Skewen ( cy, Sgiwen) is a village within the

county borough County borough is a term introduced in 1889 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, to refer to a borough or a city independent of county council control, similar to the unitary authorities created since the 1990s. An equivalent ter ...

Neath Port Talbot Neath Port Talbot ( cy, Castell-nedd Port Talbot) is a Local government in Wales#Principal areas, county borough in the South West Wales, south-west of Wales. Its principal towns are Neath, Port Talbot, Briton Ferry and Pontardawe. The county bor ...

, in

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...

. The village is served by

Skewen railway station , symbol_location = gb , symbol = rail , image = Skewen railway station, Neath (geograph 4123125).jpg , borough = Skewen, Neath Port Talbot , country = Wales , coordinates = , ...

and has its own

rugby club Rugby football is the collective name for the team sports of rugby union and rugby league. Canadian football and, to a lesser extent, American football were once considered forms of rugby football, but are seldom now referred to as such. The ...

History

Skewen was once an industrial village. There were a number of

collieries Coal mining is the process of resource extraction, extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its Energy value of coal, energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use c ...

around the village (see link below). The Crown and Mines Royal Copper Works and the Cheadle and Neath Abbey Ironworks were once important industrial sites which stood close by. Old top-loading

blast furnace A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical furnace used for smelting to produce industrial metals, generally pig iron, but also others such as lead or copper. ''Blast'' refers to the combustion air being "forced" or supplied above atmospheric ...

s can also be seen at

Neath Abbey Neath Abbey ( cy, Abaty Nedd) was a Cistercian monastery, located near the present-day town of Neath in South Wales, UK. It was once the largest abbey in Wales. Substantial ruins can still be seen, and are in the care of Cadw. Tudor historian ...

. To the south of Skewen lies the village of

Llandarcy Llandarcy is a village near Neath in the Neath Port Talbot county borough, Wales, and was the site of the first oil refinery in the United Kingdom. It was originally designed as a garden village to house the workers for the BP refinery built b ...

, the site of the country's first Llandarcy Oil Refinery, oil refinery. The site of this former oil refinery is now being developed as an urban village called Coed Darcy, a development which was promoted at its start by the Charles, Prince of Wales#Built environment, Prince of Wales's Foundation for the Built Environment.

Monuments of interest

The ruins of

, a former Cistercian monastery, are now in the care of Cadw. On Mynydd Drumau to the north of the village is an ancient standing stone known as the Carreg Bica (or 'Maen Bradwen').

Notable people

*The village is the birthplace of Sir Samuel Thomas Evans (1859–1918), British judge and politician who was appointed Solicitor General for England and Wales, Solicitor-General in 1908 and became the President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division in 1910. *Skewen is also the birthplace of internationally successful singer Bonnie Tyler and Welsh composer David John de Lloyd (1883-1948). *Comedian Eddie Izzard lived in the village for a short during childhood. * The grandparents of the legendary American entrepreneur Howard Hughes are believed to have lived in Skewen in the 1930s. * The notorious murderer, Elizabeth "Betty" Maude Jones, née Baker (1926-?), was born in Skewen. In October 1944, she and an American paratrooper named Karl Hulten (1922-1944), sometimes branded "the Blackout Bonnie and Clyde", carried out a series of brutal crimes that culminated in the murder of a London taxi driver. Both she and Hulten were sentenced to death, but Jones was reprieved by the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison.

Nearest places

*Birchgrove, Swansea, Birchgrove

References

External links

Skewen Collierywww.geograph.co.uk : photos of Skewen and surrounding area
{{authority control Villages in Neath Port Talbot