Caerphilly has been twinned with Lannion, a town in the Cote d’Armor area of Brittany, since 1991. The major event in the Twinning calendar is a biennial visit by our Breton friends, with a party of Caerphilly residents visiting Lannion on the alternate year. July 2024 saw a coach of 34 Lannionnaise arrive late on a Friday evening for a 3 day stay, including trips to Cardiff Bay, including the Welsh Assembly, and Big Pit Mining Museum. During their stay, the Breton families are usually hosted by a Caerphilly counterpart and we stay in their homes when we are in France. I have been a member of the twinning Association for nearly 30 years, but had neither visited nor hosted for the last 15 of these as my wife, Ghislaine, and I are usually elsewhere in France when the visits take place. As Ghislaine was spending all of July in our recently purchased, second home in St Suliac, we had no intention of hosting this time either.

Then I had an e-mail from Anne, the secretary of the Twinning Association looking for 2 extra families to host 2 of their founder members. One was an elderly lady bringing her granddaughter and, although I had stayed in Caerphilly for work purposes, I did not feel it appropriate for them to stay in 0ur home without Ghislaine about. The other was Jean-Jacques Monnier, an 80 year old. published historian and founder member of la Comite d’etudes et de liaison des interets bretons (CELIB), an organisation that promotes Breton scholarship and culture. He usually stays with one of our local councillors, but Phil had booked a holiday that clashed with the visit, which was a week earlier than usual this year. we have both known Jean-Jacques from the start of our involvement with the Twinning and I asked Ghislaine if she minded him staying while she was not there.

A much younger Jean-Jacques (far left) at the 20th Anniversary Dinner for Caerphilly-Lannion Twinning Association in the Great Hall of Caerphilly Castle

The upshot was that at midnight on a Friday in July, I found myself meeting the coach outside our local Welsh language secondary school. Unfortunately, they had made good time after leaving the ferry at Plymouth and had been waiting 20 minutes. Most of the families had already left and time for a chat and making preparations for the weekend would have to wait until the Saturday morning welcome meeting. Which left me with the problem of how to entertain him on the Saturday afternoon and evening, which had been left free for “relaxing with families” and recovering from the trip. Lunch was spent having coffee and home made cake with Hilary, another old friend of the both of us whose husband had died suddenly and unexpectedly in January. 2 hours flew by in reminiscences of Ieuan and of previous twinning visits. This still left me 6 hours to fill, without the barbecues with friends that had been part of the pattern 15 years before. The solution – a guided visit to Cyfarthfa Castle and Park, that includes the Merthyr Museum.

This is a little known gem that outlines the development of the iron industry and rail transport in Wales, but also has sections on the Roman and Norman presence in the Valley and a display on the Merthyr Riots, where the Red flag was flown for the first time in Britain only 40 years after the French revolution. Although acknowledged expert on Breton history, Jean-Jacques knew nothing of these events. Of particular interest was a model of Richard Trevithick’s steam engine, the first engine to carry a 10 ton load of iron and “seventy very happy passengers” the 10 miles from Samual Homfray’s Penydarren Ironworks in Merthyr to Abercynon on 21st February, 1804 and, in doing so, winning a 500 guinea bet (over £50,000 at 2023 value) against another iron master and owner of Cyfarthfa Castle, Richard Crawshay. Outside was an ice house supplying ice to the castle in summer, a structure Jean Jacques had never encountered.

Cyfarthfa Castle (side view).

If the visit to the castle museum and the walk in the park were right up Jean-Jacques street, the icing on the cake was added by also visiting the Merthyr cholera  cemetery  at Pant, near Dowlais, opened following the cholera epidemic that killed over 1400 people in 1849 and then Robert Thompson Crawshay’s grave at Vaynor Church, bearing the famous inscription “God Forgive Me”. We had also called en route at the Senghenydd Memorial that commemorates Britain’s largest mining disaster, in which 439 men were killed in 1913, along with all the other mine accidents in South Wales. but the view from Nelson mountain was obscured by clouds.

My plan was to drive past Tower Colliery and over Treherbert mountain before returning home via Rhondda, the former centre of Welsh coal production, showing the “Gren houses” so called after a Western mail cartoonist who depicted the mining villages so well in his regular cartoons. Time, which earlier had to be killed, was now running out so we cut down the A470 for a pint in my 300 year old local pub, the White Cross at Groeswen. This pub is remarkable not only for its long history and its association with Dr Who, but also because it is one of the few county pubs that does not serve food, thriving instead on wet sales alone. The crowd present on a Saturday evening explains why but, once we found a seat, Jean-Jacques, like all the French guests we have taken there before him, was impressed by the warm welcome all visitors receive and the view past Groeswen chapel to Caerphilly basin below.

The chapel is another historical treasure that was built in 1742 and has seen the likes of Howell Harries and Caledfryn preach there. The adjoining graveyard contains the graves of famous Welsh Methodist preachers, poets and musicians and has been called “the Westminster Abbey of Wales”.

After a pleasant pint, it was time to go home to the lasagne I had prepared for supper, then an early night in order to get up in time to meet Jean-Marc and the coach to the Welsh Parliament at 9am the following day. But that is another story for another day.