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Rhymney (Welsh: Rhymni) is a town and a community located in the modern County Borough of Caerphilly in southeast Wales, and was until 1974 located in the historic county of Monmouthshire. Along with the villages of Pontlottyn, Fochriw, Abertysswg, Deri and New Tredegar, Rhymney is designated as the 'Upper Rhymney Valley' by the local Unitary Authority, Caerphilly County Borough Council. As a community, Rhymney includes the town of Rhymney along with Pontlottyn, Abertysswg, Butetown and Twyncarno. Rhymney is known to many outside Wales as a result of the song "The Bells of Rhymney", a musical adaptation of a poem by Idris Davies. [edit] History
The countryside around present day Rhymney would have been very different in the early 17th century. A new parish of Bedwelty had been formed in 1624, covering the lower division of the Wentloog Hundred of Monmouthshire, a hilly district between the River Rumney, on the west, and the River Sirhowey on the east. The upper Sirhowy Valley at this time would have been a natural well-wooded valley, consisting of a few farms and the occasional small iron works where iron ore and coal naturally had occurred together. Later it would have contained the chapelries of Rhymney and Tredegar, the latter being known as a market town. It wasn’t until the 1750s that industrialisation began with the establishment of the Sirhowy Iron Works. It was from this pastoral pre-industrial period that the buccaneer Henry Morgan was born around 1635. He was the eldest son of Robert Morgan, a farmer living in Llanrhymny, today known as Rhymney, three miles from Tredegar. In Welsh the original meaning of Llan is ‘an enclosed piece of land’. The town was founded with the establishment of the Union ironworks in 1801, with the Rhymney Iron Company later being founded from a merger between the Bute and Union Ironworks in 1837. The ironworks used local coking coal, iron ore and limestone. From the mid-19th century, steam coal pits were sunk to the south of the town. The ironworks closed in 1891 and by the early 20th century the town's collieries employed nearly the entire local population. (The collieries closed in the 1980s, if not before.) [edit] Research Tips
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