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On Saturday 8th September, three valiant members of the Radical Tea Towel team, Tim, Bea and Luke, plus Luke's brother Adam and Moss the dog, ventured forth in the wind and rain to find the Chartists cave on Mynydd Llangynidr, high on the moors above the village of Trefil, in Blaenau Gwent, South Wales...

 

The forecast was pretty dire but, as we'd planned this venture a couple of weeks previously, we weren't about to let a bit of bad weather stop us, so off we set!

 

However, even though the Chartist cave is a prominent landmark noted on most maps, it took us two hours of walking over very difficult ground, and getting soaked through too, before we finally found it. (Orienteering is apparently not our strong point!)

 

​The cave entrance itself is a broad arch formed of millstone grit and you can see it would be very easy to miss if you approached from the wrong angle. At least that's what I'm telling people.

 

This was Luke just as he found the cave:

 

​The Chartist rebels involved in the Newport Rising of November 1839 are thought to have made and stored their weapons in this cave in the summer of that year.

 

You can go inside and see where they would have met in secret and imagine what it would have been like for those brave men and women in those far off days, huddling in the dark and planning to march on Newport.

 

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It's possible to explore further into the cave via a narrow slot to a lower main chamber with many passages leading off it

 

Potholers tell us…

 

The Chartist Cave has long been known, originally under the name of Tylles Fawr – The Great Hole. …. In 1969 the SVCC excavated the floor in the cave to find a descending passage that entered a lower level chamber with a multitude of passages radiating off it.

[CAVES of SOUTH WALES ogof. org.uk]

 

but this is best not tackled except by experienced cavers: pot-holers, not tea-towelers.

 

Four decades ago, cavers found the remains of three people deep inside the cave complex. They weren’t sure if they were the bodies of informers who’d been murdered or those of rebels killed in the uprising itself and their bodies dumped there. We can only speculate.

 

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I think it’s too easy to dismiss Chartism for its failure to quickly bring about democracy, but it’s important to set it in its 19th century context.

The movement provided the prototype for later working class movements by demonstrating the importance of working voices and showing the necessity for action in response to the conditions and limitations of the social system. And it gave a much needed boost to working class morale.

 

Let’s not forget these brave men and women who fought for democracy and paved the way later in the century for the Suffragettes to follow them and eventually bring about universal suffrage.

 

The original blog can be can be viewed at https://radicalteatowel.co.uk/blog/finding-the-chartists-cave

 

And if you visit the site, please heed the ‘tea towelers’ warning – Pot holing is for professionals.

 

 

See our 1839 Newport Rising tea towel

 

https://radicalteatowel.co.uk/tea-towels/peoples-charter-tea-towel

 

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