" Any landscape is a condition of the spirit."
Henri Frederic Amiel

A visit to Annwn,the Otherworld, today - somewhere close to the main road but over the hill and it's like another world.  This is Pwll Du, also known as Canada Tips, above Blaenafon.  Many times I've driven past this area, familiar from the other side of the hills on the Brynmawr road, and many years ago I photographed orienteering around the tips, but I've not visited this side of the hills before.

The name derives from the opencast mining that was carried out here In the 1940s by the Canadian Army in support of the war effort.  Opencast like this was previously unknown in Britain, so machinery was imported from the U.S. and Panama.  The area retains some nineteenth century industrial features, from digging the raw materials to feed the furnaces at Blaenafon ironworks but it's now dominated by the unrestored opencast workings which have created a  lunar landscape reminiscent of the "spaghetti westerns" of the 1960's.  After a couple of hours wandering through the post-industrial landscape with its' swathes of cotton grass on the tops, A and I headed off to Abergavenny for lunch at Nicholls before I decided to call it a day and head back to put my feet up.