Have you ever noticed this rusty cast iron pipe in the Gele beneath the bridge at the top end of High St? Brian Haynes told me that its purpose was to fill the paddling pool that used to be in the Playnies (King George’s Field).
The concrete pool was there when I was a child in the 60s and 70s. During the 1980s it became a gardening project for Emrys ap Iwan students. This pool is filled in today.
I don’t have a photo of the pool but here’s one of where it used to be and one of the pipe used to keep it filled with water.
I am not sure that this is the pipe for the paddling pool as there were several other piped abstractions from the river besides the one photographed by Gareth, most fell into disuse in the interwar years, but there are bits of one still in existence, besides that of the paddling pool, which once fed a Pelton Wheel in the cellar of the former Mountjoy Café, this I believe once drove a dynamo, the last remains were removed and presumably scrapped in the 1950s. Much of the evidence of these extractions was also destroyed when the river was “tidied up” in more recent times.
I remember the paddling pool quite well. It was there in 1938 when our family moved to Plasnewydd Buildings. It was a very shallow pool, no more than a foot deep but as the war started there was nobody to look after it and remember seeing broken glass etc at the bottom and we were not allowed to use it. It was empty for many years and when I left Abergele in 1952, it was still empty. Just for your info, Mountjoy Cafe was not a cafe as such but a bakery run by a Mr. Hughes and his son Arthur. Beautiful small cakes and bread second to none. Metropole Cafe next door, more or less, to the the Harp Hotel was also a bakery and not a cafe in the accepted sense