The waste tips and pollution on the hill are the obvious legacy remains of the copper industry. However, there are several other copper-related features on the hill. In Cilfái: The History and Heritage Features, I listed 16 features of Swansea copper heritage. One of them appears to have been completely missed by the several archaeologists that apparently surveyed the area. The Copper 14 Feature (listed on page 57) White Rock Hammer Pond Tunnel is an incredible survivor of a water course that supplied water to the water wheels of the original watermill that was on the White Rock site before the building of the works in 1737. It still works today carrying the Nant Llwynheiernin under the Pentrechwyth Road and into the White Rock site before running out to the river south of White Rock near the original White Rock coal yard.
Below: The White Rock incline and site of Nant Llwyheiernin bridge and tunnel in the early 1930s. The bridge and tunnel still survive buried in the new road.
Before World War Two, the Luftwaffe intelligence assessment teams under Professor Dr. Heinrich Steinmann were interested in electricity supply. Steinmann believed that the vulnerabilities of the electricity generation and supply industries made extremely valuable strategic targets. Swansea’s power stations were particularly interesting due to their importance in the South Wales power generation network.
Swansea had two power stations, the Strand Power Station (opened in 1900) and Tir John Northeast of Kilvey (opened in 1935).
As a very modern and efficient power station, Tir John was identified as a strategic target as part of the Study Blue research into conducting an air war against Britain. In the Luftwaffe target lists, Tir John was assigned Target number GB 50 56. The full story is in Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941.
Below: a 1930s illustration of Tir John North power station (Kraftwerk) from German intelligence records.
One of the big threats to a recovering woodland is habitat fragmentation. This is a huge problem for wildlife in Wales. I covered this in the second Cilfái book (Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea). It is reasonable to assume that a big woodland is better for biodiversity and the environment than a small one. After two thousand years of habitat destruction in Wales we are left with one of the poorest environments in Europe. The woodlands we have are constantly being threatened with further subdivision as roads and houses are built in ever remote or pictureesque areas.
The woodland that has recovered since 1970 will now be fragmented further by the foreign tourism development which will cut through the centre of the biodiversity area. The impact on the recovering wildlife will be immense. The impact will be change and a reduction in opportunities for wildlife and plants on the vital central area of the hill. Fewer opportunities to live will result in fewer species and reduced biodiversity. That is habitat fragmentation.
In numbers, the 102 hectares of woodland and open access space we now have on Cilfái will be reduced to about 29 hectares of woodland. As a comparison, the country park of Penllergare (near Junction 47 on the M4), has about 67 hectares of mixed woodland and Singleton Park has about 11 hectares of (badly fragmented) woodland. So, yes, the loss of Cilfái woodlands is significant.
It may not necessarily be all doom and gloom. Swansea Council and the tourism developers will hopefully be obliged to produce a series of habitat recovery and restoration plans for various tracts of land that may be leased to the Company but will not be built upon. I assume pressure will be put on Welsh Government to provide a large sum of money for ‘native’ woodland restoration. As everybody who has a say is committed to cable cars and adventure tourism, I’m sure the money will come…it has to.
Below: The area of concern on Cilfái is coloured red here. A large chunk of this is the original Forestry Commission land (now NRW). A mixture of coniferous forest, fire damage and fantastic natural regeneration. Full of bats and birds. The contract ecologists bought in by the tourism firm will seek to devalue the quality of the environment and frame it as a place that is worthless and ripe for redevelopment.
Although there is a publicity fanfare about Copper in Swansea, it is coal that is in the heart of Swansea’s history. There may be two thousand years of coal workings around the city and west to Crofty. Beyond that, the rocks of Gower change so there is no coal mining.
The mining of coal was a part of every farm and farmworker’s life before the Industrial Revolution in the 1750s. Coal often outcropped on the surface and small scrapes or pits still survive all across Swansea. The country park of Penllergare is an invention of the mid 1800s, before that the Llan valley was devastated by coal workings. The valley is still full of pits and collapsed tunnels. Cilfái’s coal was mined from medieval times, and Swansea’s earliest coal mining records are actually Cilfái coal mining above Foxhole. I discuss the early history of coal in Cilfái: Historical Geography.
