It's all about the slate

Last day in Llanberis today, once again Snowdon is under a cloud so walking up it, or really any of the high mountains, was out again. We're not actually sure if we've seen Snowdon itself at all on this trip ! Instead we took a wander around town, and once you slide around behind the huge 'Electric Mountain' visitors center and tacky tour departure building which dominates the main A road, you actually find some pretty cool stuff.



One of the most dominating features of the landscape here is this slate quarry cut into the side of the hill. 39 decks of cutting with some being over a mile long, there are also huge slag heaps left around the place from the quarrying exercise.



This first photo was taken from the top of this, the local castle ruin, which is of course made of large blocks of slate.





The next few hours disappeared as we worked our way around the National Slate Museum . Once again proving my rule that the best things in the UK are the free things, this rates among the most interesting things we've done all trip. The museum itself is all built around the old (but for the slate quarry new) HQ. The slate itself was cut and dressed by some 3000 men up on the quarry decks itself, from where it was transported on a system of hundreds of miles of narrow gauge railway on some 12,000 individual carts (like the one above).

The HQ was all about supporting those men and the infrastructure they needed, there were some 20 carpenters cutting logs into boards, cutting boards into railway sleepers and slate carts. There was a large foundry where every metal part for the whole operation was first drawn, then patterned in wood (only three patterners for the life of the quarry - three generations of the same family) and then cast and finished onsite. The whole place was powered by a huge 54ft diameter waterwheel until the 1920s, and then by a water-powered turbine until the day it shut in August 1969. It's quite striking to see such a big industrial operation which had to be invented, designed and created onsite, by hand, using largely local materials (except for the Canadian yellow pine that makes up all the buildings), all pre electricity and automation.