Ynysfach Engine House

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”
Octavia E. Butler
A Walk Through Merthyr
Ynysfach Ironworks was an extension of Crawshay’s Cyfarthfa Ironworks
The massive beam engine that supplied the blast to the nearby furnaces was housed in the four storey Engine House, restored but now an empty shell I was told. The foundry, which predates this engine house, cast cannon and cannonballs for use in the American War of Independence. It’s later ‘fame’ seems to have been the result of deaths in and around the site, reported in the Merthyr Express in particularly graphic and lurid detail around the turn of the century (that’s the nineteenth/twentieth by the way). One story in 1870 reported two visitors to ‘China’ for some ‘entertainment’ who, having spent their money, crept into the works for somewhere warm to sleep and never woke up again having been roasted. It seems they weren’t the only ones to have found refuge in the warmth of the coke ovens to have come to an untimely end, with as many as fifty sharing a similar fate in 1900. The most poignant story perhaps is the White Lady of Ynysfach, a (harmless) ghostly apparition haunting the area around Merthyr College and sighted many times over the years; reportedly the image of Mary Ann Rees, murdered by her younger lover William Foy who was hanged for the murder in 1909. If you like storytelling, and radio, her story is told by Owen Staton in his podcast Time between Times at https://owenstaton.substack.com/p/time-between-times-storytelling-with-0fe