'I was crying out for mum': Inside the TB sanatorium where children were isolated and tied to beds

• Former Craig-y-Nos patient Graham Canning explains how he was tied to his bed as he was treated for TB

Former patients of Craig-y-Nos Castle have spoken about the distressing experiences of being kept in a sanatorium where children were treated for the widely-feared and deadly disease tuberculosis.

Situated in the Swansea Valley, Craig-y-Nos Castle was one of several sanatoria that opened across the UK to treat children for TB between the 1920s and late 1950s.

"Today, the way that we look back on the treatment and the regime of the sanatoria, we would now consider to be abuse," Dr Carole Reeves, a medical historian and co-author of a book called The Children of Craig-y-Nos said.

"Children in high-sided cots at the age of five or six, deprived of a toy if they were naughty, slapped if they got out of bed, tied to the bed in order to force them into bed rest: we would now consider to be abuse.

"But of course at the time the strict regime was that bed rest, food and fresh air were really the only curative treatments."

Craig-y-Nos Castle opened its doors as a sanatorium in the early 1920s.

It became a symbol of desperate hope with many families fearing that, once their children entered the imposing castle, they may never see them again.

Those were very different days back then. Knowledge of TB - and how to effectively treat it - was still developing and, decades on, many people may look back on some of the treatments used and feel a deep sense of unease.

One of the treatments used at Craig-y-Nos was a procedure known as gastric lavage. It was an invasive process used to determine if a patient - child - was finally free from infection.

Sylvia Moore spent five years at Craig-y-Nos and recalled the physical experience of the gastric lavage procedure as part of an ITV Wales documentary.

"It was done by basic rubber tubing, an enamel funnel and sterile water," she explained.

"The tube was inserted into the stomach by the patient swallowing slowly, the funnel put on the end and the water poured in.

"It was there for about two minutes and then the patient would be upended, it would be siphoned out into a bowl and it would be sent away to the labs.

"And that's how they determined whether the germ was still there or not.

"We had to have three in a row done consecutively. It had to be three and that was done every three months."

Graham Canning also spent five years at Craig-y-Nos and vividly recalls the fear and distress he felt when he was taken to the sanatorium.

He said: "The nurses carried me, with my head over her [a nurse's] shoulder and my arms are out crying for mum.

"That's the reaction she remembers, me being taken away and of course that upset her and of course I was upset because I was two, and the most important person in the world then, at that age, is your mum."

Being such a young child when he was admitted to Craig-y-Nos, Graham's liveliness and boundless energy meant the nurses had to take extra action to ensure he properly rested.

"I can remember being tied down in bed, I can remember having a restrainer around me," Graham said.

"I remember that the most, the fact that I was restrained. I did find a way of undoing the straps by putting my hand underneath and undoing the knots, but then the nurses found out what I was doing and started putting the straps around my shoulders."

With the children often being kept in isolation to help them recover, many of them would use their youthful imaginations to help pass the time.

Sylvia spent two years in one room, on her own, and said it was the window to the outside world that kept her young mind occupied.

"I spent two years here, on my own, apart from a couple of months," Sylvia said with a notable emotion in her voice.

"Looking out of the window and outside is a beautiful spruce tree and I swear blind I watched that tree grow.

"I did a lot of cloud watching from here as well because that's the way we used to amuse ourselves. So yes, it brings back some heartfelt memories shall we say."

Despite many of those dark experiences at such a young and innocent stage of their lives, several of the friendships the children forged back then remain strong to this day.

The perseverance of one former patient in particular helped rekindle connections that could otherwise have been lost to the passage of time.

Anne Shaw, who co-authored the Children of Craig-y-Nos alongside Dr Reeves, was so determined to find some of the people she shared those early years with that she decided to do something.

After placing adverts in a newspaper and writing a blog, she said she and her husband were blown away by the response to her reaching out.

"He was flabbergasted, he said 'the phone hasn't stopped ringing all night!'" Anne said.

"He said 'I've got all these people from Wales ringing me up and I don't know what they're talking about'.

"I ended up with 150 case histories and that's when I kind of realised I had tapped into fifty years of lost Welsh history."

Some of those who spent time at Craig-y-Nos - regardless of the isolation, the enforced bed rest or the fear of being away from their families - look back on it all with a sense of gratitude.

Looking back on her life since Craig-y-Nos, and those early childhood years spent in the castle, Sylvia reflects on it all with a notably positive sentiment.

After leaving Craig-y-Nos, Sylvia would one day return as a nurse to care for people.

"Without this place I certainly wouldn't be here today," she says.

"I wouldn't have my children. I'm 80, it's a long while, and looking back on it, some people would say 'I don't believe it happened' but I look at it the other way round that it very much happened and I'm glad it did."

You can watch the full Children of Craig-y-Nos programme on the ITV Cymru Wales website.