HLW (P) 4

Elan Valley  

2001  

Special  

Designated  

This remote area includes the larger part of the catchment of the River Elan and its tributary, the River Claerwen, which drain the south eastern side of the Cambrian Mountains in Mid-Wales. It comprises an extensive area of heavily dissected upland plateau between about 400m and 550m above OD, with the deeply incised valleys of the Elan and Claerwen providing the only routes east-west across this otherwise isolated and deserted part of Wales. The valley floors fall from over 300m above OD in the west to 200m above OD in the east, from where the River Elan continues to flow for a short distance beyond the area described here, to join the River Wye south of Rhayader. This area is a prime example in Wales of a landscape showing human endeavour on a grand scale, having been substantially altered by major civil engineering projects connected with the water industry and its managed estate. The projects encompass the construction of a series of massive dams and ancillary works undertaken in two principal stages between the end of the 19th and the middle of the 20th centuries. The first stage was amongst the greatest 19th century civil engineering achievements in the whole of Britain, and was reported once as being the ‘eighth wonder of the world’. The series of reservoirs, known collectively as the Elan Valley, was started by the Birmingham Corporation in 1893, with the commencement of the Caban-coch Dam. This massive structure and its three subsidiary dams were described in an official report of the time as being ‘of cyclopean rubble embedded in concrete and faced up-stream and down-stream with shaped stones arranged in snecked courses’. By the time they were completed in 1904, the Corporation had not only built the expected range of straining and valve towers, settling tanks, filter beds and other machine and generator houses necessary to control the water level and maintain its steady flow, but also enclosed most of the land immediately surrounding the reservoirs with a succession of massive stone walls and elaborate boundaries to protect the water from contamination. The height of the reservoirs enabled water to reach the outskirts of Birmingham by gravity alone, without the expense of pumping, along a remarkable system of buried aqueducts, 126km long. The Birmingham Corporation employed direct labour for the scheme, which involved the construction of a railway to transport materials from the Cambrian Railways at Rhayader; in excess of 50km of track had to be laid to serve all the various construction sites. Between 1906 and 1909, a small, high quality garden village in distinctive Arts-and- Crafts style, comprising a neat collection of detached and semi-detached stone houses ranged along the southern bank of the Elan, was built at the foot of the main dam to house those destined to work at and maintain the machinery and apparatus of the dam complex. The village included a school, a shop and an estate office. Much of this imposed landscape has survived more or less unaltered since the turn of the century as the estate has been strictly managed, to preserve water purity, by successive water boards and companies. The landscape has, therefore, avoided many of the recent trends for large-scale forestry and other upland agricultural improvements. Provision was made for the future expansion of the original scheme with the construction of the Claerwen Dam in the adjacent valley during 1948 –52, making the Elan Valley complex one of the largest drinking water supply schemes in Britain with a combined capacity of over 100 billion litres. Since the privatization of the water companies, the ownership and management of the Elan Valley Estate has been passed to a charitable trust, which is charged with preserving the area’s unique heritage and continuing its sympathetic management. This will, hopefully, maintain the landscape’s atmosphere and serenity. The remote and inaccessible upland areas which surround the reservoirs are liberally scattered with spectacular Bronze Age burial cairns and standing stones, while there is a Roman marching-camp at Esgair Perfedd. In the medieval period, the area was part of the extensive Cwmteuddwr grange of common pasture and isolated holdings belonging to the Cistercian Abbey at Strata Florida, Ceredigion. There are also post-medieval farmsteads, and a considerable number of late 18th and early 19th centuries mining sites and industrial monuments. Although physically dwarfed by, and secondary to, the theme of this landscape, many of these sites have been so well-preserved by the estate that they form a valuable historic adjunct to an otherwise modern landscape. The area also has important associations with P. B. Shelley who extolled the virtues of its character whilst writing his poetry at Nant Gwyllt.