Episode 3 Hidden Histories

The Royal Commission is a government detective agency set up in the same year as the FBI.

Unlike the FBI, the Commission investigates the history of Wales

and its case files are open to everybody.

This week the hidden history of the well that became infamous as a place of cursing...

..discovering the secrets of a showcase mine

that failed and rock art as you've never seen it before,

and how volunteers from across the world

built a better future for the Welsh Valleys in the '30s.

Water has been long linked with healing

and North Wales has two of the most famous examples in the UK.

Holywell has been a centre for healing since the seventh century

and is the oldest healing shrine in continuous use in Britain,

but not all wells were used for healing, quite the opposite.

Cefn y Ffynnon Farm is about 15 miles from Holywell, near Abergele.

It was once a centre of dark arts.

It doesn't look much now, but 200 years ago

the Ffynnon Elian, near Abergele, was infamous as a cursed well.

Its very name struck terror into the hearts of anybody cursed here.

Huge amounts of money would be paid to the guardians of the well,

upwards of £300 a year, a fortune in those days.

It's a fascinating, if dubious, chapter

in the social history of Wales.

Cursing involved writing the initials of the cursed on a piece of slate

and paying a fee for the slate to be put in the well.

Ffynnon Elian has long fascinated Richard Suggett,

an expert on magic and witchcraft, but this is his first visit.

There, Richard, look what a little bit of strimming in a corner of some local field has revealed.

This is astonishing, Eddie, absolutely a total surprise.

The well was supposed to have been utterly destroyed

sometime in the 19th century, and here we have it.

I can't say the breeze blocks look like 18th-century workmanship to me, but...

No, I think this is 20th-century workmanship, yeah,

but the point is the continuity of the well.

Despite every attempt to destroy it, it survives and look at the water.

-Crystal clear.

-Crystal clear.

-Excellent for a curse or two.

-That's right, yes.

Richard, would people have known all about this, "Oh, please don't do a Ffynnon Elian on me?"

Oh, yes, certainly. The threat to curse someone,

to put them in the well,

was a terrifying utterance in the 18th and 19th centuries.

So, I find out that somebody has done EB on a pebble

and chucked it in, I am obviously worried, what do I do?

-Very worried.

-Very worried.

-Very worried.

Well, either you, or if you're very ill a surrogate,

goes to the farmhouse at Cefn y Ffynnon and you see the woman of the well

and you want to know if a slate, or a pebble or whatever,

with the initials EB has been retrieved from the well.

And you're probably taken to an upper room

and there you're shown hundreds of slates and sure enough...

You start scrabbling.

You start scrabbling.

And sure enough you find a slate with your initials on it.

And, um...

without being too cynical, I think it was probable that every possible permutation of initials

was kept in the farmhouse.

So, you've got your slate, you're taken down to the well

and you essentially remove the curse

by doing a reverse of the ritual for imposing the curse.

And then it comes to the question of a fee.

So, you may offer the woman what you can afford and she may accept it or reject it.

But, it seems from the documentation of one case,

that something like 18 shillings or so

-was the going rate, which is quite a lot.

-Yeah, not cheap.

Yeah. I imagine a pound or a guinea, or something like that was asked for

and that the price was brought down a bit.

In the 21st century this would be called diversification.

EDDIE LAUGHS

Although the tradition of cursing wells has long gone,

a few remnants survive, mainly from the 19th century.

Bangor Museum has a small, but fascinating, collection associated with this darkest of arts.

There's a lot of effort gone into this slate.

It's inscribed on one side with the name Nanny Roberts

and what's quite interesting is, on the other side...

It looks like it's been a trial run, because the Roberts doesn't quite fit the slate property.

-Or poor old Nanny got it twice.

-Possibly.

Scratching names on a piece of slate

wasn't the only way to curse your enemy,

this cursing pot had pins inside.

There would have been a frog skin and some pins found in here.

If somebody wanted to put a curse on somebody else,

you would put your curse, make incantations and seal it

with the slate on top.

Apparently it was tradition amongst younger girls.

If they wanted to get the affections of a young man,

they would put a curse against one of their rivals for that affection.

Oh, jealousy.

Jealousy in Anglesey.

