The sunlit uplands

On Saturday 31 May this year, the Welsh Government were finally able to announce something incredible. The Heads of the Valleys Road is finished.

The A465 is one of those numbers whose journey is so varied that it’s hard to look at its two ends and believe they are the same road. Its eastern extremity is at Bromyard in Herefordshire, not far from Worcester, and the gentle country road that rolls through the fields and villages towards Hereford is pleasant but quite ordinary.

West of Hereford it begins to feel more like a main road with a sense of purpose, but on arrival at Abergavenny it transforms into something else altogether.

From there to its terminus on the M4 at Neath, it is the Heads of the Valleys Road, one of the most important routes in South Wales. Its journey, dancing between the heavily populated Valleys to the south and the Brecon Beacons to the north, traverses a wider variety of landscapes than ought to be possible in such a relatively short distance.

Ten years ago we published a long form article about the history of this unique road, and the struggle to build it in the 1960s, when the original Heads of the Valleys road travelled up and down the valleys themselves and through an almost continuous run of towns and villages. If you haven’t seen it before, take a look - it’s a great story.

The sixties road was a vast improvement, but as soon as it was finished, it was clear that more work was needed. It ran from Hirwaun to Abergavenny, but the existing routes east and west of there were becoming heavily loaded with traffic taking advantage of the new section, and even the new road was criticised from the day it opened for its substandard design.

Putting that right has been a continuous project from that day to this, but on 31 May the final section of upgraded dual carriageway was opened and the job is now - 60 years on - complete.

The last part to be finished was an upgrade to a section of road first built in the 1960s between Hirwaun and Dowlais Top, running through the northern suburbs of Merthyr Tydfil and across a section of exposed moorland. It includes a series of bridges vaulting across steep-sided valleys and required the delicate threading of a modern 70mph expressway through suburban housing estates.

Its completion means that you can, now, for the first time, travel on an uninterrupted dual carriageway from the M4 at Neath to the A449 at Raglan, not just improving access to the Valleys but opening up a whole new alternative to the M4 for journeys across South Wales. These are the sunlit uplands that the Valleys were promised back in 1956.

To recognise this achievement, today we’re welcoming the A465 Heads of the Valleys Road to the Motorway Database, where it takes its place as the UK’s newest expressway route.

Thanks for your support

The new A465 page in the Motorway Database is just one of the many things I do that are only possible with your support. Roads.org.uk is big and complex and uses a lot of resources, and with every passing year it keeps getting bigger and reaching more people.

I don’t accept paid content and I don’t run advertising, and for twenty-odd years I covered all the costs myself, because this is something I enjoy doing. But as the site gets bigger it doesn’t get any cheaper.

A year ago, for the first time, I added a link to Buy me a Coffee to accept small donations towards the running of the site.

Last month the proceeds from the donations I’ve received enabled me to move Roads.org.uk to new and more powerful hosting, which has immediately improved the site’s speed and will end the occasional interruptions where the site went offline for hitting its hosting limits.

That’s only been possible thanks to the generosity of the people who visit. Whether you’ve been able to chip in, or whether you spread the word by sharing the things you like on social media, or whether you just visit and enjoy the stuff I put online, I wanted to say thank you for your support.