When development of the mines began the Brendon Hill villages had little capacity to cope with the influx of workers in need of lodgings. Houses and barns were rented as temporary dormitories to accommodate local workers who walked from their homes on Monday morning and returned home on Saturday night.
Although the company built dedicated miner’s cottages living space remained scarce and every building was utilised and adapted, often for more than one purpose. By the end of 1855 the Company had twelve houses built: a row of three cottages built at Sminhays, a row of five at Gupworthy adit entrance, and a row of four in the Raleighs Cross mine compound. In the census of 1861 about 130 miners and associated trades - carters, smiths, engine minders, etc. - were listed of whom only about 22 lived in company cottages, and some of these were lodgers.
Weekly rents for a cottage started at around 2/3 and went up to £1. Skilled men like William Gundry, a cornish pump manager, could afford a cottage, but most cottages were subdivided and shared with lodges and their families.
Both Gupworthy and Brendon Hill were new settlement established to house the workforce close to the mines. Brendon Hill at the head of the Incline became the largest settlement. By 1864 the Ebbw Vale Company owned a manager’s house and 40 cottages there. Extension cottages’, a single row of ten small timber single storey dwellings with brick chimney stacks, were erected to house railway construction workers.
Apart from the later ‘Brick Row’, all the houses were built of stone taken from the quarry a few metres south west of Brendon Hill station; walls were plastered internally and most were clad externally with Treborough slates to shed the driving rain. There was a privy, usually in a small stone building at the end of the back garden. Most dwellings had only one fireplace, in the kitchen-living room.
There were also two turf huts, built by the occupants on the west side of the incline about 100 metres below the top.
The cottages were built of tarred timber with brick cross-walls in which were incorporated back-to-back fireplaces; they were roofed with corrugated iron, and although intended as a short term dwellings, some were still occupied more than twenty years later, when they were sometimes referred to as the ‘Black Huts’.
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