Chatting to a friend from the valleys tonight the subject came around to Maesycwmmer viaduct. I asked if it was still there as so many of these landmarks are gone, but I was assured that it was indeed still there.
I was told that it was bought some years ago from Great Western Railway for 1p by the local council and costs approx £30,000 a year to maintain. It is a national landmark and therefore has been preserved. Along with the Nine Arches viaduct in Tredegar it is one of only two listed viaducts in Wales. (see Blog of 2nd Dec.2008)
It is 260 metres high and there are 16 arches. It was built in 1857 and closed in 1964. Today after a grant of £870,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund for Wales, it is part of the Cycle Network for the Celtic Trail as it stretches across the Rhymney valley. I was pleased to hear this as when I was engaged and later married for the first time, I used to travel under this huge structure almost on a daily basis as my then future husband came from that valley. It was so huge and high, an urban structure rather than the softer rural structures that are surrounded by fields, like the Nine Arches in Tredegar. It always made me feel strange, vulnerable somehow and a little frightened, but of what I don't know. How odd that I should remember those feelings more than forty years later.
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