The Bridge

“I thought of my river, the Afon-Lwydd, that my father had fished in youth, with rod and line for the leaping salmon under the drooping alders....... But no salmon leap in the river now, for it is black with furnace washings and slag, and the great silver fish have been beaten back to the sea or gasped out of their lives on sands of coal. No alders stand now for they have been chopped as fuel for the cold blast. Even the mountains are shells, groaning in their hollows of emptiness.... "
Alexander Cordell, Rape of the Fair Country

Not quite that far back, but I can remember this place before the canal was culverted underneath the road, when the road swept around in a semicircle over the bridge . It was considered an improvement as the canal basin was disused, overgrown and silted up after decades of disuse. Much the same as the rest of the stretch through Cwmbran. The dilapidated buildings along the canal - pubs, industrial buildings, long deserted cottages - were a playground for us with our backsides hanging out of hand-me-down trousers. We were the unofficial demolition crews; Health and Safety hadn't been invented back then, although the local police would discourage us if they ever saw us. It was a time of great change throughout the valleys as the old industries were dying and new ones emerged, although not always for long.

There is canal restoration work under way further downstream, towards Malpas. It's been going on for decades and the patience of the teams working on it is remarkable. They won't necessarily see it completed in their lifetimes but they continue to make progress, a step - a lock - at a time.

This stretch of culverted canal will be a particularly expensive one to restore, and it's presence has probably been the biggest obstacle to the idea coming to reality. The series of pools that replaced the overgrown canal basin have, in their turn, become overgrown. The pools have more discarded beer cans than fish in them, with the occasional shopping trolley thrown in for good measure.

plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose