A grim, chilly slate mine now yields tourist money

By Kathy Shorr, Globe Correspondent, 01/05/03

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		Printable version How to get there Blaenau Ffestiniog lies on the A470 road in Snowdonia National Park in North Wales, 30 miles from Llandudno and 20 miles from Harlech. The Llechwedd Slate Caverns are just north of Blaenau Ffestiniog, with an entrance off the A470. The Ffestiniog Railway runs between Blaenau Festinoig and Portmadog, with stations at the entrances to both towns. What to do Llechwedd Slate Caverns Blaenau Ffestiniog 011-44-1766 83 03 06 www.llechwedd.co.uk Adults about $10, children $7. Open daily March to September: 10 a.m.-6 p.m., October to February: 10-5. Ffestiniog Railway Harbour Station, Porthmadog 011-44-1766 516024 www.festrail.co.uk One-way fares are about $22 for adults, $18 for senior citizens. Children under 16 travel for half price, with one free fare for each child accompanied by an adult or senior citizen. Free admission for children under 5. Dogs and bicycles can also travel along for $4. Trains are wheelchair accessible. The train's scheduled times and stops vary with season and weather, so check.

BLAENAU FFESTINIOG, Wales — To imagine this town, try crossing Charles Dickens's industrial England with the stripped-mined hills of Appalachia. It's smack in the middle of the gorgeous Snowdonia National Park, and yet one of the ugliest spots you'll find in north Wales.

The air itself seems permeated with a dark gray cast. This is major slate country, and some of the world's biggest slate mines used to be here. In the 1880s, the Oakley quarries in Blaenau Ffestiniog had 1,700 workers and produced up to 60,000 tons of slate each year. The slate caverns ran 26 floors underground, with 50 miles of narrow tracks running through them to carry the slate to the surface.

The slate history of the town is everywhere. Stone houses are roofed in slate, stone steps leading through town are slate, and shops feature slate products in their windows. But most striking is the dead landscape that surrounds the town. The hills are lifeless piles of gray rubble. Slate is found in narrow veins between other kinds of rock, and the traditional method of extracting it was to dump the 90 percent of rock that wasn't needed. So enormous mounds of waste rock now cover the land.

A gorgeous place it is not, which makes it all the stranger that Blaenau Ffestiniog holds some of the biggest tourist attractions in Wales.

This is not due to some reverse aesthetic at work. As cheaper materials replaced slate for building, sales and profits dropped, many quarries closed, and others used outdated methods of production rather than invest in new equipment and techniques. By the late 1960s, most of the quarries had shut down.

Goodbye industry, hello tourism. In 1972, the Llechwedd slate caverns, just outside Blaenau Ffestiniog, became the first ever open to anyone but the occasional famous visitor like Prime Minister Lloyd George, and the miners themselves. Now the caverns draw scores of visitors every year.

Visitors can take two ways down into the Llechwedd caverns, where more than 600 men once worked. There's a shorter tour, via a battery-electric tramway that travels through an 1846 tunnel and stops at various points for displays and descriptions of how the slate was extracted from between layers of chert.

The longer trip is via a small railway that drops almost 400 feet down a steep incline, making it the steepest rail track in Great Britain. Someone hands you a yellow plastic hard hat before you step into one of the tiny cars, and wearing it seems silly until the first time you whack your head trying to climb in or out. The hats also save people from almost certain head trauma as they walk through the caverns. Most of the way, the only illumination is that approximating the candlelight the miners used to work by, and the passageways have low openings you sometimes don't see till you walk into them.

The dim caverns are refreshingly tableau free: no Disneylike figurine miners, no laser light shows. They're also heat-free: a steady 48 degrees or so, with water dripping on you periodically and puddles on the floor. It feels colder than it sounds. In each cavern "room," there's a taped narration by an actor in the guise of one of the 19th-century miners, telling the story of Victorian life underground. Some people might find it hokey, but it beats those impersonal educational brochures and videos. The disembodied voice, hanging in the dark, gives the small details that re-create a world. You're standing there, damp, chilled, and increasingly claustrophobic, watching a few tiny pinpoints of light in a corner. The voice tells how the new young miners often didn't have enough money to buy candles, so they had to share the light of someone else's candle to work, until they earned enough to purchase their own. And suddenly it seems even darker, and wetter, and colder.

The caverns are only one part of the re-created Llechwedd experience. There's a Victorian village where you can buy candy made using Victorian recipes, see the old bank window with its display of now-extinct half-pennies and shillings, or view late 19th-century privies (flushed — where else? — into the river).

But these feel like set pieces after being down in the quarries. A more interesting move is to make your way back into town and take the narrow gauge Ffestiniog Railway, which runs almost 14 miles from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coastal town of Porthmadog.

Sure, it's primarily a tourist thing now, but this is the actual railway that was used to transport the slate from the quarries. Before the railroad, the slate was hauled in carts by pack animals down to the River Dwyryd, loaded onto river boats, then transferred onto sailing ships at the coast.

In 1836, the new Ffestiniog Railway changed that. Though still drawn by horses, the wagons now ran on 23-inch-wide tracks, the same gauge the wagons used in the quarries. The gauge was narrow enough to be able to handle sharp mountain curves, but still wide enough for horses to walk between the tracks. No one thought steam engines could be built to handle such a narrow gauge, so the train simply ran downhill by gravity from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coast. When it reached Porthmadog, the slate was unloaded, and horses pulled the empty wagons back uphill.

In 1860, the Ffestiniog finally got a steam engine, and became the first narrow-gauge steam-powered railway in the world, attracting so many visitors that by the 1920s, the trains carried as many cars of tourists as of slate. The decline of the slate industry, new transport by truck, and no money for track repair eventually closed the line in the 1950s, but a preservation society formed to restore it. Hardy volunteers cut their way through rock and peat in the mountains to repair the lines, and the narrow-gauge route from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog reopened in 1982.

The spectacular ride, just over an hour, carries you through wild, fog-shrouded mountains and valleys, past thick oak forests and mountain lakes. The cars hug the track tenaciously, which is good, since there are sharp turns and a number of spots with precipitous cliff drops on either side, like a landlocked California Highway One. One 11-year-old girl who rode next to me, a charmer from nearby Manchester with long brown hair and a gorgeous smile, kept her sparkling blue eyes closed for several portions of the ride. She laughed about her squeamishness: "I wouldn't go in the caverns at all!" she exclaimed. But, like many on the train, she sat with nose pressed against the window when the train slowed to a stop midway through the ride, to see an old steam locomotive pulling a train from the other direction.

As with the caverns, the train cars have no heat, and after a round-trip journey, the cold seeps into the bones as much as it did underground. The seats are hard and narrow, the aisles barely wide enough for one person. But who would complain about such temporary discomforts? After even a short day of traveling in the shoes of those vanished generations who labored here, you're more likely to feel grateful for the tiny window into their lives. You'll also look forward to a long, hot bath.