History
This valley is one of the South Wales Valleys, and its history largely follows theirs: sparsely populated until the nineteenth century; industrialised for iron, steel and coal; industrial decline in the 1980s and 1990s. The Rhymney Valley produced a miner poet, Idris Davies of Rhymney, famous for his poems associated with the locality and the struggles of its people, and prolific writer Marion Evans, a local historian who has produced five volumes of her series of A Portrait of Rhymney with cameos of Pontlottyn, Tafarnaubach, Princetown, Abertysswg and Fochriw together with The History of Andrew Buchan's Rhymney Brewery. Her other booklets and articles include The Story of our Village, Rhymney, Gelligaer Common, A Portrait of the Bent Iron, Clay Pipes and A Portrait of Idris Davies.
The 1990s brought improved road connections to the valley—a dual carriageway running north from Caerphilly—increasing access to and from Cardiff and the M4 motorway, and increasing the numbers of commuters from the valley to Cardiff. The area is now one of the most populous in Wales.
The Rhymney Valley hosted the National Eisteddfod in 1990.
Read more about this topic: Rhymney Valley
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