History
First developed by the Romans, local village Banwen is confined to the Roman Road of Sarn Helen. There are two Roman forts and the remains of a Roman Road within the community.
Legend has it that St Patrick was born here and taken to Ireland after the area was raided by Irish raiders. A celebration and a march is held on March 17 to mark the event.
With over 200 years of coal mining behind it, the parish was once home to five pits that employed hundreds of men. Now all that remains is a coal processing and coal washery. On the route of the former Neath and Brecon Railway, a freight only routes exists to the coal washery from the South Wales Main Line at Neath.
Read more about this topic: Onllwyn
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“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
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“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)