Cyfarthfa Park ‘Bird Garden’
by Laura Bray
There are many parts of Merthyr’s history than seem not to have been documented formally, although I am sure many of you will have photos. One such is the Bird Garden in Cyfarthfa Park. Who remembers this?
The Bird Garden, as I always called it, was basically a narrow corridor of bird cages that ran behind the tennis courts. You got at it from the end nearest the “top swings”, mostly by running down the bank from the chalet, (there was later a short tarmacced path) preferably sticky from chocolate bought in the shop. I can’t remember what birds there were, apart from the peacocks, whose calls echoed round the park and were the accompaniment to many a boring lesson in school, but I do remember that they eventually added a small pond and expanded the cages further up towards the main road leading to the Castle.
It must have been there about 7 or 8 years – from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, and there is no trace of it left today.
What do you remember about it? Share your memories in the comments below.
I remember it well. I lived in the Quar so it was a weekly trip to walk along the birds and out the other side
Thank you, Laura, for this piece of nostalgia. My father, Emrys Morgan, was the Aviary Keeper. He had a life-long interest and self-taught expertise in ornithology. He loved the job and showing visitors around, answering any questions and providing detailed accounts of each bird section. He succeeded in creating a range of habitats including one area where sprinklers and a heating system created the conditions the birds housed there would experience in their native rain forests!
However, our now all too familiar ‘friends’ austerity and cutbacks made the Aviary an obvious target and it was closed. My Dad was very disheartened. He retired soon after and it was not long before he left Merthyr when he and my mother moved to Ammanford where I, my wife and our three children were living at the time. He had almost a decade of very active retirement there until suffering a serious illness. He died in November 1999, aged 80. Fittingly, we asked for donations not flowers and that these be made to the RSPB.