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Those old railway lines

There has been a recent upsurge in the amount of correspondence in the press regarding re-instating some of the long defunct rail lines in Wales.

More moons ago than I care to count I travelled on many of these routes including Carmarthen to Aberystwyth, Ruabon to Barmouth Junction and Afon Wen to Bangor. 

Usage then was indeed very poor, and this picture of one of the replacement bus services provided at the time gives some idea of how many passengers were expected!

Crosville Commer 12-seater mini-bus CFM 275B at Pwhelli on a rail replacement route to Ynys over part of the Afon Wen to Bangor line. (reproduced from an early outing with one of those new-fangled Polaroid cameras – sorry about the quality!)

 A new TV series on BBC4 is featuring old railway walks, and I was interested to see the line from Dolgellau to Barmouth featured, as it was one on which I had often travelled.

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An Island Parish 

Another series currently showing is the latest saga in “An Island Parish”. Fan of the Scilly Isles that I am, I thought it might be interesting to tell something of the smaller, generally uninhabited islands in that far flung outpost of the empire.

So far starters I’ll go to Rosevear. 

This for some reason is quite a common house name up and down the UK, but why, I don’t know.

It certainly doesn’t smell of roses as its main occupants are sea-birds. Just imagine hundreds of years of their deposits which even the fiercest of  storms cannot wash away!

Its’ claim to fame is that it was the nearest island piece of land to the site of the Bishops Rock lighthouse on which it was possible for the workforce to be housed.

The remains of the accommodation blocks are still there as is what little is left of the temporary quay that enabled men and materials to get on and off.

Talking of quays, brings me to Rat Island.

This is, or rather was, where the main island of St.Marys’ quay now stands and was just separate from the main land.

No prizes for guessing how it got its name!

The last time I visited, there was a sail makers shop there which produced very strong sail canvas bags, called, would you believe, Rat Bags!

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There is something north of the Rhigos 

It has always puzzled me as to why our local  tour operators seem loath to run excursions in a northerly direction – there are plenty of places well worth visiting and well within day trip range, but instead they’ll happily take you miles into the depths of south-west England.

So when I saw The Royal Show the temptation was just too great to resist.

I gather that the driver must have dusted off an ancient “safe conduct” pass, as we travelled northwards without any hostilities from the natives!

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INFLATION seems to be getting somewhat out of hand. and I can’t help but wonder to what extent the three items above could help or hinder the situation.

The good old FARTHING, ¼d or if you like 960 to the pound, enabled increases in costs to be fairly accurately passed on. Today with the smallest division of the pound being 1p (100 to the pound), the tendency seems to be to rake in extra profit at the same time by rounding up increases to the next whole 10p (10 to the pound). Increases in manufacturing and transport costs there might well be, but I for one, do not believe that the retail prices of any individual unit produced needs to go up by quite so much as is currently happening.

The (dotty) decimal system, said to be simpler, produced scope for instant inflation by not giving the chance to break down unit costs into truly accurate amounts.

The use of percentages, so beloved by our chancellors, is oft times used as a ploy to hide things which would appear bad if referred to in cash terms. How often have you heard the phrase  -“We have invested 20% more than the previous administration” when what they really mean is that they are not funding something properly. In civil service pay a 3% pay rise on a £30,000 pay packet might sound good, giving a rise of £900, but giving that same percentage to someone on a lower salary will see  them getting correspondingly less. In this way the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sorry Sir Humphrey, but surely it would be better that the lowest grades should see a decent rise in £p terms, and subsequent grades pay should rise by a fixed £p increment, maintaining but not increasing the differentials.

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Who do you think you are?

I have recently got hooked on the “family tree” hunt, and it is throwing up some interesting insights into life a couple of hundred years ago. For many years before I retired, I worked in local government in Suffolk dealing with network planning of bus routes, and in order to do that properly I made myself familiar with virtually every village and hamlet in the county. Before taking that job, I had never been to Suffolk and knew nothing of its geography or history. I was rather surprised therefore to discover some links to the county when I started investigating some of the more indirect (and I do mean indirect) family links on my tree. 

I discovered amongst the papers that had been passed to me a birth certificate for a child of a family called Welham who was born in a parish called Shelland, to the local blacksmith’s wife. Intrigued, and somewhat puzzled by this, for the present day village of Shelland is a tiny place indeed, I dug deeper into this tree in both directions. It transpires that this child grew up to eventually become a coal merchant in Peckham Rye, London. He married twice, his second wife being the sister of my paternal grand-fathers wife! Hence the reason for the documents coming down to me. Following it so far? 

In the other direction following the Welham tree back in time took me back to the mid-1600s before I ran out of links, so I then followed the line forward through time from that point, running down every son's tree and those of the daughters until they married into other families.

In the 17 and 18 hundreds, large families were the order of the day. Most of the men seemed to have been agricultural labourers, though I did come across a number of blacksmiths, a stoker, and a railway carman in later years. A rather sad feature of those times was the high infant mortality rate, many of the children not surviving more than a few days or weeks. 

Those that survived seemed to have lived their entire lives in the same small area,, the tree not spreading much further than the surrounding parishes, but in the process taking in several hundred souls. A good few survived into their 80s, even the spectre of the workhouse not shortening the lives of a couple.  

Delving into the past like this can become quite addictive and I can understand the popularity of the TV programmes which use it as a theme. It is amazing what can turn up when you start digging! My own tree, I discovered, includes a great-great uncle who became an MP in South Australia after running away to sea, as well as more distant links to both Scotland and Wales.  

How far and to where can you trace your ancestors? The Rhondda was not very heavily populated before the industrial era, so it’s a fair bet that there will be distant kith and kin somewhere.

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Local History - puzzle ●

This was not always just a pile of stones. If you know where it is and what it and maybe have a picture of it intact which can be published, let me know via news@treorchy.net

 More “Local History Puzzle Spots” in later editions.

© Written for www.Treorchy.net by Mike Ash, Pentre  October 2008. 

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