Ancient well, medieval shrine, sixties social experiment – what next for Penrhys?

Penrhys balances on top of a steep hill between Rhondda Fawr and Rhondda Fach. Once it was a major site of Christian pilgrimage; now it is the fourth most deprived area in Wales, writes Claire Boot

The final leg of the Penrhys Pilgrimage Way contains its most demanding section. I leave the train at Dinas and immediately start walking up. At first, I climb shallow steps beside a small stream before crossing the main road through Trealaw and continuing up the hillside between a bowling green and a cemetery. The paved road ends with a few houses and I pause for a swig of water, sweat clammy on my back. It’s 10am and already warm. None of Max Boyce’s ‘Rhondda Grey’ today, I think. With the bright sunshine and clear sky, it’s all Rhondda blue.

A silver metal gate takes me into a field as steep as a staircase with ferns up to my shoulders. I push through the fronds with my arms above my head, resolving to check for ticks later, and trusting my feet will find the footpath I cannot see. I slowly progress up the incline, accompanied by butterflies and birdsong, foxgloves and flowering heather. A breeze brushes through some birch trees and overlays the dull burr of traffic from the valley below.

A second silver gate leads me to the manicured fairways of Rhondda Golf Club, laid across the unexpectedly broad plateau on top of the hill. The climbing is done, but the golf course must be crossed before I reach my destination. I worry that the crunch of my boots on the gravel path will distract golfers teeing up for a shot, so I step on to the verge and walk quietly on the grass instead. I pass through a dense thicket of trees and then the view opens out before me – there is Penrhys. Its pale-coloured houses are surprisingly sparse, making the estate look like a gap-toothed smile spread across the hillside. There’s a crop of pines on the crest above it, reminding me of a shock of hair that stubbornly refuses to lie flat.

The final stretch is easy-going and I approach the statue of Mary, Our Lady of Penrhys, that stands at the foot of the estate. The brightness of the sun obscures her face, but I can tell her head is angled down towards me and the four bouquets, still in their cellophane wrappers, laid on the top step of her plinth. After a few moments, I curve back down the hillside a short way and pass a small amphitheatre with its semi-circular steps edged with wood. Further I go before turning to follow the contour of the hillside to the stone building that shelters Ffynnon Fair, St Mary’s Well. Purple buddleia and yellow ragwort adorn the roof, as if nature is echoing the flowers left at the statue.

I’ve been inside several times before to dip my hand in the water that collects in a trough at one end of the building, but today the gate is padlocked shut. I’m not disappointed – I know where the spring emerges from the hillside a few metres below. I’m grateful for my boots as I stamp down brambles and nettles, and glad I didn’t wear shorts on this hot day, feeling myself lightly stung and scratched through the fabric of my trousers. I carefully pick my way down to the outlet. Beneath a rough stone arch, water trickles from a pipe and seeps into a crush of mud, stones and leaves. Someone has placed a little grey plastic flower fairy next to the flow. I crouch down and stretch my fingertips under the cool clear water. I make the sign of the cross on my forehead. I’m not Catholic, but these days I need all the blessings I can get.

It’s a sad irony that people in Penrhys suffer the poorest health in Wales, given that the well has been a focal point of healing for centuries. The Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation puts Penrhys in the lowest 1% of communities for ‘lack of good health’, as indicated by chronic disease, cancer, limiting long-term illness and premature death rate. No wellspring, no matter how pure, can cure all ills, but the fresh water emerging uncontaminated from the hillside would have attracted people since the earliest times. 

Penrhys is only twelve miles from Llyn Fawr, the lake in the shadow of Rhigos Mountain, where a major hoard of Bronze and Iron Age artefacts was discovered between 1909 and 1912. Swords, spears, axeheads and a cauldron were remarkably well-preserved in the peat of the lakebed, and it’s believed that the items were thrown into the lake as a votive offering to help secure a good harvest or a mild winter. If you draw a straight line from Llyn Fawr to the large hillforts at Rhiwsaeson near Llantrisant and Caerau in Cardiff, you pass very close to Penrhys. It’s not difficult to imagine people walking between the settlements and the sacred lake, perhaps choosing an easier route over the hilltops than through the densely-vegetated valleys, and stopping at the spring for refreshment. You can see how the well at Penrhys, like others all over Wales, became revered as holy. In the days before adequate sanitation, who wouldn’t feel better for drinking and washing with such cool, pure, sparkling water?