When Ffynnon Elian was in full swing as a cursing well, Welsh Methodism was at its height.

This used to be a Calvinist Methodist chapel

and what the congregation here saw over there at the cursing well, just in those trees, they didn't like.

And one day in 1829, they decided to take matters into their own hands.

Richard, what did they do?

Well, they marched in a body across the road,

through the hedge, up the stream and to the well.

They dismantled the well stone by stone

and it's said they actually ploughed the ground and planted potatoes there.

-Such righteous indignation, such trespassing.

-Very probably.

And they decided to erase it completely from the landscape.

Well, that's pretty radical, isn't it?

-It's extremely radical.

-Did it really put an end to the cursing tradition?

You'd think it would, wouldn't you? But no, completely the opposite.

The well hung on for the next 20 years.

It's extraordinary, just 50 yards from the chapel,

two ways of life facing each other, challenging each other in a way.

In the end one does triumph, but it takes 20 years.

I feel slightly reassured that the Welsh carried on cursing.

The man who enabled the Welsh to carry on cursing

was known as Jac Ffynnon Elian

who diverted the water supply from the farm.

Current well owner, Jane Beckerman, doesn't believe that Jac was a villain

and has even written a university thesis on the subject.

I think he was a shrewd and intelligent man

who was a very, very gifted amateur psychologist.

But he pinched your water.

He made a living for himself at a time when it wasn't easy in Wales.

And I think, although the reputation is so negative,

I think Jac Ffynnon Elian provided an extremely useful service for many people who didn't have access

to perhaps normal channels of justice, or indeed normal channels of healing.

I think perhaps the well can be called more of a well

of justice and healing than a cursing one.

At Ffynnon Elian we're not far removed from a world of witchcraft and magic.

Richard Suggett has never met Jane before and he is intrigued

by her interest in an era which has almost disappeared.

So, here we are, this is Jac Ffynnon Elian territory.

So, this is quite appropriate we're entering his domain, crossing the stream that comes down from the well.

Yes. Jac Ffynnon Elian, when he took up residence, probably about 1820,

he if you like, stole the water from Ffynnon Elian

and diverted it into his own garden, which is here, which is this area.

The reputation for cursing really did begin to develop

at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century

with a new breed of writers who wrote about the well,

picking up this idea of cursing and using an image of the Welsh which suited, perhaps,

-English middle-class ideas of Welsh romanticism and Welsh backwardness, and Welsh primitiveness.

-Yes.

And wrote the most extraordinary articles which were read all over Great Britain.

So, can you honestly believe

that people came here for that length of time,

people who were suffering and in difficulties,

at a very difficult time in Welsh history?

And I can't imagine that people would have parted with hard-earned cash

unless it was for their benefit,

unless they felt that they were going to access healing.

And, Jac understood that, he was a shrewd psychologist, a clever operator too.

Yes, yes. I think we have to think of the well as a kind of...

-You know, having dual aspects.

-I think so.

A healing and a hurting aspect.

We've rather forgotten the healing aspect.

-Exactly.

-But the hurting aspect is quite extraordinary.

-It is.

There's a twist to Jac Ffynnon Elian's tale.

Towards the end of his life, he became a Baptist and recanted.

He got religion round about 1854,

was dipped in his own well, apparently, by the Baptists,

wrote an autobiography, or wrote with the assistance of a minister,

a kind of confession, rather like the confessions

that the condemned made before they were hanged,

exposing everything as a hoax and saying

that he didn't have any powers at all, he was just an ordinary man.

-Presumably, he'd have been a prime catch.

-Absolutely, yes.

What better catch than Jac Ffynnon Elian?

-And then getting him to write his autobiography saying...

-I recant.

I recant and the whole thing was a hoax.

This is Ystrad Einion, a silver-lead mine south of Machynlleth,

which wasn't exactly a huge success.

It cost a fortune to build, had state-of-the-art machinery,

and yet only worked for a few years at the end of the 19th century

with very little return. But what was bad for business

has proved to be a boost for heritage.

In the beautiful Artists Valley near Machynlleth,

the remains of a Ystrad Einion metal mine are about to be brought to life.

