Ivy House Farm

Went for a walk with friends and their dogs. Crossed through a farmyard where this abandoned cottage is situated. I always itch to look inside places like these. My sister once spent a day exploring an abandoned coke works in the Torfaen valley so I guess we're a nosy family. We think that's a medlar tree next to the porch but I particularly like the rusting wheelbarrow. You can get to this by coming off at an angle on the Taff Trail and it all seems very rural until you realise you're just metres away from the A470 and hundreds of motorists blithely zooming past. Though it was ever thus. There used to be a signal box and railway just around the corner - in fact, one great-grandparent of mine brought his family to live here from Croydon in the first decade of the twentieth century to work on that stretch of railway. There are other, older markers of industrialisation too such as scraps of the old Merthyr to Cardiff canal. So, annoying as the traffic sounds are in what looks like countryside, in this neck of the woods, the rural rubs up against modernity.