Concrete Outbuilding at Plas Farm

At Plas Farm, c100m south of Plas Cilybebyll. Approached via a drive and farm track from Cwm Nant-Llwyd Road. On the E side of the river Clydach, the farm is accessed via a concrete bridge.

Farm building constructed on the Plas Cilybebyll estate c1891 using concrete as a walling material. During the C19 industrialisation and improved transport enabled the increasingly widespread use of new materials such as concrete, creosote and corrugated sheeting for farm buildings. They were cheaper to buy, simpler to use and did not require skilled labour for their use. Concrete was quickly harnessed for foundation work, dock construction, and on estates, particularly under the stewardship of improving landlords but generally its use for walling or as a construction material was limited.

Mass concrete had been used in 1870 for a barn on the Buscot Estate in Berkshire and articles on its use had started to be published from this date in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. In Wales the Gregynog Estate (Powys) under Henry Hanbury-Tracy was also building in mass concrete. Similar work was also underway during the 1870s at Dinas Mawddwy in Gwynedd. Concrete was also being used in South Wales in the same period; an advert from Oldfield Bros. of Bute Dock Cardiff, agents for the Economic Concrete Building Company of Gracechurch Street, London had appeared in the South Wales Daily News in May 1874 for ‘economic’ concrete building. A letter to the editor of the Cambrian in September 1876 described the erection of an 8-roomed concrete house in the Swansea Valley, constructed using shuttered concrete (a mix of 1:7 Portland cement to crushed local stone) incorporating large stones within each layer. The owner of the Cilybebyll estate from the mid C19 was Herbert Lloyd, an improver in estate management, and concrete had already been used on the estate by the time these farm buildings were constructed in the early 1890s: an out building at the mill, c500m south of Plas Farm was built using concrete, possibly in the 1860s or 1870s.

The experimental use of concrete was largely abandoned by the 1890s, superseded by reinforced concrete: the Weaver flour mill on the N Dock in Swansea in 1897 was the first reinforced concrete framed building in Britain. It is possible that the earlier experiments in concrete construction informed this new departure in the use of the material.