Ceredigion County Council have asked the Royal Commission

to produce an animation showing how it worked.

So, just how important is a site like this?

It's the history of the site, it's what it represents

to the metal and mining industry as a whole in the 19th century.

And the discovery of the metal, it brought new people into the area,

it brought prospectors in and it changed the way of life

of people who lived and worked here,

there were some more employment opportunities.

So, it's really representative of a time of great change

and it actually sort of placed Mid Wales on the map, really,

to a wider world.

The current lack of information and interpretation here

make it difficult to visualise what went on.

All that has changed with the new animation

which shows how the mine looked in its heyday.

What to me seemed like a jigsaw in stone, suddenly began to make sense.

We are actually stood at the top of the mine site

and we're actually stood over the main shaft of the site.

Now, behind us this huge hole here went down 50 fathoms,

that's over 100 metres down under ground just to extract the ore.

This is a silver-lead mine,

but the ore came out in a mixture of others,

so you can start seeing the silver-lead here,

but you do have zinc as well.

And, also from this mine, copper was being extracted.

So, the shaft behind us, as well as an access point down into the mine,

was also a place of bringing up pieces of rock like this,

the actual ore, which could then be processed throughout the site.

In its heyday Ystrad Einion was state-of-the-art,

employing just 11 people,

but even the most advanced machinery failed to produce results.

In 1891, the mine produced five tonnes of lead ore, ten tonnes of zinc and five tonnes of copper,

yielding a turnover of less than £60, meagre returns for an investment of £3,000.

Below us you are looking at these... The two circular...

-They're known as buddles.

-Buddles.

Buddle pits. And that really was the final stage in the process.

So, what happened was, in this process it was a circular sweeping machine, in effect,

where various sludge and various small particles

were placed into this machine,

water, again, added to it and sweepers rotating around and around.

Minerals would then all settle, it's almost like gravity,

they'd settle along the surface of this buddle.

And you could then see the different ores you were getting,

so you'd have a heavier top layer, perhaps of the silver-lead,

you might have a middle layer of the zinc down to the much lighter copper

and at the very bottom you'd have all the waste -

the sludge and the slimes,

which could just be thrown onto the nearby spoil tip.

Not all of Ystrad Einion's attractions are above ground,

they're on another level in the more ways than one.

One of the greatest feats of engineering is just through this tunnel.

And here it is.

The water wheel is unexpected and stupendous,

a full five metres in diameter,

not even the animation can capture its surprising scale.

The wheel had two functions, winding up ore bearing rock

from lower levels and pumping out water to keep the mine workable.

The wheel dates from the mid-1870s.

The fact that it's been hidden away for so long perhaps accounts for its remarkable state of preservation.

Silly question, but look at the size of this and look at the tunnel through which we came in,

how did they get it in here?

Well, I think we'd guess that they would have constructed it actually here.

So, they would have brought all the parts in and manufactured it.

Wood and iron are the two main components of this, which to me is more amazing

when you consider they would have been working with candlelight as well to construct all of this.

So, it's an absolutely amazing feat really.

More than a century after it closed Ystrad Einion is about to illuminate

another corner of Wales's mining heritage.

Leisure facilities,

we take them for granted nowadays.

Swimming pools like this at Nantyglo can be found across Wales,

but it hasn't always been so.

The depression years of the '20s and '30s

were not entirely unproductive for industrial communities in Wales.

There was a spate of building recreational facilities

for the hardest hit, financed by a levy on coal owners and miners.

Many of today's parks were built by voluntary labour and born of extreme hardship.

An example is Brynmawr in Blaenau Gwent which has just had a makeover.

In Brynmawr Welfare Park, what the local workforce

and the international volunteers created is not only still here,

but has recently been commemorated in this new area in the main park.

This is the Pebble Beach.

In the past few years, a corner of the existing park has been redesigned

to commemorate the achievements of the 1930s pioneers.

The centrepiece is this fountain, actually a pump, part of the original swimming pool.

Daryl Leeworthy is studying leisure facilities in the Valleys during the '30s

in a joint project with The Royal Commission and Swansea University.

He's found that the park was built by a team of international volunteers,

who flooded into the Valleys at a time when Wales needed their help.

