The Church in Wales                                                               Yr Eglwys yng Nghymru

 

The Parish of Caerau with Ely

 

 

 

Ely as a village

 

A new church in 1871 for the small hamlet of Ely must locally have been an event of no mean importance, for the habitations consisted only of a few farmsteads,  a cluster of houses and a few wayside inns near a narrow arched stone bridge crossing the meandering river Ely.  But no doubt those in authority could see that things were shaping for population expansion. 

 

One can picture the village setting at the time, with its farms and market gardens supplying the food needs of rapidly growing Cardiff by transport along country roads in horse carts. 

 

There was Red House farm,    Ely farm, the Ely Flour Mills of Mill road, and fields all around, with picturesque St. Fagans woods to the north and Leckwith woods to the south. 

 

Ely Paper Mills (now the largest paper works in the United Kingdom for newsprint) had started to expand in 1865, and a malting house occupied the site where the Ely Brewery now stands. 

 

Uninterrupted open space lay between the River Ely and Fairwater, for Chiver’s preserve factory and Crosswell’s brewery did not make their appearance until about 1900.

 

In the true sense Ely was a village. 

 

Early in the twentieth century there was still a blacksmith shop opposite the present Isolation Hospital and another at the Dusty Forge Inn at Cyntwell.  Even as recently as 1920, before the Ely housing estate developed, there were some pleasant country walks over stiles and across fields from Ely to Caerau, Drope, St. Fagans, and Fairwater.

 

Moreover, less than seventy-five years ago both Ely and Llandaff  were more or less isolated from Cardiff,  which was then beginning to lose altogether its “market town”  characteristic under the pressure of commercial enterprise.

 

Ely was quite separate from Cardiff by Ely common, on which Victoria Park was opened in1897, and a map printed about 1852 shows the main road to Cardiff passing through “The Village of Canton”  to a turnpike gate at the spot where Cowbridge Road and Cathedral Road now intersect. 

 

On the present site of the police station and cinema an enclosure is indicated marked “Farm Yard.” 

 

The Canton village was largely fields with scattered dwellings, for most of the houses to the west of Canton bridge have been built in the last sixty years.  With no school other than Llandaff

church school, limited transport and no ready-made entertainment, the village community life was in its very nature compelled to centre its recreative interests around activities associated with the church. 

 

The Welsh language also had evidently a hold, though a dying one, on the inhabitants ;  George Thomas of Ely farm was proud of his native tongue, and it was only in 1874 that the Sunday school in the old Wesleyan chapel in Mill Road abandoned the Welsh language for English.

 

One must remember, also, that the number of parishes within the boundaries of Cardiff had increased as the population had grown;  for example,  St Luke’s parish, with its present church and the former corrugated iron building which it replaced, is a comparatively modern parish carved out of the parish of Canton.  The same is true of the parish of St. Catherine. 

 

The parish of  Caerau-with Ely antedates both, and in its short history of seventy-five years can look back at some quite interesting changes in ecclesiastical divisions in the district.

This article was written in 1946, and many of the land marks which the author mentions have long since disappeared, including the paper mill.

Parish History                 the story continues……...