Gwaelod-y-garth ( Welsh for ''Foot of the Garth'') is a village in the

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, ...

Pentyrch Pentyrch ( cy, Pen-tyrch) is a village and community located on the western outskirts of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. The village gives its name to a Cardiff local authority electoral ward, Pentyrch, which covers the village and immediat ...

Cardiff Cardiff (; cy, Caerdydd ) is the capital and largest city of Wales. It forms a principal area, officially known as the City and County of Cardiff ( cy, Dinas a Sir Caerdydd, links=no), and the city is the eleventh-largest in the United Kingd ...

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...

Location

Gwaelod-y-garth is located in Taff Valley at the foot of

Garth Hill Garth Hill (usually called The Garth, or Garth Mountain, ''Mynydd y Garth'' in Welsh) is a hill located in between the communities of Llantwit Fardre and Pentyrch in Wales. The Garth can be seen from nearly the whole of the city of Cardiff and th ...

, north of central

and south of

Pontypridd () ( colloquially: Ponty) is a town and a community in Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales. Geography comprises the electoral wards of , Hawthorn, Pontypridd Town, 'Rhondda', Rhydyfelin Central/Ilan ( Rhydfelen), Trallwng ( Trallwn) and Treforest (). ...

. The castle of

Castell Coch (; ) is a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle built above the village of in South Wales. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans after 1081 to protect the newly conquered town of Cardiff and control the route along the Taff G ...

is within reach of the village, by car or on foot.

History

In Elizabethan times, Gwaelod-y-Garth was noted for its

iron-ore Iron ores are rocks and minerals from which metallic iron can be economically extracted. The ores are usually rich in iron oxides and vary in color from dark grey, bright yellow, or deep purple to rusty red. The iron is usually found in the f ...

mines. The mines were opened between 1565 and 1625, and re-opened in the 19th century by the Blackmoor Booker company. In the early 1990s, a campaign was held to save the site. The Pentyrch Iron Works was opened in Gwaelod-y-Garth in 1740 (Gwaelod-y-Garth was then in the parish of

). It supplied iron to the

Melingriffith Tin Plate Works The Melingriffith Tin Plate Works (alternate: Melingriffith Tin and Iron Works; Welsh, ''Melingruffydd''; translation, "Griffith's Mill") were post medieval tin and iron works located on Tŷ-mawr Road, in Whitchurch, Cardiff, Wales. Founded s ...

in Whitchurch, about downriver. In 1812 a tramway was constructed to the Mellingriffith Works; in 1871 this was upgraded to the

standard-gauge A standard-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge of . The standard gauge is also called Stephenson gauge (after George Stephenson), International gauge, UIC gauge, uniform gauge, normal gauge and European gauge in Europe, and SGR in Ea ...

Melingriffith and Pentyrch Railway. An

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

map revised in 1915 shows the works as 'disused'. The forge from the ironworks was demolished in 1977 and the site is now used for housing.

Amenities

Amenities include a Royal Mail collection point, Garth Tyres yard and a police car park, from where South Wales Police Roads Unit is run. There is also a large playing field named Heol Berry, where local amateur football team Gwaelod Rangers plays. At the top end of the village is the village pub, the Gwaelod Y Garth Inn. Situated in the village is Gwaelod-y-Garth Primary School, a school that educates through both the medium of Welsh and English. The students are separated into two sections of the school (English and Welsh). The village has a Welsh medium chapel called Bethlehem built in 1832.

Notable residents

*Dr.

Mary Gillham Mary Eleanor Gillham Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, MBE (26 November 1921 – 23 March 2013) was a British natural history, naturalist, university lecturer, and writer, who was resident for many years in Gwaelod y Gart ...

, one of the first women to visit

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

in 1959.

References

External links