You've got solicitors and teachers

and sculptors and watchmakers from all over Europe

landing in what really was Wales's most savaged community

during the Great Depression with 80% of people out of work.

-80%?

-Yes.

-Wow.

And so, they must have felt a little bit of guilt in the fact that they had jobs back at home,

whereas most of the town, most of the people they came into contact with,

were struggling to survive.

We can see what they've left, what did they start work on?

This is what they've built.

Imagine everything around us is completely black, there's coal waste, there's quarry waste,

there's bits and pieces of the earth literally thrown all over this place,

completely barren and black landscape.

So, they've dug down deep enough to form these hollows.

Literally, brought it down to less than ground level, really.

Flattened it off to try and provide as much level surface as possible.

During the 1930s, the sufferings of Welsh industrial communities struck a chord throughout the world,

much in the way that Africa animates today's youngsters.

The International Voluntary Service was based in Switzerland

and Daryl succeeded in tracking down its membership files.

Oh, they came from all over. There were Swiss, Belgians,

even people from as far abroad as Syria,

Georgia, Czech Republic, Detroit in the United States...

So they really did come from all over the world.

There was one guy from Switzerland

who cycled in five days from Lausanne all the way to Brynmawr.

Taking into account the ferry, that's quite an amazing achievement.

They were almost super volunteers, in fact they paid for the privilege.

Yeah, they paid because the International Voluntary Service

said to them, "Well the people in Brynmawr

"simply cannot afford to help support you,

"so you've got to fund your activities in Brynmawr on your own."

Were they here and gone tomorrow?

Camps took place over the summers, one in 1931 and one in 1932,

and the final one to really finish it all off in 1938.

And they were here for about two and a half, three months at a time.

So, it was a long period and quite a few of them actually stayed the whole period.

One thing strikes me, you have Britain, there's the depression

which is affecting everybody, but Britain is a hugely wealthy nation.

-Yeah.

-And yet, it can't provide facilities like this.

It's saying to volunteers, "We can't do it, you'd better do it."

The Great Depression, we tend to think about it happening all over the United Kingdom.

It really didn't, it hit certain areas of the United Kingdom far more than it hit other parts.

Oxford, for example, you could talk about the great Roaring '30s.

People moved from South Wales to go and work in the Oxford car plants

and Cowley and those parts of the world.

So, there really wasn't a depression in Oxford.

The new commemorative area has several community features,

such as facilities for young children and the less-abled.

The history of the site is never far away.

This is the talking post and it tells the story

of the international volunteers and what they did in the 1930s.

Give it a spin and it all depends on which way you turn for which language you get.

'After years out of work even the most optimistic can lose hope,

'but the world did care about Brynmawr's fate and future.

'In December 1928 newspapers reported streams of relief

'flowing in from all quarters of the kingdom.'

This park within a park is the inspiration

of local councillor Terence Hughes who swam in the original pool.

The focal point of this garden is the fact that it had

such historical significance and importance to the people of Brynmawr,

so much nostalgia, that we thought "This is vital, we should retain this fountain."

So, it keeps alive that spirit of building something for everybody.

That's right. So, we thought that because of the spirit

and the community that was in the form of the open-air swimming pool,

we tried to recreate what we had.

We've recreated it here, young families can come,

relax and sit and take in the surroundings, you know?

Just thinking of how you've got the experiment

of the volunteers arriving from abroad here,

joining forces with the local workforce and building,

what, the new Brynmawr spa?

Yeah, it's amazing, the heights of ambition and idealism,

that they wanted to turn Brynmawr into a leisure spa,

really showing how Brynmawr from the depths of unemployment

could rise. A phoenix from the ashes, really.

There's something of a Teletubby house about this,

but instead La La or Po inside,

there's some of the best Stone Age rock art to be found in the UK.

I'm at Barclodiad y Gawres, a Neolithic burial chamber

of the Anglesey coast

where Stone Age people left their mark in more ways than one.

It's carvings like these which make Barclodiad y Gawres on the Anglesey coast, such an exceptional site.

Apart from photography, new methods of laser scanning

are revealing the 5,000-year-old burial complex in a new light.

