25/02/2024
IN THE NEWS: Recently, the media reported that plans have been submitted to Neath Port Talbot Council for a 295-bed hotel and leisure complex on the site of the Grade II-listed Rheola Estate in the Neath Valley.
Rheola is a 100-acre estate believed to have been designed by John Nash, and built by John Edwards featuring (in varying levels of dereliction) a walled garden, a lake, stable blocks and a mill house, as well as Rheola House itself.
The noted Quaker surveyor William Weston Young (1776–1847) wrote the following of the Rheola Estate in his 'Guide to the Scenery of Glyn-Neath' in 1835: "Rheola; a seat built by the late John Edwards Vaughan Esq.. It is in a mixt style; the scenery about it, naturally beautiful, improved by art. Since the new line of road has been formed, these improvements appear to advantage. The view is taken from the road side, near the pond, which has a very good effect. The glen at the back of the house is very lovely, but intirely [sic] private."
In the 20th Century, the British Aluminium Country set up works on the estate which were to last from 1939 to 1981. Rheola House served as the company offices. Aerial views of the estate still clearly show the outline of where the works stood.
In Elis Jenkins' Neath & District: A Symposium (1974), Jenkins wrote of the aluminium works: "The British Aluminium Company's works at Rheola, in the middle of the Vale of Neath, must have the most beautiful situation in the country. When it was sited here in 1938, there were some protests from conservationists (not that they were called that then) who wondered why a large factory could not have been located in some derelict industrial waste land like the Lower Swansea Valley.
"While it is true that the Vale of Neath, already defaced by deforestation and old coal tips, could have been spared such a brash outlandish intruder, there were both social and economic reasons for planting the works a few yards below the finely-situated mansion. War was imminent, a wooded valley offered some protection from air-observation, the families in the district had just emerged from twelve years of humiliating unemployment; and above all there was available close at hand a cheap and plentiful supply of coal duff and even water."
Below is Thomas Hornor's Panorama of Rheola, painted in 1816, from the National Library of Wales's digital collection.
https://museum.wales/collections/online/object/07319b8c-9602-39ce-be5a-8cfa528ff9b8/Panorama-of-Rheola/
The Neath Antiquarian Society's Martyn Griffiths wrote the following on John Nash's links to the area in 2021: http://neathantiquariansociety.co.uk/news.asp?intent=viewstory&newsid=109039
--
💻 https://bit.ly/47H4lie
Heritage Neath Port Talbot Glynneath & Cwmgwrach Historical Societyf
