Time Team S08-E04 Blaenafon, South Wales
Vložit
- čas přidán 20. 04. 2013
- Time Team came to Blaenafon, in south Wales, to look for the world's first railway viaduct.
Forty metres long and ten metres high, this ten-arch stone construction had been built back in 1790 to carry coal to the new Blaenafon blast furnaces, which were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution in Wales.
Yet within 25 years of it being built, it had 'disappeared' from the landscape. There was no record of it having been demolished - so where had it gone?
this is ,for me,one of the best episodes ever done.
Thanks for post
This was an amazing episode! The Time Team bit off more than they could chew and were Triumphant! A Testament to their Dedication and Professionalism!
I live in California now but I was raised in Blaenafon (or Blaenavon, the English spelling). Big Pit mining museum with its ever so slightly scary descent to the coal face and the excellent and historic Iron Works where one of the main characters is Americas own very famous Industrialist Robert Carnegie, are very much worth a visit. You will also find the local landscape and surrounding towns to be very enjoyable. Just take a rain coat :-).
Thank you for uploading, uploader.
Sadly the spelling *Blaenavon* has become standard in *Wales* depite there being no _v_ in *Cymraeg.*
Loved the “just bring a raincoat” comment! That is most true about Wales, but in Great Britain in general.
27:40 is why I'm a Phil Harding fan; he has an unabashed wonder for historical spaces
this episode has some of the best music of all TT episodes!
A delightful testament to the satisfaction workers can feel from a job well done-- we all deserve the fruits of our labour!
The cost of investigations on this scale must be enormous!
What an excellent episode! I don´t normally like the industrial ones but this was very interesting.
I have learned so much about technology, ancient and modern, from the Time Team reconstructions.
Great find on You Tube - my partner's father was a coal miner down Big Pit, she would help her mother pack sandwiches and piece of cake for his meal underground.
Just imagine the memories she has! I hope someone writes her stories down, and gives them to the Museum associated with the Bit Pit.
God bless that old man and woman at 9:53. They look like they would even have problem remember where they live now, let alone 50-60 years ago. lol
"Industrial archaeology" becomes industrial-scale archaeology, when they have to shift a substantial chunk of South Wales just to reach a structure.
It's Always that way especially with the earliest places and parts of industry modernity such as this part of wales.
I love the logo of this show and looking at the process of making something like Iron replica of it was wonderful
THANK YOU
I’m an American of Welsh descent, so this fascinates me. As does all the history of the UK, just a bit partial of Wales.
Reminds me of the deep pit dug on Oak Island in search of treasure. So cool that they actually found the viaduct here though.
Hartstikke bedankt
Diolch?
Shew!!! Those poor children working there. What a life!!!
Burning cables to get the metal in modern Africa isn't that much better, isn't it?
Kids burning motherboards to get the semiconductor elements in India
A really interesting episode. This demonstrates a fascination for archaeology but utter contempt for the poor old choir at the end.
What choir? 😉
The choir was singing as the show opened, with Tony’s intro, and then at the end.
Few things are better than a delighted Phil Harding.
All of a sudden, while watching this, I thought of the landfills that we create today, not unlike this slag pile. I wondered why they buried the viaduct - if they thought it would help hold the waste in place? Unfortunately there are other slag heaps in Wales that make this Blaenafon site look pretty. I refer to the slate heaps, which are jagged and black and quite scary.
There was also Aberfan. I lost two cousins there.
All waste heaps are ugly as well as scary. I've seen many of them but the whitish ones from the *Cornish* china clay quarries and pits are the worst.pastremainsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/china-clay-pit-st-austell-cornwall.html
The first rail viaduct in the world.
World Heritage or the Lottery should fund excavating the 500,000 tons of dirt to uncover the complete 1790 viaduct, for the education and edification of future generations.
And put it where? That's a billion kilos miss. Shifting it would release an untenable amount of dust and moving it somewhere just created a whole new ecological scar on wales.
