Down in the valleys: the wonders of Wales

The Guardian

20-05-2025

For nearly 30 years Ken Grant has photographed the south Wales valleys. The title Cwm means valley or corrie in Welsh and steep-sided valleys form the backbone of the images in his new book. Grant embarked quietly on this series in the mid-1990s, in parallel to his more widely seen photographs depicting urban working-class life in his native Liverpool. Although visually dissimilar, both sets of work are connected by the themes of labour and endurance. Cwm: The Fair Country by Ken Grant is available to purchase from RRB Books
Grant's images record the gradual post-industrial transition of the landscape and the communities weathering change – watched by the steadfast ponies who have populated the hills for millennia
The valleys are typically aligned by nature in parallel, running north to south. With the advent of industry in the area in the 19th century, urban development began to snake in ribbons along the floors of the valleys
Wild ponies inhabit many of the landscapes and have witnessed what industry did to the Welsh valleys and its people over centuries
Grant's photographs – taken in locations across the region including Beaufort, Ebbw Vale and Fochriw – show the green of the hills disrupted by artery-like roads, concrete bridges and rows of workers' terraced houses
Ken Grant: 'When my father began to talk through ways to settle affairs, as old men tired of it all sometimes do, I told him I needed nothing. I already had the tools he'd given me when I first proved I could carry a job. I had no use for suits, or shirts bought in sales but never worn, and why would I hold on to family photographs that had lain in drawers across a working life that could never pause to look at such things? I asked for nothing, except for a painting that, steady and watching, had sat above his mantelpiece all my life'
'… Dapple-bruised Welsh horses, painted in a loose herd, are imagined beneath a sky that promises rain. That rain will come, and the horses will surely bear it again. They must know it will pass. They tend to tolerate these things. Didn't their benign strength free children from the push and drag of mines? Weren't they compliant through filthy wars, harnessed and led by the promise of pasture and release? And didn't some look up from grazing when strikes brought fracture and silence as the work ended?'
'There are quick growing forests now above the deep vein seams of south Wales, with spruce neck lacing villages cast free of a purpose that once shaped them'
'Near Beaufort, Fochriw and Ebbw Vale, where horses drift in teams, the marks of industry are easily missed in the shade of hills that rise behind institutes and towns that, for all the squalls that pass through, persevere'
'There's wonder in why a painter chooses shadow over sunlight and the kind of pleasing prospect that might comfort a home better. There must be reason in the depiction of waiting, of weathering and tolerance, of the still hereness in all of this'
'There's tenderness in the stories about the loved and expired that find a late path through shallow breathing to the closest of company, watched only by the horses, who are still there after everything, and who know all there is to know about belonging, the end of days and occasional rain'
Collectively the photographs in Cwm create a layered account of a much photographed region, foregrounding beauty, scars and the life that persists despite the weight of an industry's passing. Read more about this image here