The Royal Commission is comparing the two different survey methods to see what each can reveal.

I asked Toby Driver why Barclodiad is so important.

Before we do the art, Toby, can we just do the age?

I mean, this is going up when the Pyramids are being built.

Oh, yeah, I mean we're stepping back 5,000, 5,500 years

to when this tomb was built.

This is what makes Barclodiad y Gawres so special.

This wasn't previously known about when the tomb was standing in a field in the '50s.

It was excavated in the early 1950s and the excavators discovered

this very rare prehistoric rock art.

-Diamonds and what are they chevrons, there?

-Well, yeah.

We can see here, and we'll see better on some of the new scans,

these double diamonds or chevrons

linked in to either side's snake-like sinuous carvings

down each side, and then zigzags at the top.

This is a pattern of tomb art that we recognise from Ireland,

Brittany, Spain, across Western Europe.

And here we are 5,500 years ago seeing this shared patterning.

George Nash is a rock-art specialist working with a team from Bristol University.

Using digital photography,

he claims to have discovered 30% more art than the 1956 excavation.

So, what we've got here in this particular monument,

we've got an odd monument, orientated north-south when it should face east-west.

You've also got interesting sort of landscape as well, which I think is being replicated on the stone.

So, if this stone is facing the east, the east where the sun rises, this could actually be the sun.

And these could actually be the zigzagged peaks of the Snowdonia mountain range.

Now the one stone is obvious, but on this stone,

you've discovered new art work, haven't you?

I've been coming here for about 15, 20 years and walked past this stone many times.

It wasn't until this year that we started to get some high-resolution photography

and some very bright lights on this particular face of stone here.

You can just see the graffiti, pretty obvious there,

but underneath that graffiti are the very, very faint lines of a spiral.

And there are some lines up here as well.

And the reason why this stuff is so faint

is partly because for many hundreds of years,

this stone was exposed to the elements,

so it's been slowly eroded away.

But, underneath the veneer of the graffiti

are these very, very faint lines which show a very ornate stone.

And again, another important point

is that the art here is hidden, only certain people are meant to see it.

-Does that bring us into the realms of the dead?

-The realm of the dead.

Now, a new survey technique is available.

Andrew Beardsley is carrying out laser scanning

which uses millions of survey points to build up a 3-D picture.

Andrew, a surveyor with a private company, has been fascinated

by Barclodiad for years and is undertaking the survey in his own time.

It's a technique capable of scanning individual rocks and showing how they relate to each other.

It fires out a beam of laser light which hits an object and bounces back.

On a dull surface it will come back with the least amount of light,

on a highly-reflective surface it will come back with the most.

So it fires thousands and thousands of millions of those out to create a 3-D space around it.

You can go in pitch black conditions?

Absolutely, it is its own light source.

We could work 24 hours with one of these.

Even though we might grumble, the scanner doesn't.

This is a tool in the box for heritage.

For instance, this is being used all around the world to capture in 3-D, with as much accuracy

as is possible in this day and age with this technology,

any monuments or heritage sites that are in danger.

This one's pretty safe, but people could vandalise it.

And that captures the 3-D essence of a site,

so if you need to reposition anything as it was within millimetres, this is the method.

To document, for instance, the carvings,

the work that's been done with sort of ambient lighting, acetate tracing

and very detailed photography is the ultimate way of documenting the carvings,

but the carving's relation to its 3-D position and the landscape, this is the ultimate way of doing that.

So, what I'm pleased with is the fact that it's got two elements to it.

It isn't a replacement for photography,

but the scan is embellished by the fact

that it's got these beautiful carvings on there as well as the 3-D shapes.

So how does The Royal Commission evaluate the two different approaches?

It's difficult, but I think both approaches have their merits.

The laser scanning is mind-blowing, the ultimate in precision,

it makes a precise record of what's here now.

But then again it's not interpreting that record,

it's just showing the rocks, the stones as they are today.

George's approach is much more detailed, much more focused,

looking at the carvings themselves, a bit like the prehistoric people who carved the pictures first.

But with a site this important you need both - you need precision, you need interpretation,

you need to understand what you're looking at.

And that's what we've been seeing today, really,

with the full armoury hitting the site.

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