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The Lost Viaduct
Blaenafon, South Wales
4 February 2001
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?
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Finds and photo gallery
Not so much an archaeological excavation as civil engineering. Photos from the dig.
The new iron age
Coal, iron ore and limestone – the essential ingredients of the new age of iron that heralded the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century. All three were to be found in close proximity at Blaenafon, where in 1789 three men leased 12,000 acres of land from Lord Abergavenny. These three, Samuel Hopkins, Thomas Hill and David Pratt, built the original Blaenafon ironworks, which immediately became the biggest in the world.
The 'lost viaduct' that Time Team was seeking was built to carry a tramway to transport coal from a nearby mine working to the coke ovens of the iron works. In the surrounding area, the Team was also looking for evidence of some of the homes of the hundreds of miners, iron workers and their families who were living and working here from the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Looking for a valley
The landscape in this part of Wales has been transformed by industrial activity, with whole hillsides and valleys buried in waste material from mining and other activities. The railway viaduct had been closed just 25 years after its opening when other sources of raw materials were opened up and new railways built elsewhere. Over the following two centuries the landscape the viaduct crossed had been covered in mining spoil and other waste. The Team's first task, then, was to find the valley – only then could they look for the viaduct.
The geophysics team used both ground-penetrating radar and electrical imaging to try to locate the valley. Indeed, by the third day they were even to be seen hauling their equipment along the road that skirts the site, where they identified a clear 'anomaly' indicating where the line of the tramway went.
'Geofizz' anomaly
For the first couple of days, though, it was a generally frustrating time. The first anomaly identified by 'geofizz' was about four or five metres wide, one metre beneath the surface and going down for a further five metres below that. It looked promising – except that John Gater was expressing 'confusion' about the survey results from the outset because they were showing the opposite to what would be expected if this was the viaduct. Stone would normally show a high resistance reading, but this was showing a low one.
Nonetheless, this was where it was decided to start the search for the viaduct and Trench 3 was started here to follow the first two trenches, which were looking for evidence of other buildings on the site.
Trench 1: Coal Tar Row
Trench 1's target was a row of workers' cottages in Coal Tar Row. Old maps and drawings showed the tramway came along right in front of the cottages, so if it was possible to find the cottages this would also help to place the viaduct. The trench gave the Team a taste of what was to come. After having to break through a layer of 1950s concrete, the digger eventually reached the limit of its six-metre arm. At the end of the first day the trench was closed down, having revealed nothing except how deep is the waste material dumped on the site.
Trench 2: Lime Kiln Cottages
Trench 2, dug by Carenza, concentrated on a raised area, the possible site of the one-time lime kiln manager's house. In fact, it turned out to be positioned over a row of three small cottages – Lime Kiln Cottages, which had been lived in until the 1970s, and from which the Team retrieved a range of finds going back from that time to the early 19th century, when the cottages were built.
Trench 5 later found the site of the kiln manager's house, having been positioned on the basis of a local man's memory of the site 50 years ago when he was a toddler.
Trench 3: A load of rubbish
John Gater's confusion about the geofizz results found its explanation in Trench 3. The anomaly turned out to be caused by modern waste, a large quantity of which had been dumped here together with a big pile of bricks. If the viaduct was here, it was a lot further down. More machinery was brought in overnight in expectation of a very deep excavation indeed. Both Trenches 1 and 3 were soon to be subsumed in Trench 4, what became known as the Big 'Un.
Trench 4: The Big 'Un
With detailed survey work having been carried out overnight at the end of the first day, and the extra digging equipment having arrived, the Team set to work on what was to be by far the biggest hole they have ever dug. Thirty metres square and ten metres or more deep, at about one ton for every cubic metre – Phil calculated that they would be shifting up to '10,000 tons of dirt'. 'The word trench is about to become inadequate,' as Tony put it.
This wasn't so much an archaeological excavation as civil engineering – and the removal of that amount of spoil had to be carefully planned. The sides of the hole were angled to avoid landslips; the disposal of the spoil was organised to make sure there would be plenty of room in which to work.
Eventually, almost 15 metres beneath the modern ground level, the mechanical diggers reached the roof of the viaduct, which turned out to have been covered. A remote-controlled camera fixed to a pole and put into the viaduct passageway offered a tantalising glimpse inside. But that was the closest that the Team were to get to this relic from our early industrial past: the site was just too dangerous for anyone to get any nearer themselves.
What is industrial archaeology?
What is industrial archaeology? For a diminishing number of traditionalists, the very phrase is a contradiction in terms. Industry – or at any rate heavy, machine-driven industry – is a modern phenomenon, for the most part well-documented historically. Archaeology, strictly speaking, is the study of ancient sites (from the Greek root of archaeo-).
Few archaeologists draw such distinctions these days. Archaeology tends to be defined more broadly as the study of the material remains of past ages as evidence of human activity, culture and history – and the 'past ages' can be very recent indeed. The British-based Association for Industrial Archaeology sets no restrictions on its aim of bringing together anyone involved in 'researching, recording, preserving and presenting the great variety of this country's industrial heritage'
Time Team programmes covering the field of industrial archaeology include the excavation at the site of Josiah Wedgwood's first pottery in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, which featured in the 1999 series, and – the first time the Team excavated an industrial archaeology site – the investigation of Matthew Boulton's Soho Manufactory in Birmingham in the 1997 series.
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