The presence of drinkable water may have influenced the siting of a farm at Penrhys, which, by the thirteenth century, had come under the control of the Cistercian monks at Llantarnam Abbey near Cwmbran. The monastic farm, known as a grange, probably kept sheep to provide meat for the monks and wool for their white habits. But Penrhys was not destined to remain a quiet hilltop sheep farm for long.

The next chapter in the story of Penrhys begins with an amazing discovery. A beautiful wooden carving of Mary with her baby Jesus was found in the branches of an oak tree. No one knew where it had come from or how it had got there. The mystery deepened when the monks attempted to take the statue down from the tree. It would not come. Even when a team of eight oxen were yoked together and lashed to a rope around the statue, it still would not budge. Finally, the monks concluded that the carving would not leave the tree until it had a suitable home to move into. A chapel was constructed on level land nearest the well and, upon its completion, the monks ventured back to the oak. This time, the statue came out with ease and Mary was placed in the chapel that had been built especially for her.

Word of the miraculous statue spread and people flocked to Penrhys to visit both the chapel and the well. By the fifteenth century, it was famous as a significant destination for Christian pilgrimage and a popular route developed from the south, beginning at Llandaff Cathedral in modern-day Cardiff. Pilgrims would attend the early evening service of Vespers in the Lady Chapel, dedicated to Mary, and then set out walking alongside the River Taff for a few miles. At Radyr, pilgrims were welcome to stay the night at the home of the Mathew family, although it appears that their hospitality was socially biased; it’s said that wealthier pilgrims were offered a bed in the house, while their poorer companions had to sleep in the barn. In the morning, the pilgrims continued through Pentyrch and Creigiau, arriving in the market town of Llantrisant for their second night. The third day took them into the hills at Tonyrefail and Trebanog, with the steepest section after Dinas, and finally to Penrhys.

The writings of medieval Welsh poets reveal that many people came to Penrhys in hope of healing. Poems speak of cures received for blindness, headaches, fever, deafness and physical disability. In his elegy for Elspeth Mathew of Radyr Court, Rhisiart ap Rhys indicated it was common to attempt the journey while in poor health when he declared that ‘her parlour was to many invalids like a hostelry’. As with other pilgrimage destinations, it’s likely that people also travelled to Penrhys to seek a blessing – perhaps for a prosperous future or for safety during a long voyage – and as a penance, a practical means of expressing your contrition for wrongdoing. There’s no way of knowing if everyone who came to Penrhys found what they were looking for. But perhaps a few days of walking in the fresh air, sharing stories and songs with fellow pilgrims, and spending time in prayer at the chapel and the well, helped to make a difference to the difficulties they faced.

Nothing remains today of Penrhys’ monastic buildings, save a few modern stone pillars marking the site of the chapel beside the road from Ystrad. Mary stands there too, but she is not the original. In 1538, Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell instructed Sir William Herbert, a prominent landowner in Monmouthshire, to remove the wooden statue from Penrhys. The Reformation was in full swing and the Catholic practices of pilgrimage and Marian devotion were viewed by the Protestant authorities as ignorant at best and idolatrous at worst. But popular opinion could have provoked a violent backlash and Herbert wrote to Cromwell reassuring him that the statue was taken down ‘with quietness and secret manner as might be’. Our Lady of Penrhys was sent to London and burnt to ashes in the same fire that consumed her sister statues from the shrines at Ipswich and Walsingham.

For the next four centuries, the hilltop at Penrhys became quiet again. Not so in the valleys below. With the advent of coal mining, the population of the Rhondda exploded – from 951 in 1851 to 113,735 fifty years later. Penrhys made its own small contribution to the well-being of the burgeoning urban communities beside the Fawr and Fach rivers. A smallpox isolation hospital was opened in 1907, followed by a cemetery in 1927. The wellspring continued to be recognised locally for its healing powers. I have a friend, now in her nineties, who grew up in the Rhondda and remembers being taken to the well as a child by her father to help relieve an eye complaint.

Catholic pilgrimages to Penrhys resumed in the 1930s and, in 1953, Mary returned to the hillside. A new statue in Portland stone was designed according to descriptions of the original wooden carving and blessed by the Archbishop of Cardiff. Holding Jesus in her arms, with a crown upon her head, Mary stands barefoot among oak leaves and acorns, reminding us where her forebear was found. Today, there’s a small oak tree a few metres from her plinth. As I sit under it and appreciate its shade, I ponder whether it’s descended from the tree that’s said to have held Mary in its branches eight centuries ago.

