Qualla: Cyfarthfa Ironworks

Cyfarthfa Ironworks: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Drayton, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Admiral Nelson came to visit in 1802, he did not come to admire scenery. He came to inspect cannon. The Cyfarthfa Ironworks, on the north-western edge of Merthyr Tydfil, was casting the guns that armed the ships of the line he commanded. Britain was fighting France for control of the world's oceans, and Cyfarthfa was where much of the iron that won those battles came out of the ground. The Crawshay family who owned the works put a pile of cannonballs on their family crest, by way of acknowledgement. For roughly forty years from the 1790s, this ironworks on the River Taff was the largest in the world.

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Image: Robin Drayton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cyfarthfa Ironworks: The Lease of 4,000 Acres

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Davies, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cyfarthfa began in 1765 as a speculation by an MP. Anthony Bacon, member for Aylesbury and a native of Cumbria, secured a ninety-nine-year lease on 4,000 acres of moorland west of Merthyr Tydfil for £100 a year, no royalties. The seam underneath ran with coal, iron ore and limest...

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Image: Nigel Davies | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cyfarthfa Ironworks: Richard Crawshay's War

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Penry Williams, Public domain. By 1786, after a tangle of partnerships and lawsuits and Anthony Bacon's death, the lease passed by Chancery order to Richard Crawshay, a Yorkshire-born merchant who had started his career selling flat irons in London. Crawshay licensed Henry Cort's puddling process, the techniqu...

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Image: Penry Williams | Public domain

Cyfarthfa Ironworks: The Castle Across the River

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Richard's son William ran the works after him, and William's son, William Crawshay II, built himself a castle to look down at it. In 1825 he commissioned Robert Lugar to design a sham fortress in Norman and Gothic styles, with battlements and turrets and crenellations, on 158 acr...

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Image: John Wilson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cyfarthfa Ironworks: The Long Closing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Davies, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the 1870s, the world had moved on. Cheaper iron was coming from elsewhere, the local iron ore was running out, and the Bessemer process meant the future was steel, not iron. Robert Thompson Crawshay, the last of the great Crawshay ironmasters, refused to switch. The works clos...

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Image: Nigel Davies | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cyfarthfa Ironworks: What Remains

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Dewhirst, CC BY-SA 2.0. Six of the original blast furnaces still stand at Cyfarthfa, the largest and most complete surviving examples of their type anywhere in the world. They are stone-built, massive, hollowed-out cathedrals of industry. In 2013, workers building a do-it-yourself store next to the site...

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Image: Stephen Dewhirst | CC BY-SA 2.0