Port Talbot is pretty much famous for its Steel Works and not much else, although it has quite a nice beach in Aberafan and a bloody good rugby team, the Aberafan Wizards. Wait, you say, that’s Aberafan, not Port Talbot. A brief history will suffice to disabuse you of that notion.
The town of Port Talbot is first mentioned in the history books in 1837 as the name of the new docks built by the Talbot family to the South-East of the Rover Afan, but as the conurbation surrounding the docks grew, swallowing up the villages of Baglan, Margam and Aberafan, the name came to mean the whole area.
Port Talbot (and its antecedents) has an interesting history. Bronze Age farming ditches dating back to about 4000 BC have been found. There are also some Iron Age hill forts on Mynydd Dinas, Mynydd Margam, and Mynydd Emroch and on another hill, Mynydd Hawdef, can be found the remains of an Iron Age village.
When the Romans turned up – yes, they did venture that far West – they brought some deer, which exist as a herd to this day: the Margam Herd. In addition to all this, there is a plethora of early Celtic Christian crosses – many of which can be seen in the Margam Stones Museum.
Lately though, there hasn’t been much of interest unearthed in Port Talbot except walls. Well, two walls in particular. The first is the nationally famous Banksy wall. This was a mural found in 2018, which the artist Banksy later confirmed was his work, on a garage near the Steelworks. It’s now been moved to a gallery in the town’s Ty’r Orsaf building.
That, I discovered yesterday, is not the only wall of note in the town. Hidden away in the grounds of the steelworks is a farmhouse wall built some 800 years ago and still standing, albeit propped up these days.
As is common with such ancient human works, a myth has built up around the wall. Reputedly, if the wall were to fall, then so would the town. The story comes from the sixteenth century, when a Cistercian monk, for whatever reason is said to have placed a hex on the remains of the farmhouse. Supposedly, the monk told the new owner of the monastery, following the dissolution, that should he fail to protect the wall, then all manner of evil would befall the town. Reputedly, the area is haunted too and several people have claimed to have seen a white monk walking around the ruin. The interesting thing is, of course, the monks did not wear white. Still, maybe that’s just an effect of moving onto the ethereal plane.
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