Welsh Journals

the Station at a place which is immediately over the Sewer mouth, it is most unjust to the Passengers to subject them to the possibility of inhaling the poisonous Gases given off by the Sewage.90 The outfall was subsequently moved downriver to Troedyrhiw.91 But opposition to using the Taff as an open sewer continued. As early as October 1864 the surveyor had reported that injunctions had been obtained against English Boards, restraining them from discharging raw sewage into rivers. 'It has been decided that it is a nuisance at Common Law to discharge any sewage into a river.'92 Finally, in November 1869 Nixon, Taylor and Cory, coalowners and exporters, owners of the Merthyr Vale colliery, obtained a perpetual injunction in the court of Chancery, restraining the Board from discharging sewage into the Taff.93 An alternative method of disposing of Merthyr Tydfil's sewage had, therefore, to be found. In October 1864 the Board's surveyor, Samuel Harpur, produced a scheme for spreading the liquified sewage by irrigation over the surface of fields on the Penydarren estate, for Dowlais, and over 'flat meadows' below Troedyrhiw, for Merthyr Tydfil. The opinion of Mr. William Lee, 'an eminent engineer', was sought; he considered that 'applying fresh sewage to land will not be more offensive than spreading farmyard manure'. There was powerful support for this strange contention. Edwin Chadwick himself was an enthusiastic supporter of the use of untreated sewage, in liquid form, as a field manure; he thought that public health measures should be self-financing.94 But local landowners like Mr. Wyndham Lewis objected strongly that the scheme would create a public nuisance, and it had to be abandoned. So in February 1869 the surveyor produced yet another scheme-Dr. Frankland's 'Intermittent Downward Filtration System'-for the treatment of sewage.95 A sewage farm was constructed about half a mile south of Troedyrhiw. The sewage was to be filtered and chemically treated in covered tanks; when dried, the final product was to be used as fertilizer. Later in the same year, plans were adopted for the establishment of a sewage farm lower down the valley, outside the borough, on 'barren mountain common' near 'Navigation' (Abercynon). 90 ibid., VII, 87. 91 ibid., pp. 101, 213. 92 ibid., VI, 69. 93 ibid., VII, 436. 94 Flinn, op. cit., introduction, p. 59. 95 See Joseph Gross, 'Water Supply and Sewerage in Merthyr Tydfil, 1850-1974', in Merthyr Historian, II (Merthyr History Society, 1978), 74.