Situated in a wonderfully bleak stretch of moorland in the east of the Brecon Beacons sits the Chartist Cave. For those of you that don’t know, basically the Chartist movement was the first mass movement driven by the working classes. It grew following the failure of the 1832 Reform Act to extend the vote beyond those owning property.
In 1839, Chartist rebels used the cave to stockpile weapons in advance of their march on Newport in November of that year. The Newport Rising was the last large-scale armed rising in Wales where approximately 4,000 Chartist sympathisers, under the leadership of John Frost, marched on the town.
En route, some of the Chartists were arrested and held prisoner. In an attempt to liberate them, fighting broke out between the Chartists and some soldiers where around 24 Chartists were killed and a further 50 injured. The leaders of the uprising were arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered although this was later commuted to transportation.
It really is an incredible cave. There is a passage dropping to a lower chamber with many passages leading off. The known length of the cave is 440 metres but it is believed to form part of a much more extensive cave system beneath the moors. I would not recommend exploring too far into it!
