Abandoned Wales

Beneath the mountains of Snowdonia in northwest Wales, an empire of slate lies silent.

At its peak, one in three roofing slates laid anywhere on earth came from the Welsh slate quarries of Gwynedd. The vast terraced workings of Dinorwic and Penrhyn - among the largest industrial excavations of the nineteenth century - reshaped the landscape of Wales. Beneath them, well over a hundred kilometres of underground workings ran through the Ordovician rock. Within them, a Welsh-speaking community of rockmen and dressers sustained a distinctive cultural life - the caban, the eisteddfod, and verse recited underground during the midday break.

The quarries closed. The communities contracted. The industrial ruins remained.

Wagons still stand where the last shift left them. Machinery at the Gilfach Ddu workshops has not moved since Dinorwic quarry closed in 1969. In the underground chambers of Cwmorthin, tools and tramway equipment survive as if the industry simply stopped rather than decayed. Above the quarry landscape, the dry-stone walls of Iron Age hillforts still follow the contours of the same mountains later transformed by Victorian industry.

Abandoned Wales investigates how this remarkable landscape was created - and why it looks the way it does.

Drawing on archaeological surveys prepared for the UNESCO World Heritage inscription of the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales (2021), quarry records at the Gwynedd Archives, oral history collections from the Welsh Folk Museum, and the scholarship of industrial archaeology, the book traces the full arc of the Welsh slate industry from its eighteenth-century rise to the closures of the twentieth century. It explores the ghost villages, prehistoric monuments, Celtic folklore traditions, and post-industrial communities left behind when the industry disappeared.

• The rise of the Welsh slate industry - how Penrhyn, Dinorwic and the Ffestiniog quarries built a global industrial empire in the mountains of Gwynedd
• Quarry towns - Blaenau Ffestiniog, Bethesda and Abergynolwyn, and the Welsh-speaking communities shaped by the industry
• The collapse - the Penrhyn Strike of 1900-1903, foreign competition and the long decline of slate
• Ghost settlements - abandoned villages and landscapes across Wales and the industrial ruins of Snowdonia
• Frozen infrastructure - the underground chambers of Cwmorthin and the workshops of Gilfach Ddu
• Celtic folklore - the coblynau, the mine spirits said to inhabit the darkness of the mountain
• Ancient landscapes - Tre'r Ceiri hillfort, Bryn Celli Ddu and the prehistoric sites of Anglesey
• Parys Mountain - four thousand years of copper mining on a single hill

This is not a guide to picturesque ruins. It is a historical investigation into how an industrial civilisation was built in the mountains of Snowdonia, sustained for two centuries, and then lost - leaving behind one of the most remarkable industrial landscapes in Britain.

The third volume in the Forgotten Britain series, exploring the abandoned infrastructure and hidden landscapes of the United Kingdom.