Category: Community Groups

This year; 2016, saw a number of engineering anniversaries impacting on Wales, most of which concerned bridges, the 200th anniversary of Chepstow Wye Bridge was celebrated on 24th July with a number of events including a re-enactment of the 1816 opening ceremony. Designed and built by John Urpeth Rastrick FRS (1780-1856) it was opened on the 24th July 1816. A bridge with five spans, 372ft (113m) long, it was the third longest cast-iron arch road bridge in the world when built and it is now the largest survivor from the first fifty years of iron bridge construction. A civil and mechanical engineer Rastrick is remembered today as a railway pioneer. He built the first steam engine to run in the USA, chaired the Rainhill Trials for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1829, and built numerous railways in Great Britain. The iron arches were cast at the foundry of John Hazeldine at Bridgnorth in Shropshire where Rastrick was the engineer. On the 24th July 2016 a procession was led over the bridge headed by engineers, as it was in 1816, with the President of the Institution of Civil Engineers; Sir John Armitt, leading the way. Until 1989 it carried the normal road traffic through Chepstow and across the Wye into England and still carries road traffic, subject to a 7.5T weight restriction, today.

Not quite as old, the Severn Bridge also celebrated a 50th birthday this year, on 8th September 2016. The 5,240ft (1,597m) long bridge was world’s first major suspension bridge to be built with an aerodynamic road deck it was also the lightest, and set the standard for future long span bridges, such as the Humber Bridge. Many people remember using the car ferries; Severn King and Severn Queen, to cross the Severn before the bridge opened. The Second Severn Crossing also celebrated a milestone this year, being opened on the 5th June 1996 – 20 years ago. At 5,134m long it is not a suspension bridge but a cable stayed bridge similar to the Wye (M48) Bridge – which also opened in 1966.

Another form of communications impacted on Wales 150 years ago with the successful completion of the laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable in 1866. On 27 July 1866 the quite Pembrokeshire bay of Abermawr became part of a trans-Atlantic

communications network with the laying of the fifth, and ultimately successful, telegraph cable between Valentia in Ireland and Trinity Bay in Newfoundland by Brunel’s Great Eastern steamship – the only ship big enough to take all the almost 2,000 nautical miles of telegraph cable required. Messages could now be transmitted from New York to Newfoundland and through the Atlantic cable to Ireland and across to Abermawr, being taken on to London via the SWR and GWR’s telegraph wires. Copper refined in Llanelli and Swansea provided the conductive core of the cable through which messages would be transmitted.

The former telegraph hut at Abermawr, now a holiday cottage, actually predates the successful laying of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable by some four years and if we go back some fifteen years before that to 1847 we find that Isambard Kingdom Brunel had chosen Abermawr as the western terminus and port for the South Wales Railway. This was never carried out but the rural setting of the beach made it an ideal landing point for an underwater telegraph cable from Wexford, Ireland in 1862. Fear of German sabotage of the cable during the first world war saw soldiers being stationed on guard duty at Abermawr.

In 1866 the transmission speed of the transatlantic telegraph system was eight words per minute, by 1900 transmission rates of 120 words per minute were being sent reliably between continents. It was a system for business and governments, for example a ten word transatlantic message from the USA to Great Britain cost $100 or about £76 (today’s values about $2,600 or £1,980). The speed of cable borne news can be gauged with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, then the news took 12 days to reach British newspapers, When President James Garfield was shot in 1881, and it was reported within hours. Some 25 telegraph cables would be laid across the Atlantic by 1922 – the year that the Great Storm washed away the shore ends of the cable at Abermawr and the telegraph station closed.

Stephen K. Jones 6

DID LANCELOT ‘CAPABILITY’ BROWN EVER VISIT WENVOE?

The August edition of Wenvoe What’s On contained a fascinating article on Wenvoe Castle. The grounds surrounding the castle are listed Grade II by Cadw (the Welsh Government’s historic environment service) because the layout and surviving planting are of national interest. Some of those features are typical of the work of ‘Capability’ Brown – rolling green slopes; trees dotted about singly or in clumps; a perimeter belt of trees and a pond of natural appearance. Historians have long pondered on whether Brown might have been instrumental in the design of the land around the castle and it is worth reflecting on whether the most important garden designer of the eighteenth century might have influenced the landscape of Wenvoe.

In 1774 Peter Birt bought Wenvoe Castle from the Thomas family and by 1776 work had started to rebuild the castle, following plans drawn up by Robert Adam. 2016 is the 300th anniversary of Lancelot Brown (1716-1783) and there have been many events this year to celebrate his work – his nickname came from the word he used to assure clients that their land was capable of improvement. He worked mainly in England but occasionally in Wales as, in 1778, when the fourth earl of Bute commissioned him and his son-in-law, the architect Henry Holland, to modernize Cardiff Castle and the surrounding grounds. At the same time Holland appears to have been asked to work at Wenvoe Castle. This seems to have been specifically in relation to the stable block and courtyard (now Wenvoe Castle Golf Club) which bears a distinct resemblance to another site he and Brown had developed together – Berrington Hall in Herefordshire.

Subsequently the land surrounding the castle became known as Wenvoe Castle Estate and remained in the hands of Birt’s descendants for almost two centuries. When the golf course was laid out in the 1930s considerable effort was made to ensure that the existing landscape was altered as little as possible. In the 1970s Birt’s descendants sold much of the estate’s farmland and buildings with the result that most of the land is private and cannot be accessed without permission. One such area, Bears Wood, is particularly interesting because it contains mid-eighteenth-century rococo landscaping with the remains of a grotto and serpentine canal. Easier to appreciate is Waun Lawn, the two fields on either side of the entrance drive to the golf course. Here oak trees that may date from the eighteenth century still stand – Brown liked to dot them around parkland, both to catch the eye and give shelter to livestock. An 1871 map of the estate shows one side of this road closely planted with trees, creating an avenue, as well as a belt of trees surrounding the perimeter of estate land. The 1871 documentation also gave details of the gardens which included ‘Vineries, Forcing and Cucumber pits, Stove [hothouse] and Greenhouses … an Archery Ground, a Charming Lawn and Terrace Walk to the south of the Mansion overlooking the Park’.

Despite the fact that the area around the castle illustrates evidence of the characteristics of Brown’s style of landscape gardening, no documentary evidence has yet been found to confirm that he visited Wenvoe but he was known to travel great distances on horseback to visit sites and it seems likely that whilst working on Cardiff Castle he would have made the short trip to Wenvoe to see how his son-in-law was progressing. Birt would, no doubt, have welcomed both him and any advice he was prepared to offer on the landscape. Brown, in turn, would certainly have assured Birt that his estate had many ‘capabilities’.