Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

ABERYSTWYTH CLIFF RAILWAY Aberystwyth Cliff Railway is one of three legacies of the Aberystwyth Improvement Company, the others being the Royal Pier Pavilion and the Hotel Cambria, the building occupied since 1906 by the Theo- logical College. The railway was the only cliff railway built in Wales, though several were built in England. It was constructed in 1895/96 and was opened to the public on i August 1896. Constitution Hill has been a popular walk with visitors from the earliest days of Aberystwyth as a holiday resort. The old name of the hill was Craiglais. The New Aberystwyth Guide by T. J. Llewelyn Prichard (1824), states that the name Constitution Hill was adopted "recently" and Prichard regretted "the bad taste of borrowing names for streets and places from other towns." The hill was part of the Penglais estate but public footpaths ran over it and visitors were urged to use them to view "frightful precipices." Throughout much of the 19th century, the quarries at Craiglais and Bryn-y-mor provided stone for the expanding town and consequently the hill's beauty was marred by waste tips. The paths and private quarry road remained, however, and late in the century the Aberystwyth Footpaths Association, led by the journalist W. R. Hall, erected seats on the hill and on other walks around the town. The idea of building a cliff railway on Constitution Hill was first mooted in 1893 but who first thought of it is not known. Britain's first cliff railway was at Scarborough (1876) and in 1890 the famous Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway in Devon was opened, with the financial support of Sir George Newnes, the publisher who founded, among other things, Titbits.1 One of Newnes' associates was George Croydon Marks, later Lord Marks, an engineer who was responsible for Newnes' Clifton Rocks Railway at Bristol and the Castle Hill Rail- way at Bridgnorth, Salop, both built in the early nineties. As far as Aberystwyth was concerned, the first move was in January 1894 when Dr. Thomas Davies Harries, a local physician who was elected Mayor of Aberystwyth later that year, took a 99-year lease of seven acres of Constitution Hill.2 It was part of Brynllwyd Farm, in the occupation of John and Richard Jones and was owned by Roderick Clement Richards, of Penglais. Within three weeks, Dr. Harries transferred the lease to Thomas Barnet Grant, of Wood Green, Middlesex, who was associated with John Bourne, of Hilderstone Hall, Hilderstone, near Stone, Staffs. Grant died early in 1895 before the Aberystwyth project really began and Bourne was left to proceed with the work, the lease being formally assigned to him by Grant's widow in August of that year. Bourne formed the Aberystwyth Improvement Company with