The place where we live now.
Risca (Welsh: Rhisga) is a town in the Caerphilly County Borough and the historic boundaries of Monmouthshire in south-east Wales. Risca has a railway station, which opened on the Ebbw Valley Railway in February 2008 after a gap of 46 years. It is split into two communities: Risca East and Risca West. It has a population of 11,700. The town is now part of the Cardiff Capital Region, with a combined population of 1,543,293. Cardiff, the capital of Wales, can be reached in under 28 minutes from the nearby railway station of Risca and Pontymister station, which reopened in 2008 after a gap of nearly 60 years.
The town lies at the south-eastern edge of the South Wales Coalfield, and the town has been shaped by mining, together with other heavy industries, for many centuries.
Risca is home to Ty-Sign, which is a large housing estate built in the early 1960s as a satellite village for the then-new Llanwern steelworks. Risca has a rural aspect and is surrounded to the east and west by several extensively wooded hills, including Mynydd Machen (1,188 ft; 362 m) and Twmbarlwm (1,375 ft; 419 m), which attract tourists for hillwalking and mountain bikers to Cwmcarn Forest Drive.
There is evidence of human habitation in the Risca area going back thousands of years, such as the Silures hillfort on nearby Twmbarlwm. However, the area was rural and sparsely populated until the nineteenth century. As local industries expanded and transport links improved with the building of the canal and railways, the population rapidly increased.
Several arguments have been put forward for deriving the name Risca/Rhisga, including that it comes from the Welsh yr is cae, meaning “the lower field”, or yr hesg cae meaning “field or rushes” or rhisgl meaning oak bark.
The earliest known official use of the name Risca for the place was in 1476 when two men from Risca were charged at the Newport Assizes. However, ecclesiastical documents go as far back as 1146, including a man called Kadmore de Risca.
From 1540, Risca was found regularly in land transactions involving the Tredegar estates, and in 1747, John Wesley recorded a visit in his diary.
Rapid population increase started around 1820 with the opening of the mines.