Someone, once asked a mountaineer, 'Why climb Mount Everest?' The answer, 'Because it's there.' Seems we've got his brother here. ;-)
Really interesting; industrial and deep! working class history, treated with passion and respect...its a cultural crime, that a programme with all the elements of this, does not exist today
There's a channel called time team classics that is run by the original creator of tt. They are crowd funding new episodes as we speak
@@joshschneider9766 - they have new episodes coming out AND Tony has rejoined the team...!
Exciting project!
Wow! Impressive amount of dirt to move to get down to the viaduct. Have to wonder how the viaduct got buried so deep.
Could we belatedly dedicate this episode to poor young Elizabeth Jones? 😔🙏
A part of my mixed blood calls to me from Wales. I see that mame, I click.
Thanks for posting.
they are digging for homes younger than the one I live in :)
As an American, your comment is almost impossible to understand!
Amazing episode!
The spot of the Big Hole is visibly greener:
51.779627ºN, 3.090652ºW
When it was first mentioned that coke was one of the three ingredients used, my first thought was 'they used cocaine to make iron?!' Then the guy explained what the coke he was referring to was, and I laughed. Having very different things sharing the same name can be confusing sometimes.
Only if you have a very limited education.
There is a third possibility-CocaCola, the soda pop drink. In America, that would most likely have been the first choice.
Apparently, I’m not up on my Welsh. I kept thinking they were callin the locale “Blind Oven”
The music was okay but I love the history they're uncovering
Wow, so this entire area is covered tens of meters deep with industrial slag? The volume of trash just boggles the imagination.
bukster1 Incredible - I think they said the viaduct was 17 meters high, and then another 12 meters of debris on top of that - and apparently all within 25 years! the entire valley, too, since there was no trace left of it at all.
There is a pile of amphorae in Rome that is so big, it's an artificial hill a kilometre wide and 35 metres tall. Called Monte Testaccio.
Thousands of other sites world wide too. Not one of the better traditions the UK has exported
Also it took almost two hundred years to fill the valley it was an operational iron mine until the nineteen seventies well past it's use as a casting site.
No basically about it they backfilled hundreds of square kilometers.
Geweldig !!
Dirfawr?
@@philaypeephilippotter6532 Toll ? if that's German, yep. LOL
@@panthera50
1. _Geweldig_ is apparently *Dutch* and not *German!* It seems to mean _great_ or _terrific._ I assume you are *Dutch,* as was my friend *Hank,* so please correct me as I may well be wrong.
2. I mistakenly thought it was *Welsh.*
3. _Dirfawr_ means _enormous._ It _is_ *Welsh.*
4. I didn't realise how long ago you posted.
5. I posted my reply quite a while ago now.
6. What did you mean?
I've seen _all_ the *TT* digs and I think this was one of the best. I think the actual best was the one on the *Scots* island of *Mull* czcams.com/video/j58tAfNXzgM/video.html .
First aired on January 28, 2001.
this is series 8 episode 5 (not4). I tried to find the date to find out how old I was when I first saw it because I remember watching it with my Dad. Answer I had just turned 7
... and 5 becomes 4.
My records confirm this is Episode 4, which aired in 2002.
It made me feel sick when they said that very young kids worked from sun up to sun down carrying buckets of iron ore up and down the hill. And one of them died.
me too.. very graphic description of the return of her body to her people, but I think it most respectful.. I can feel her mother's grief, she carrying her wee body for a few short years, not expecting to out live her...
this episode was one of the most emotional, considering the lives lost and forgotten under so much earth...
@@kathysenn7664 Every time a coal fire spits, a Miner dies. My family were South Wales Miners. My Father at age 12 lost his older brother Fred, then 18 ina mining acident. He was working with my Grandfather, There was a roof fall and Fred hit his head. He took 6 months to die.18 months later my Grandmother was dead. My Father said she died of a brocken heart.