This second Mary presided over the next major transformation at Penrhys. Two years after her arrival, Rhondda Urban District Council was elevated by royal decree to the status of Municipal Borough. Prince Philip presented the Charter of Incorporation to the council’s chairman in a ceremony held at Gelligaled Park in Ystrad, at the foot of the Old Pen-Rhys Road. In response, the Duke received an inscribed silver ashtray ‘as a small souvenir of his visit to the Rhondda’, according to the programme published for the event. One wonders if he ever used it.

Perhaps royal affirmation gave the impetus to the newly-incorporated Rhondda Borough Council to embark on the most ambitious social housing development yet seen in Wales. Councils across post-war Britain were scrambling to provide new homes that could address the worsening problems of overcrowding and substandard accommodation. In the Rhondda, restricted by narrow steep-sided valleys already crammed with Victorian terraces, the council looked upwards and found the space they needed on top of Penrhys.

Between 1966 and 1969, 951 flats and houses were built over 61 acres to create homes for around three thousand people. The designers gave the new site a new architectural style. Unlike the ubiquitous rows of terraced houses in brick, stone and slate, Penrhys gained geometric cement-rendered dwellings with single-pitched tiled roofs, each block angled to offer a spectacular view over the valleys and even as far as the Bristol Channel on a clear day. Penrhys was also given an innovative shared heating system, through which hot water from large centralised coal-fired boilers was pumped to all the homes. The estate was officially opened in September 1968 and the first residents were welcomed to the pinnacle of modern living in the shiny new village in the sky.

Despite the optimism, the odds were stacked against Penrhys from the start. There’s a reason why settlements haven’t generally been built on hilltops since the Iron Age – the weather. Penrhys is on an exposed elevation up to 1,350 ft above sea level and when the prevailing south-westerly wind blows, it bears the brunt. Everywhere is wet in Wales, but altitude reduces the average temperature by 0.5°C per 100m, making Penrhys around 2°C cooler than coastal areas and more disposed to snow and ice. At the other extreme, on a calm and sunny summer’s day, the lack of shade on top of the hill can make the heat unbearable.    

The communal heating system was intended to keep homes warm while keeping costs down. When the price of coal rose sharply during the 1970s, households in receipt of benefits were protected from the increase, while working residents saw their bills go up and up. People began to move away from the estate to properties where they could control their energy usage; within a shared system, there’s no point turning down your thermostat to save money if your neighbours don’t do the same. 

The exodus of working people was compounded by the collapse of the coal industry. In the programme for the council’s Charter Day in 1955, the clerk estimated that ‘the reserves of coal at the present rate of output can be mined for at least another hundred years and this factor … leads one to justifiably hope that the present standard of prosperity will be maintained for many years.’ The clerk was wrong. Within 35 years, the long history of coalmining in the Rhondda ended with the closure of Mardy Colliery, the borough’s last working pit. Those who could, moved away to find work. Those who couldn’t, stayed. And those who couldn’t afford private housing to rent, never mind buy, found themselves moving to Penrhys. 

By the 1980s, Penrhys was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Revd John Morgans moved to the estate with his family in 1986 and his diary records a litany of private tragedies and public disorder. Violence, arson, vandalism, addiction, poverty, abuse, neglect. A woman in her thirties with arthritis and depression struggles to get by on £38 a week; a young man dies by suicide and his brother is temporarily released from custody to attend the funeral; a premature baby is born to teenage parents and only survives a few days. In September 1992, Morgans wrote:

We seem close to a “riot” situation and there is an ominous feel that something will happen tonight. Twenty or thirty youths – with one or two older men encouraging children – set fires in derelict maisonette blocks, wait for firemen to arrive, instigate the calling of the police – and then throw stones. The rumour is that they may use petrol bombs tonight. The trigger incident was apparently a policeman beating up a youth a night or so ago because of a stolen car incident; the deeper causes are boredom, wanting to taunt and challenge the police, a pride in becoming notorious.

In an attempt to curb such episodes, buildings left empty by departing residents were demolished. This in turn gave the estate an increasingly desolate feel, prompting more people to leave. Remaining residents lost out further as the shrinking population meant that businesses and amenities couldn’t be sustained. Today, Penrhys is home to less than a thousand people in some three hundred properties, with only a corner shop, a takeaway, a school and a church on site.

