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Home » Industry » Mining and quarrying (other) » Lime kilns

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  • Limestone forms a thin belt all around the coal measures of south Wales and many small limekilns, intended to supply a purely local need for lime for agricultural purposes, can be found throughout the area. No less than 171 of these limekilns stand in and around a walled enclosure (some one square kilometer in extent) on Carnau Gwynion, some of which are shown in this aerial photograph. There are several such concentrations of kilns on the southern edge of the Great Forest of Brecon to which the commoners came from local farms to burn lime on the limestone outcrop itself. Many of the kilns date from before the enclosure of the Forest in 1819 and nearly all of them were very crudely constructed of unmortared limestone blocks. The remains are now ruinous, most of the kilns probably having fallen into disuse during the early part of the twentieth century. 

Source: Stephen Hughes and Paul Reynolds, 'Industrial Archaeology of the Swansea Region' (Association for Industrial Archaeology, 1992 edn), p. 9
Aerial photograph of Carnau Gwynion Limekilns, Ystradfellte, 1990
Aerial photograph of Machen Limekilns, 1999
Aerial photograph of Gwernymynydd limekilns, 1993
Aerial photograph of Craiglas limekilns, near Llanrhystud, 1995
  • Photographed by John Thomas.
Kilns at Llanddulas, Denbighshire, c. 1885