@@51WCDodge I'm so sorry.. they worked so hard under terrible conditions to eak out a living..at what cost?!?
✝️🌹💝🕯️🛐
@@kathysenn7664 Very true. But many families in the area will have similar stories. If les than 5 men died it didn't even enter official records as a disatster.
Average British woman in the 1880s had six kids. Some twice that. None of them were shy about forcing their kids to work. Just the times they lived in. Was no different in the USA or the European mainland.
nice to see that Time Team not - only - did Roman and - stone age - excavations...
who were the choir and what was the song they were performing the last few seconds? for sure they deserve that we could hear somewhere their whole song?
They were also singing during Tony’s intro.
@@leecarlson9713 no one knows the whole song, a link, a title? after a whole year, no answer to that...At the end of the episode on can see and hear the whole choir sing. But the credits run to fast to make out who they were. and when stopping the line running, it is so blurred, one can read nothing. So, who is the magnificent Choir performing that great song?
Yeah so true, so much Hart stikke and bendankt in this video.
my hometown
I went on google maps to see what it looks like today, and they just refilled the hole. is just a field again. No care or further work was put into it. was really sad.
It's not that no one cares it's that Wales can't afford to dig there and also moving a billion kilos of spoil and such would just create another industrial waste zone in wal es. None of the workers there would want that for their descendants right?
Bloody hell.
Men of Harlech stop your dreaming, can't you see their spear points gleaming. Still sends a shiver down my spine.
Fine - but *Blaenavon* is quite a few miles from *Harlech!*
Lol helluva walk for the poor defenders of jolly old harlech.
Elizabeth Jones crushed, a mutilated landscape, probably uncountable horses worked to death,...and all the garbage created on the site used to cover it up. It reminds me a lot of the land east of Columbus, Ohio. I'm having a bit of a time seeing much positive out of this. Not to ignore it, of course. Just to recognize it cost a great deal in many different ways.
17:24-17:42 John Geo-fizz looks like he's chewing on disbelief...
geophys
So, are Kate Hurst and Jennifer Butterworth twins 🤔? Just curious.
At 20:03, did that farmer say it was 53 or 54 year ago (talking about his garden) and then tell Carenza she was just a toddler then? I must say, she was remarkably restrained in her reply---she just went heh-heh.
hard life makes you age faster :)
Pretty sure he said "I was a toddler". Being a joke... because obviously he wasn't a toddler 53 years ago
10k tons of dirt. Or about the weight of a WW2 cruiser.
And not a small WW2 cruiser like the C class or the Arethusas either..
Via no chicken?
How do you lose a village, mines, viaducts...and a whole valley? That's just very careless and thoughtless.
Bury it in gigatons of slag. Simple and ugly truth is they didn't think long term whatsoever.
Why a duck? 🦆
Well, when Death asked Harry that question , Harry said What duck? Ignoring the duck on his head.
@@SandraNelson063
*Pterry* rules!
44:24 44:50 45:58 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
Pretty sure it was demolished.
did anyone excavate it further later on?
Probably not yet. I looked today and could find no reference to a further excavation but I'm quite sure that there'll be one.
It's completely untenable to move enough to run a detailed site analysis. All you would achieve is creating another industrial waste zone in Wales and trust me there's already enough there.
I hope it gets fully exposed some day.
Derek trucks
Is it just me or even by English standards, it seems the Time Team had rotten luck with weather?
It rains a lot in south Wales. A lot. More than in England for sure
Lsten Boyo! If you don't like the weather in Wales, wait ten minutes. There can be five seasons in an hour on those mountains.
*Wales* is _not_ *England* (says a naturalised *Briton* ).
@@bonzey1171 It rains a lot in north *Wales* too. 😉
@@51WCDodge I _know._ 😉
Guys seriously go to Walmart and buy a rc car with a camera lol you spent all that money on digging
I don't get the point of digging up what you already know is there and have full knowledge of its details. Unless the point is to create content for your TV show.