ABSTRACT
Maerdy, Rhondda Valley, South Wales, January 1985 As the narrow Rhondda Valley road snakes its way up to Maerdy, it gets narrower and more tortuous as the hills on either side close in, forcing the road to adapt to their contours. They’re not called hills in the Rhondda but ‘mountains’, an ancient term, and perhaps they did seem like mountains to the young boys who pushed the slurry carts up the track in the old days and tipped them on to the man-made hills that came out of the ground. They are also mountains in the sense of the lack of communications between the valleys. A person from the Cynon Valley, just a handful of miles as the crow flies from Maerdy, lives ‘over the mountains’ and is an outsider.
