Snow in the Valleys

Commercial Street, Tredegar

The old chap from up the road came to hand deliver a Christmas card this morning and was complaining about how cold it is, saying 'cold enough for snow'. I have lived in Newport for very many years and only once did we have what I considered to be a real snow fall and that was in the 1982.

When I was a girl in Tredegar the above picture was the norm. Every winter snow falls such as this were common. Tredegar is approximately 1650 ft above sea level and it is always very cold there in the winter. Snow brought the valleys to a stand still. The snow drifts were so bad I remember my father going out the front with a sweeping brush to get the snow off the front room window. Schools closed for days on end, buses not running and my father making sleighs for me and my sister. That was a snow fall.


The year of 1963 will be immortalised as one of the coldest and most severe snow storms of the century, second only in the valleys to 1947, the year I was born. I was still in school in 1963 when my aunt came up from Cardiff for Palm Sunday to take flowers to the cemetery to her parents grave, and was snowed in with us for three days. So sudden was the snow fall and so much of it.

In 1982 we had that sort of snow fall in Newport, but it is the only one I remember in almost forty years. Lucky Newport? ........that's a matter of opinion!