Cilfái had three good coal seams running west-east across the hill. These were the Hughes Vein, Captains Vein, and the Foxhole Vein. The Hughes and Captains yielded a good-quality bituminous coal which was used in the copper smelters of White Rock and Middle Bank. The Foxhole Vein was more of a problem, it tended to vary in thickness and quality so mining it was often frustrating as it would disappear and then reappear further up the hill. The top of Cilfái is marked with excavations from the 1700s where men had dug to try and get a better access to good coal from the Foxhole. They never found it, so the Foxhole Vein was called ‘lumpy’…unreliable.
Local colliers on Cilfái knew all about the problems of mining on the hill and the knowledge was passed down the generations. It wasn’t until 1837 when William Logan started talking to the colliers and mapping their knowledge, that we begin to have detailed knowledge of the coalfield under Swansea and Morriston
Below: Coal from the Hughes Vein above White Rock. A lustrous black coal that shines like a jewel. You can see the layers of harder vitreous coal that were often the source of better quality fires. The nature of layers in the coal was only finally understood in the early 1900s by Dr Marie Stopes, Britain’s pioneering palaeobotanist.
What was on the Archwilio site wasn’t really good enough for us to understand Cilfái, so I redid the surveys. I increased the heritage fetures count on the Hill from 35 to nearer 80. A lot of our Copper, Coal and modern history is not officially recognised by archaeologists…but it doesn’t make it unimportant. You can’t expect historians or achaeologists from elsewhere in England or Wales to understand the significance of our local history and culture. We are forced to do that for ourselves.
Below: Pete Thomas and Green Man in 1998 shortly after it was completed.
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Below: A map of some of the heritage features on Cilfái.
You can always contact me to buy the Cilfái books. Send me a message on FB or use WhatsApp or LinkedIn. Or you can email me at my Gmail address. Eye of the Eagle will be available at an illustrated Bo0k Launch talk at Swansea Central Library in early June. I will probably do some talks on the air war over Wales later in the summer.
You can also buy copies of the Cilfái books at the lovely little shop in Swansea Environment Centre. It’s the only shop in Swansea that stocks them.
If you want to buy the books online, the easiest way is to buy them direct from lulu.com because these are the people who print them. In fact if you use Amazon all they actually do is contact lulu. So cut out the middle man and go straight to lulu.
So you can buy Cilfái: Historical Geography on Kilvey Hill, Swansea. This is the history book of the trilogy and it covers the biggest topics in the history of the Hill. So that is Coal, Copper, Pollution, Restoration and Repair and the Nature Recovery. This one also includes Annexes covering the legal background to White Rock Copper Works from 1737, and the Geological history and the pioneering explorations of William Logan. 126pp, fully indexed and referenced.
The second book of the trilogy is Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea. This one covers the environmental issues faced by the hill and the woodlands. A lot of this one reflects my past government work as a programme reviewer for Defra, DCMS and Historic England, particularly where matters of the environment are concerned. I’m a qualified ecological surveyor and have been involved in a number of large environmental schemes since the 2010s. This book is built around my ecological surveys of the Hill and you will see a lot of Annexes here showing how we create Species and Habitat Action Plans for conservation, My records of everything I found within 1 km of The Glade (between 2010 and 2023) including Mammals, insects, Invasive Species and Reptilees and Amphibians. I also include my Open Mosaic Habitat plant list (including bombsite plants). I have produced a sample copy of a standard Woodland Management Plan to show people how to prepare a good conservation plan and I finish up with my discoveries and monitoring of bat populations on the Hill. This book also has discussions of landscape resilience and climate change issues as we saw them in UK Government.130 pp, fully indexed and referenced.
