User:Bleanllechau

Blaenllechau is a small ex-mining village in the county of Rhondda Cynnon Taff, South Wales.

It is typical of its kind for the topography of the Rhondda Fach Valley (Cwm Rhondda Fach), or small Rhondda. Three or four rows of stone houses are strung like beads on a necklace and seem to cling precariously to the mountainside.

The village population is far less than 1000 at present. Until the beginning of the 1950s it had two collieries producing anthracite coal the pit-head workings were still extant in the early 1960s, but now they have been removed.

Until Dr Beeching wielded his axe on British Railways the village and its nearest largish town of Ferndale was served by a branch line from Pontypridd and Porth. The line was still operating as a mineral railway until the closure of the last of Rhondda’s collieries, Maerdy by the government of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s.

The sites of both railway and colliery have been ‘landscaped and where a slag and spoil tip, called the ‘Banana tip’, because of its shape, once stood now a cricket and sports ground stand.

The village has an infants’ school “Bleanllechau Infants”, a community centre and a working men’s club the Bleanllechau Radical Club, or the ‘Rad’.