31/03/2023
Notes From The ...
Each quarter we feature brief accounts of events or customs that helped to shape the lives of our .
This time we explore: & Over time...
These days, we take our transport systems for granted. But until just 200 years ago, things were very different in without proper . . .
Until the 19th century, the majority of our ancestors lived throughout their lives within a 10-mile radius of where they were born. Prior to industrialisation, it was relatively unusual to see someone from one end or side of Wales settling in a totally different part of the country.
Travel in Wales was difficult – in particular in the winter months, when some tracks were too muddy to traverse easily. Many goods, such as lime – used by to fertilise the fields – were, instead, transported by ship along the .
Late-18th and early-19th century travellers in Wales frequently commented on the appalling condition of the roads – although by the early 19th century they were gradually improving, as turnpike trusts laid new ones and upgraded existing routes. This eventually led to a coordinated road network linking emerging 'cities' to smaller towns, with lanes to local villages.
Strategic routes, such as Thomas Telford’s coach road to Hobb’s Point at Pembroke Dock, were heavily engineered and received Parliamentary funding.
was the site of the world’s first ever journey – a nine-mile haul from the ironworks at Penydarren to the Merthyr–Cardiff Canal wharf at Abercynon. On 21 February 1804, Richard Trevithick’s steam transported ten tons of iron in five wagons, and 70 men riding on them, at nearly five miles an hour.
The world’s first fare-paying was the Mumbles Railway ( to Oystermouth) starting in 1807. It was built as an industrial horse-drawn tramway in 1804-5, and horses were used up until 1896, but steam locos first came into use in 1877. Electric tramcars, which many people remember, took over from 1929 until closure in 1960.
It took a few decades in the 19th century before passenger and mail trains regularly travelled around Wales. But work had begun in the north on the to Holyhead Railway by 1845 - introducing Thomas Telford and George and Robert Stephenson as pioneering engineers - and the first part of the South Wales Railway (Chepstow to Swansea) opened in June 1850.
Pictured: Horse and cart was the main way to travel in Wales in the 1880s. This is Llansawel in Carmarthenshire. (Photographer John Thomas - National Library Wales, Wikimedia Commons.)
