High on the open moorland plateau of Carreg Goch, on the Black Mountain west of Abercraf, lie the scattered remains of a Vickers Wellington bomber — and a small stone cairn that remembers the six young men who died here on the night of 20 November 1944.
The crew of MF509 were all Royal Canadian Air Force, most of them French-Canadian, on a night navigation exercise when engine trouble, wing icing and swirling mountain mist brought them down. All six were killed; this is the “Canada plane” that walkers come to pay their respects to. Their families only learned the full story some sixty years later, and local volunteers still tend the memorial and its Canadian flag.
It is the nearest mountain walk to the door — but it is a serious one, across pathless moorland where the same low cloud that caused the crash is common. Go equipped to navigate, and go to remember.
Worth knowing
- The aircraft was a Vickers Wellington Mk X, MF509, of No. 22 Operational Training Unit — lost on a night training flight, not a combat mission.
- All six Royal Canadian Air Force crew, aged 20 to 28, died; the memorial cairn carries a steel plaque with their names, in Welsh and English.
- The Wellington’s distinctive geodetic “basket-weave” airframe — Barnes Wallis’s lattice design — survives remarkably well across the site.
- A photograph recovered from the wreck reunited the story with the airmen’s families in 2005; a second plaque marks a surviving sister’s visit in 2006.