The final Cilfái book is Cilfái: The History and Heritage Features on Kilvey Hill, Swansea. This is based on my new surveys of all the heritage and historic features on the Hill. I spent a couple of years working for UK Parliament, chiefly as a heritage researcher so I picked up al ot of experience working with Parlamentary conservation departments, Historic England and Scottish Heritage. When I reviewed the current records of heritage and archaeology for the hill, I could see they were incomplete or needed updating. This book does that, and I’ve added maps and What3Words locations of all the heritage features on the Hill from the prehistoric sites, coal and copper industries up to the present day with The Green Man. I’ve also added a number of heritage featurews to the list that aren’t on the official lists. All this empasises the point about how special Cilfái actually is.
A lot of people know me as a historian specialising in World War Two and my latest book is a revised and much enlarged version of a book I originally published in 1993. Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941 takes me back to my original research field as a Historical Geographer investigating landscape history. Using Luftwaffe aerial photographs to study Gower landscape sent me in a different direction as I tried to understand the history behind German military intelligence activities in South Wales. Over many years I amassed a large collectionn of Luftwaffe intelligence which portays the reality of the war oiver Wales from the German viewpoint. It also provides a fantastic insight into the activities of the ports of Swansea, Cardiff, Barry and Llandarcy in their finest hour as they supported the nation’s defence and resilience. Using a combination of Luftwaffe intelligence documents and maps and local records from the 1930s, this book examines the reality of why the ports were bombed. A4 size, 170 pp, fully indexed and referenced.
My latest book will cover a bit about the history of the Luftwaffe intelligence of South Wales in the early years of World War Two. It’s been an interesting journey. The records have been mainly in German and it’s been great fun to work with old maps again as opposed to modern GIS systems which have taken up so much of my time looking at Cilfái.
Regardless of how much of a stupid idea it was, the German armed forces were ordered to prepare for an invasion of Britain in 1940. This they duly did in a thorough and orderly way. Some of the documents from that time have survived, although most were destroyed at the end of the War in 1945. I was able to get my hands on a series of Luftwaffe intelligence files and the portfolio of invasion plans of South Wales, which cover in detail why Swansea and Cardiff were bombed. They also show up the gaps in knowledge that often made bombing a waste of lives, money, and time. I can now explain the reasons behind the air attacks on Swansea and Cardiff, and what they were aiming for.
I’ll be doing a series of talks next month to launch the book. I’ll announce them here, but if you want to know more, you can always contact me.
Below: A German military information pack covering South Wales from 1941.
My new book on the history of the Blitz bombing of Swansea and the other South Wales ports is now available from me.
This is the second edition of Eye of the Eagle, the first edition was published in 1993!
I’ve completely rewritten the history based on years of research in German Air Force sources and I’ve looked at the other ports the Luftwaffe attacked in 1940 and 1941. Over the years I’ve collected a large range of intelligence materials which are rarely seen because they were often destroyed at the end of the war.
In this history I have concentrated on Luftwaffe intelligence maps, photographs and other sources to give the real reasons why Swansea and the other ports were attacked and dispell some of the rumours from the past. I’ve also looked at the U-boat campaign against Swansea and Cardiff and included translations of key German war diaries and Luftwaffe intelligence records. I’ve described in detail the U-boat mining of the Scarweather lightship and the U-boat attack on Swansea.
Intelligence records are often difficult to understand so I’ve added a detailed examination of how photographs were taken in the preparation for invasion and the Blitz attacks on the ports.
I’ve made this book a big A4 size to take full advantage of the many maps and images that show Swansea and the ports as seen from the German point of view. Over 130 illustrations, many in colour.
Chapters: 1. Understanding Intelligence and Reconnaissance (The Munich Crisis, The decision to bomb Swansea, the bombs and the aftermath as seen by the Luftwaffe cameramen), 2. The history of the South Wales ports between 1933 and 1941 (The ports as targets, how they were selected, and how they fought their war). 3. Reconnaissance over Wales (the Units and aircraft), Detailed illustrated chapters on 4. Newport, 5. Cardiff, 6. Penarth, 7. Barry, 8. Port Talbot, 9. Llandarcy Oil Refineries, 10. Briton Ferry, and 11. Swansea, With Annexes on the U-boat mining of the Scarweather Lightship, Descriptions of the Luftwaffe intelligence records, and other information on the bombs that were dropped on the ports.
Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941, Nigel A. Robins, Size: A4, Paperback, 170 pages. Price £16.99.
Available from Nyddfwch Publishing, Swansea, or contact the author on nrcontact30@gmail.com. Or you can contact me here.
When I worked for the Government, I did some tours of duty in environmental activities. Over the years, I monitored programmes on the health of Honeybees, parks protection in Greenwich’s ancient woodlands, Restoration of the environment in the Olympic site in East London, and several small conservation programmes on security sites for the MOD, where fencing things off from the general public did wonders for the local biodiversity.
In all of that, I learned that data and information are vital. Far too often I heard the comment ‘there’s nothing there!’, often from gentlemen in their fifties whose only interest in nature was how to kill it or cut it down. When I got to a position of some influence, I could slow down or even reverse developments by insisting on a good quality ecological survey before any construction work. Sometimes, this was deeply unpopular as the construction industry usually has little interest in conservation or environmental care…what we see of due diligence by building firms is there because the Law forces them. This will definitely be an issue in Cilfái with the Skyline development. That tourist firm will promise anything in the planning permission stage but quietly ignore it in the building phase, knowing very well that Swansea Council does not have the resources to monitor and enforce anything. We as volunteers will need to monitor the destruction to try and ensure it is kept to the promised minimum.
In December 2022, I prepared the first of a series of ecological protection documents based on my time in Whitehall. The key one is called an Ecological Constraints and Opportunities Plan (ECOP for short). I did one for Cilfái based on what we knew at the time. It proved quite popular and still is, judging from the large number of downloads it still gets from all over the country. Eventually, the ECOP evolved into the second book Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea.
I published all my survey notes and plans going back over about ten years of tree and animal survey, including all my work on the Hill. So, the book has an explanation of the data covering the Hill and lists of bats, birds, plants and animals I found or saw presence of. I also included the wonderful observations made by Carl Squires over many years of walking the Hill. I also added some of my Climate Change risk analysis from my time working for UK Parliament.
Below: A mash-up of some of the Cilfái data from my surveys and explorations. It is complex because ecology always is. The red dots are dead or dying trees, the dotted lines and light green stripes are areas for better bird habitat, Yellows and oranges are different types of open land, and darker greens are the Forestry Commission plantation trees. The red lines show the ghost of the coming area of Skyline destruction.
When investigating the history of a landscape, one of the first things worth looking at is the underlying rocks that make up the land. In Wales, this is often the question, ‘Is there coal here?’ In Swansea, the answer is usually ‘yes!’
We can usually get a map showing us the geology of the land. In Swansea, we have the famous Sheet 247 to guide us. As a young student of Geology, my old Dynevor Geology teacher John Rees always told me to ‘get the Memoir’. It was sage advice, and referring to the Memoir is one of the most essential tools in a researcher’s toolkit. Even today, when I read my copy of the Memoir, it comes out in John Rees’ voice and tone in my head—the legacy of an excellent teacher.
The Memoir is the written guide that accompanies every British Geology map. Most were published in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Whereas the map represents what is under the ground, the Memoir describes in detail all the features and rock types. Swansea’s Memoir was published in 1907 and is a priceless record of years of fieldwork and investigation by a team of accomplished geologists working throughout the 1890s (Strahan 1907). The original work of the Memoir began in the 1830s on Cilfái when pioneer Geologist William Logan taught himself geology by exploring the mines of Cilfái Hill.
The Memoir is a historical record in itself now, as almost all the landscape described has disappeared under housing and tarmac. The Memoir is vital to understanding the geology of Cilfái, and I refer to it many times in Chapter Two of Cilfái: Historical Geography.
Strahan, Aubrey. 1907. The Geology of the South Wales Coal-Field. Part VIII, The Country around Swansea: Being an Account of the Region Comprised in Sheet 247 of the Map, Memoirs of the Geological Survey. England and Wales, 247 (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationery Office by Wyman and Sons)
Below: The title page of the Swansea Memoir and below that Swansea as shown on the modern edition of Sheet 247. It still credits the original work by William Logan from the 1830s.
Nigel Robins 