A programme looking at tuberculosis survivors who were treated at a sanatorium in the Brecon Beacons will air tonight on ITV Wales.

Children of Craig y Nos hears the accounts of survivors who spent years at the castle trying to recover from the bacterial infection which has cost hundreds of thousands of people their live.

Presented by Ellie Pitt, the short documentary looks at those who had TB and were sent to the hospital for treatment between the 1920s and when it stopped treating TB patients in 1959.

The TV show comes from a book which was co-written by a former patient and TB survivor Ann Shaw who was originally from the Crickhowell area but now lives in Stirling, Scotland and medical historian Dr Carole Reeves.

Ann had been living in a farm near Crickhowell when she was diagnosed with TB - despite being told she’d only be in the hospital three days, she was a patient for four years and a day.

In the TV programme, which will be shown tonight at 8pm, she said she was in disbelief at the change in environment.

She said: “I’d left a warm bedroom in the farm and there [Craig y Nos] there was no glass in the windows so the wind just howled through.

“There were no windows there and French doors there and there was just the noise of the wind and girls coughing. They were all coughing.

“I was put in this bed and my mother brought in a big box of things and the nurse took one look and said ‘you don’t need all that’. I said I wanted my dolls and she said “you’re too old for dolls” and I started crying.

“I was allowed to keep one doll. She had blue eyes and I wasn’t allowed to touch her - she was up on the mantle piece and there she stayed the whole time.”

The idea for the book started as Ann visited Wales and hoped to do some digging into the history around Craig y Nos from the time she was a patient, however she struggled to find anything.

Following an advert in the local press, she received 150 case histories about the lost 50 years of Craig y Nos.

While Craig y Nos - which is more famously known as the estate of the celebrated opera singer Adelina Patti who was the “Madonna of her time” - is now a loved wedding venue, it remained a hospital until the late 1960s.

The ITV Wales programme revealed that the only indication of the castle’s past as a TB hospital is in the upper two floors of the castle - far from the eyes of regular wedding guests.

While there was no moving footage from the time that it treated TB patients, Children of Craig y Nos shows footage from similar TB units around the UK as well as modern footage of the castle where it interviews remaining survivors.

The show also revealed that 90 per cent of deaths of people aged 15-24 in the 1940s were as a result of TB which effects its victims' lungs and bones.

In the show, it’s revealed that 100-years-ago parents were afraid of places like Craig y Now as they were deemed places that people went to die as they were the last chance at recovery for TB victims.

Patients were strapped to their beds for forced bed rest and put outside on the balcony or near open windows for fresh air in an attempt for them to get better as “nobody knew any better”.

Other TB survivors featured in the programme said they have memories of snow on their beds as the only time they weren’t put outside was when it was raining.

The survivors featured in the programme - which also includes Sylvia Moore from Llanelli, Roger Beynon from Ammanford, Graham Canning and Caroline Boyce - also spoke of lost childhood, the awareness of death around them and how it impacted them individually - whether positively or negatively.

Watch The Children of Craig y Nos at 8pm tonight on ITV Wales for the full accounts from the survivors and how it effected their lives.