Litter Pick and Glass Collection

Yesterday, 28th April 2019, was our usual monthly litter-pick/volunteer day – surprisingly the area around the car park was relatively clean. When I visited the area on Friday morning the area was in a bad state with a great deal of litter everywhere including household detritus dumped around the stone cairn – so someone had obviously been there before us to clean it all up.

We were very grateful for that, because it left us free to get to the top of the mountain to do a job we have been planning on doing since last year – and that was to set about cleaning up the vast amount of broken glass that was uncovered by the wildfires of last summer. It needs to be cleared up both for public safety and the fact that it presents the potential of starting more fires with its magnifying effect in the summer sun.

Half a dozen of us spent an hour and half up there and each of us collected half a bucket of glass but when we looked back we could still see plenty more. The glass has accumulated there from generations of picnickers, hidden in the undergrowth for many years.

When we got the glass back down the hill I just couldn’t bring myself to simply dump it all in the recycling for collection, so we sifted through it and found that each shard must reveal a part of our social history. Most of the glass appears to  be quite thick and heavy, suggesting it is of considerable age and it sets you to wonder that people have obviously been climbing Twmbarlwm with their picnics for many years.

The bottles were all shapes and sizes – but there were some flagons with ebonite screw in stoppers. There were also some bottle necks which might have had the old fashioned glass-marble type stopper.

On many pieces you can make out bits of words such as:- “..aber…”, “…rtons…”, “…ercar…”, “…BRO…”, “…miner…” – and we spent a while guessing what some of these could be.

The most popular wording we could decipher on the shards were “Newport and Merthyr Bottle Co.” and a quick Google search reveal that many could date from the early part of the 20th century.

There was one complete bottle neck with the ebonite stopper still intact bearing the words “Hansards. Merthyr” – another Google search reveals that they famously made those heavy duty soda siphons you used to see in many pubs.

None of us is an expert in the history of glass, but if there is anybody out there who could enlighten us to the origin of some of these bottle manufacturers and perhaps shed some light on the social history of the area – please get in touch.

I can promise you we won’t be pursuing the person who dumped any of these bottles, or their descendants, for littering – and I wonder, if we find a complete bottle, will we still be able to claim back the deposit?

Below are some examples of the “Twmbarlwm Hoard”