Using the images captured by the camera lens over the last hundred years, Emrys Jenkins and Roy Green have reconstructed the broad canvas of past life in the Upper Rhondda Fawr valley - in Cwmparc and Treorchy through Ynyswen and Penyrenglyn, Treherbert and Tynewydd finishing in the often-forgotten corners of Blaenrhondda and Blaenewm.
The selection is a wide-ranging one: from colliers to carnivals, soup kitchen to champion gardeners, hospital queens to blacksmiths. Many readers will be able to spot the faces of friends and relatives, to relive long-forgotten events, and revisit once-familiar scenes. Much nostalgia will doubtless be evoked in the older generation and the pictures should provide a useful introduction to the area's fascinating past for the young. The book will be of particular interest to those who have left the valley to make new lives overseas, or in other areas of Britain, but who still retain a love for their homeland.
In consecutive years from 1990 to 1993, and in 1995, exhibitions of local photographs and old documents were held in Treherbert's OAP Hall. Now with many of those images published here for the first time, local people will be able to take a stroll 'down memory lane' each time they open the pages.