Hidden from view behind the industrial units of the Hirwaun Industrial Estate and glimpsed only momentarily from the main A465 Heads of Valley Road lies a nine-metre-deep, 15 hectare peat bog. For years the bog was forgotten, the subject of landfilling, neglect and disregard. An impediment to progress. However, although battered and bruised it had survived. A sea of purple moor-grass studded with peat pools, a rare example of a lowland raised peat bog with has only recently been re-discovered and recognised as a precious environmental asset. The story of its re-discovery is one of chance and luck, a strange coming together of circumstances and opportunities. It is the story of how a requirement upon National Grid to accommodate the green energy production of the upland windfarms of the south Wales Valleys realised a renaissance in the fortunes of the bog. A bog that has been pragmatically and perhaps poetically christened as the Hirwaun Industrial Estate Peat Bog.

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The bog sits in the valley bottom of the Cynon Valley in Rhondda Cynon Taf at the northern edge of the South Wales Valleys close to the boundary of the Brecon Beacons National Park. It lies immediately next to the gleaming new Rhigos NG substation. Through the planning application for a new electricity sub-station the importance of the bog was recognised and National Grid purchased the greater part of bog and under a Section 106 Management Agreement it is now managing and restoring the peat bog. With up to nine meters of peat, the bog perhaps started to build 9,000 years ago, possibly as a glacial melt-water lake within a drumlin field of rounded smooth tumps.  The closely adjacent Blaen Cynon Special Area of Conservation (SAC) supports a sister bog, which together with the Industrial estate bog are the largest remaining bogs within this much changed glacial landscape.