Wikipedia
Pontardawe ( – "bridge on the Tawe") is a town of some 5,000 inhabitants in the Swansea Valley (Welsh: Cwmtawe) in south Wales. The community of Pontardawe, comprising the electoral wards of Pontardawe and Trebanos, is served by an elected Town Council and forms part of the county borough of Neath Port Talbot.
Pontardawe first came into existence as a small settlement on the northwestern bank of the Tawe at the point where the drovers' road from Neath to Llandeilo crossed first the river and then the road running up the valley from Swansea towards Brecon. Its best known landmark today is the tall spire of St Peter's church which dominates the centre of the town from its site on a high point of the valley floor close to the Swansea Canal.
Pontardawe is an electoral ward of Neath Port Talbot county borough, Wales. It is a division of the Pontardawe community and falls within the parliamentary constituency of Neath.
The greater part of the geographical area of the ward is made up of mountainous grassland and open moorland with a scattering of farms. However, the majority of the population is concentrated in the town of Pontardawe in the south of the ward.
In clockwise order the ward is bounded
- to the north by the wards of Glanamman (in Carmarthenshire), Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen, and Cwmllynfell
- to the east by the wards of Ystalyfera and Godre'r Graig
- to the southeast by the ward of Rhos
- to the south by the wards of Allt-Wen and Trebanos
- to the west by the wards of Clydach and Mawr (both in Swansea)
In the 2012 local council elections, the voter turnout was 38.64%. The results were:
|Candidate
|Party
|Votes
|Status
|Linet Purcell
Plaid Cymru
911
elected – Plaid Cymru hold
|Mike James
Labour
729
elected – Labour hold
|Sue Northcott
Plaid Cymru
675
|Vince Hotten
Labour
612