by Carolyn Jacob
MOUNTAIN HARE is the name of an old inn above Pen yr Heol Ferthyr which gave the district its more modern name – the 1851 Census Returns recorded Pen yr Heol Ferthyr (see below).
It is not certain when the inn was built, but it would seem to have ideally positioned for the time before industrialization and the road links and pre-1750 conditions, but the name suggests a post-1750 inn. It is an English name. The other public house in the area, the Farmer’s Arms, has the interesting nickname of ‘the Spite’, and there may be truth in the local legend that it was intended to ruin the trade of the other inn. However the name might be derived from the Welsh for a water spout because there was one there. There is another public house with this name in Carmarthenshire, and many of the residents of Mountain Hare came from there. This is very curious but the truth behind the name is hard to be certain of.
The Mountain Hare Ironstone Mine in mentioned by Clive Thomas in Merthyr Tydfil – A Valley Community, page 305, this pre-1860 ironstone mine was at Mountain Hare, just southwest of Dowlais No 2 Pit. In 1841 ironstone mining, coal mining and associated employment such as haulier are practically the only two occupations in the district, however, by 1851 there are different occupations in the area. Gradually the ironstone mining dies out and gives way to coal.
The 1851 census returns, which records place of birth, give clear evidence that the population of Mountain Hare (Pen yr Heol Ferthyr) came from various Welsh counties. We can find people born in Montgomgeryhire, Denbighshire, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire. There are only a few Englishmen here later but no Irish or Scots.
On 31 May 1856 the Merthyr Express reported the conversion of a small cottage to a Sunday School because of ‘the large number of children running about the whole of Sunday at Pwllyhwyaid. The school was connected to Zoar Welsh Independent Chapel.
Also, according to All Change by Josh Powell, page 63, a garden at Pen yr Heol Ferthyr was sold by David Robert Davies to Zion Welsh Baptist Chapel in 1861 for £20. A Sunday School called ‘The Bryn’ was then built on this site.
PEN YR HEOL FERTHYR: The ‘top of the road or ancient byway from or to Merthyr Tudful’, a place generally located below the old ‘Mountain Hare’ Inn, immediately east of the former Dowlais Inclined Plane, just above the former bridge which (in the 1940s) took the road called Heol Ferthyr alias Twyn yr Odyn Road across the Dowlais Inclined Plane. Sometime the name is on documents without the ‘yr’. The Dowlais Inclined Plane went right through this locality, mostly as a deep cutting, requiring a bridge to take Heol Ferthyr over the railway and another bridge lower down taking a lane over the railway to Tir Ysgubor Newydd homestead.
By 1885, the six-inch Ordnance Survey Map showed nearby Mountain Hare Inn, Maerdy, some houses to the rear and a row of houses alongside the road. This apart, there is very little if anything known of the history and occupants of this ‘farm’ or small-holding which lay alongside one of the main access roads to the village of Merthyr Tydfil. However, evidence taken from the census returns 1841- 1911 reveal quite a large number of persons residing in this district.
Mountain Hare was pictured in the Illustrated News of 1875 because this popular London based magazine did a feature about Merthyr Tydfil during the 1875 Strike, the longest strike to date. The men met at Mountain Hare for huge outdoor political rallies, but the area had long been a general outdoor meeting place gathering crowds of working men for sports and activities such as dog fighting (actually illegal from 1835) and bare knuckle fighting. Its main claim to fame is that the greatest politician of all time, Keir Hardie, spoke here to a gathering of working people in 1898.
