Mountain Ash
Town · 12,715 residents
55Good
Good · better than 1 in 10 towns
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Food & drink scores 38, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Mountain Ash
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Mountain Ash a good place to live?
Mountain Ash scores 55/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
No topic reaches "very good" (70+); its best is affordability (68).
It scores lowest on food & drink (38).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Mountain Ash in Wales, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Mountain Ash
Terraced rows climb the valley sides here in long Victorian streets, the kind of streetscape that tells you this was built for coal and never quite rebuilt itself around anything else. It's a town of narrow high street shops, chapels turned into whatever chapels get turned into, and a skyline that's more hillside than skyscraper. You notice the age of the building stock before you notice much else — solid, terraced, unmistakably valleys.
The number that matters most for the practical stuff is the price: a median house sale around £102,500, against a Welsh average nearer £208,000, and even against Rhondda Cynon Taf itself you're looking at homes selling for close to 17% less than the county norm. Almost everything that changes hands is a freehold terrace — 68 of the 84 recent sales — so a For Sale board here is nearly always advertising the same thing: a two-up two-down with no service charge and no leasehold small print. Getting around doesn't depend on a car alone; Mountain Ash has its own station along with Fernhill and Penrhiwceiber close by on the same line, useful if you're commuting toward Cardiff. Schooling is dominated by primaries — Caegarw, Darrenlas, Miskin, Pengeulan, Glenboi and Penrhiwceibr among them — feeding into Mountain Ash Comprehensive, a genuinely large secondary at over 900 pupils, so there's no shortage of school places even if the individual Estyn judgements aren't part of this picture.