Under the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation, areas are designated as having ‘deep-rooted’ deprivation if they have remained in the fifty most-deprived localities since 2005. Penrhys hasn’t just stayed in the bottom fifty; over the last twenty years it has slid further and further down the rankings. The Index is a relative measure, meaning that life in Penrhys may have improved, but not at the rate experienced elsewhere. In 1994, Morgans noted that 90% of the population were on housing benefit; today, 47% of people in the ward that includes Penrhys are in receipt of income-related benefits. Similarly, results from the 2001 census showed 29% of people in the ward were living with a limiting long-term illness, as compared with a slight improvement to 23% in the 2021 census.

Statistics are only part of the picture. During a community day in 2019, I asked people to write or draw on a postcard their answer to the question, ‘What’s special about Penrhys?’. Several mentioned the beautiful views, along with the abundance of special climatic effects like rainbows and snow. ‘On a misty morning,’ responded one participant, ‘the clouds cover the valleys and in Penrhys you feel like you’re up with the gods.’ Others commented how children could play freely together outside and one person declared that ‘the pizzas in the kebab shop are AMAZING.’ But what struck me most were the many references to the strong sense of community spirit. ‘If I needed something,’ contributed Jeanette, ‘I could go to anybody up here and they’ll help me.’ Dylan said: ‘The people are kind and helpful … and it means a lot to me.’ One resident, who has lived in Penrhys since 1992, wrote:

I love it here. We have ups and downs, but Penrhys is a close community where people care for each other and support each other.

In a turnaround from previous decades, people want to stay in Penrhys. Yet the ongoing uncertainty over the estate’s future is wearing. ‘The people are happy enough,’ said Rob at the community day, ‘but it’s stability they want.’ The demolitions of the 1990s and 2000s raised a fear that the whole estate might be levelled, which still lurks today, especially as long-promised redevelopment programmes have not fully materialised. In 2012, RCT Homes and Independent Regeneration Ltd announced a five-year, £40m project to install external insulation on existing homes and build 107 more. The insulation happened, though not without problems and delays, but the housing construction did not. In 2021, the council approved proposals for the regeneration of Penrhys in collaboration with Trivallis, the successor to RCT Homes, and the Prince’s Foundation. Three years on, residents are yet to see a detailed design, budget or delivery timescale.

The challenge lies in balancing the expectations of a dizzying list of stakeholders. Penrhys residents should be placed centre stage, but the aims and resources of the council, Trivallis, health and education authorities, the police, local businesses and connected charities all need to be taken into account. Most of the people involved in these external agencies are outsiders, like me. I’m from Penarth – ‘There’s posh,’ says everyone north of the M4 and south of the A465 – and I’ve never lived in the Rhondda, let alone Penrhys. My connection began through the project to re-establish the Penrhys Pilgrimage Way using the old footpaths still in existence. While dressed in the get-up of a medieval pilgrim, I led workshops in schools to explore the history and purpose of the pilgrimage. On a very wet February day, I walked to the estate with Clare Balding for her Radio 4 programme ‘Ramblings’ (not in costume); on a breezy November day, I arrived with a 13-foot-tall pilgrim puppet called Peri for a short film about the route (back in costume again). 

I’m now on the management committee for Llanfair Uniting Church, which occupies two former maisonette blocks at the heart of Penrhys. Run by a remarkable group of local people, Llanfair serves the community by providing a café, homework club, clothes bank, activities for young people, foodbank and meeting rooms, as well as a listening ear and moral support. On the day of my walk from Dinas to the well, I head up to the church on the off-chance it’s open. It is; not only do I catch the tail end of a coffee morning, but I’m just in time for the surprise birthday cake presented to Sharon, the church’s community worker, with two rounds of ‘Happy Birthday’ sung in English and Welsh.

I want to see Penrhys thrive, but on its own terms. The potential for refurbishing homes, revitalising public spaces and erecting new houses, shops and facilities is exciting, yet it must revolve around the people who already live here. Maybe Penrhys will become the destination for a different sort of pilgrimage, where visitors come to see how residents can work together with funders, developers and service providers to create a flourishing community. As the community balances the glories of the past with the challenges of the present, I’m hopeful that a brighter future proves to be what’s next for Penrhys.

Claire Boot is a writer from Penarth. She has worked with Literature Wales, Sherman Theatre and Honno. All photographs are by the author.