Above Pontneddfechan, strung for nearly two miles along a deep, wooded gorge on the Afon Mellte, lie the moss-covered ruins of Wales’ first gunpowder works — an eerie, half-swallowed industrial landscape that most visitors to Waterfall Country walk straight past.
You follow a flat former tramway through the trees, and gradually the woodland reveals three-walled stone buildings, water channels and earthen blast-banks. It’s a heritage walk rather than a viewpoint, and it pairs beautifully with the nearby waterfalls for a half-day of history and greenery.
It’s a Scheduled Monument, so the ruins are protected — walk among them, but leave every stone where it lies.
Worth knowing
- Established in 1857 by the Vale of Neath Powder Company — Wales’ earliest gunpowder works, making black powder for mining and quarrying.
- Sited here on purpose: remote, thickly wooded for charcoal, and water-powered — the River Mellte drove the mills.
- Safety was obsessive — the works’ horses wore copper (non-sparking) shoes to avoid igniting the powder.
- It passed to Nobel’s and then ICI, closed in 1931 when black powder was banned in coal mines, and the buildings were deliberately burnt and demolished in 1932.