Penscynor: The rise and fall of Wales' wildest tourist attraction

It was a Noah’s Ark in the Neath Valley. During the 1970s and 80s, Penscynor Wildlife Park was one of the biggest tourist attractions in Wales.

It was a mini paradise of exotic birds and animals, a zoo nestled in the hillsides of a mining valley.

For an entire generation the Park will forever be associated with school trips and family days out. Penscynor closed its doors 25 years ago, but the story of its rise and fall is extraordinary.

It began as one man’s dream. Idris Hale was a local builder with a vision: to bring the world’s wildlife to Wales.

Jonathan Hale-Quant remembers his grandfather's dream becoming a reality with fond affection.

“It started off in my grandfather’s imagination,” he told ITV Cymru Wales.

“It was a ridiculous, impossible dream but one that he actually did create. 

“There’s no doubt that he was a visionary, with a touch of eccentricity thrown in for good measure.  

“My grandfather was a builder and carpenter by trade. His three main passions in life were photography, wildlife and travel. So he travelled the world, filmed wildlife and brought an awful lot back with him. Eventually he created the park that everybody knew and loved.”

Penscynor opened to the public in 1971 and became hugely popular. Around a quarter of a million visitors flocked to the site each year.  

The sheer variety of creatures on display was staggering. There were polecats and parrots, snakes and sealions, macaws, marmosets and muntjac deer. When the Park closed it had 19,000 birds and animals housed on site.

What made Penscynor different from most zoos at the time was the opportunity it gave visitors to get up close and personal with the wildlife.

The birds were free-flying, the primates interacted with the public and the penguins and pelicans waddled merrily through the Park.

Many people still have childhood memories of watching hornbills swoop down to steal food from the cafe, or peacocks snatching the packed lunch from pupils on a school trip.

For all its quirks, Penscynor took animal conservation seriously. Howie Watkins was the Park’s education officer in the early 1990s:

“There was a real commitment to trying to be the very best we could be," he said.

"For a small zoo we really punched above our weight, doing far more than zoos of a similar size.

“We played an active part in global breeding programmes. We ran the UK breeding records for the Humboldt penguin and the European and African breeding records for a number of other endangered species. I was really proud to be a part of that.”

Penscynor’s popularity soared during the 1980s, thanks to the introduction of a new visitor attraction, its alpine slide.

The brainchild of Idris Hale, it was a toboggan run where visitors sat in a bucket seat and controlled the speed of their descent.

Children would eagerly race down the tracks, take a chairlift to the top of the hill and do it all over again. The attraction cost £250,000, a huge sum at the time. It proved so successful that the Park recouped its investment within 18 months.

Penscynor also developed a canny marketing strategy. Any visitor who travelled to the site by car was given a sticker to display on their vehicle. That sticker, emblazoned with the distinctive animal logo of Penscynor, became a common sight on cars across the country.

“I don’t think there was any car in South Wales that didn't have one of those stickers,” said Jay Curtis, a regular visitor to the Park who still owns his original sticker. 

“On every car I’ve ever owned, the sticker has followed me on that journey. So I might have sold the car, it might have gone on to a new owner, or even the scrap, but the car sticker has come with me on every single car I’ve owned since.”

In the 1990s, Penscynor’s fortunes began to wane. Competition from other attractions, the constant unpredictability of the Welsh weather and the introduction of new trading laws allowing shops to open on a Sunday, gradually drew visitors away from the Park.

Although footfall was down, the cost of running the zoo continued to rise: energy costs, vet bills, staff wages, food for the animals - the list went on.

In 1998, Penscynor closed its doors and never reopened. It was the end of an era. The birds and animals were eventually rehoused. Today, all that remains of the zoo are a handful of ruins slowly decaying in the woods.

Idris Hale died in 2001, but his grandson Jonathan is proud of his grandfather’s legacy.

“It was a remarkable thing that he built. To create Penscynor Wildlife Park and to give so many people so much happiness is incredible.

"I have a head full of memories and a heart filled with joy."

You can see more on this story in Penscynor: Life on the Wild Side on Sunday 5th November at 7:30pm on ITV Wales. Catch up online afterwards.