Slate industry in Wales
The slate industry in Wales dates back to the time of the occupation of Britain by the Roman Empire . Slate roof shingles were already used in the construction of a Roman camp near what is now Caernarfon . Until the beginning of the 18th century, this industry was of little importance to the Welsh economy. However, during the industrialization of the 19th century, slate mining and processing became the most important industry in Wales alongside coal mining . Towards the end of the 19th century, the most important mining regions were in north-west Wales. Of thePenrhyn and Dinorwic quarries near Llanberis were the two largest slate quarries in the world at the time. Blaenau Ffestiniog's Oakeley mine , which mined the slate underground, was the largest slate mine in the world. Slate was and is mainly used to cover roofs, as well as flooring, as well as for worktops and tombstones .
In July 2021, UNESCO added the “Slate Landscape of North West Wales” to the list of World Heritage Sites . The site consists of the six selected components "Penrhyn Slate Quarry and Bethesda, and the Ogwen Valley to Port Penrhyn", "Dinorwig Slate Quarry Mountain Landscape", "Nantlle Valley Slate Quarry Landscape", "Gorseddau and Prince of Wales Slate Quarries, Railways and Mill "," Ffestiniog: its Slate Mines and Quarries, 'city of slates' and Railway to Porthmadog "and" Bryneglwys Slate Quarry, Abergynolwyn Village and the Talyllyn Railway ". The International Union of Geological Sciences had already designated Welsh slate as a Global Heritage Stone Resource in 2018 .
overview
Until the end of the 18th century, slate was usually extracted in small quantities by groups of independent quarry workers. They paid a fee to the landowner for the mining right and transported the slate to the ports in horse carts. From there the slate was transported by ship to England , Ireland and occasionally to France . After the British government lifted tariffs on slate in 1831 and the construction of narrow-gauge railways made it easier for the slate to be transported to ports, the industry began to expand rapidly. Towards the end of the 19th century, the quarries were usually operated directly by the landowners.
Slate mining dominated the economy of north west Wales especially in the second half of the 19th century. In the rest of Wales this industry was of far less importance. In 1898 about 17,000 workers were engaged in the quarrying of slate. The production volumes at that time were 500,000 tons of slate per year. A strike in the Penrhyn quarry from 1900 to 1903 marked the turning point in the importance of this branch of industry. During the First World War , the number of people employed in this branch of industry decreased significantly. The Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s and World War II led to the closure of most of the smaller quarries. When other materials such as clay tiles increasingly replaced slate shingles as a building material for roofing, most of the large slate quarries also closed in the 1960s and 1970s. Slate shingles are now only manufactured to a limited extent.
Deposits
The slate deposits of Wales were formed during three geological periods: Cambrian , Ordovician and Silurian . The deposits that formed during the Cambrian run southwest from Conwy to near Criccieth. This slate was quarried in the Penrhyn and Dinorwig quarries and in the Nantlle Valley . Smaller extensions of the occurrence of this time period are also in other places, for example near Anglesey. The deposits that arose during the Ordovician run in a south-westerly direction from Betws-y-Coed to Porthmadog; they were mined in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Another band of Ordovician slate runs further south and extends from Llangynnog to Aberdyfi . This slate was mainly mined in the Corris region and in some places in south-west Wales, especially in Pembrokeshire. The Silurian deposits lie further east in the valley of the River Dee and in the area of Machynlleth.
Slate mining begins
The use of slate to build and cover roofs dates back to Roman times. When the Roman camp at Caernarfon was built, clay bricks were initially used, but slate was increasingly used for roofs and floors in later construction phases. Since the next slate quarry was about eight kilometers from the camp, its use is probably not due to the fact that this building material was available on site. During the Middle Ages, shale was mined on a small scale in several locations in Wales. The Cilgwyn Quarry in the Nantlle Valley dates back to the 12th century and is believed to be the oldest in Wales. The first evidence of slate mining near the later Penrhyn quarry is available for the year 1413: the household books of a landowner based there record that several of his tenants were paid ten pence for the production of 5,000 slate shingles each. The Aberllefenni Slate quarry could date back to the 14th century. The first written evidence of its existence comes from the early 16th century and shows that a country estate in the area was covered with shingles from this quarry.
The transport problems caused by the heavy weight of the slate meant that the slate was normally used in the vicinity of the quarries. However, it was transported by ship very early on. This is evidenced by a poem by the poet Guto'r Glyn from the 15th century. In it he asks a cleric to send him a shipload of slate to Rhuddlan from Aberogwen, which is near Bangor , so that he can cover his house in Henllan near Denbigh . The wreckage of a ship carrying finished shingles as cargo, believed to date from the 16th century, was found in Menai Strait . There is evidence of a small export trade of slate shingles to Ireland in the second half of the 16th century. The shingles were shipped from Beaumaris and Caernarfon. From Penrhyn in 1713 a total of 415,000 shingles were sent to Dublin in 14 shiploads. The shingles were first transported to the ports with pack horses and later with carts. Women often worked as carters in this otherwise exclusively male-dominated branch of the economy.
Until the late 18th century, the slate was usually mined in a large number of small quarries by working groups, each of which consisted of only a few local men. For this they usually paid a rent or fee to the landowner. The quarry workers at Cilgwyn, a quarry on a crown domain, were exempt from this payment. In a letter from 1738, John Paynter, who represented the Penrhyn quarry, complained that Cilgwyn shingles could be offered more cheaply because of this and that this would affect the sales of Penrhyn shingles. Penrhyn introduced larger slate shingles between 1730 and 1740 and gave names to the shingle sizes common in this quarry, which, like the formats designated with them, gradually became the standard. At 24 × 12 inches (60.96 × 30.48 centimeters), duchesses were the largest shingles, while countesses , ladies and doubles were the next sizes. Singles were the commercially available shingles with the smallest dimensions.
Growth phase 1760-1830
The landowners initially demanded an annual rent of a few shillings from the workers who extracted slate from the quarries on their land, as well as a share of the proceeds from the shingles sold. The first landowner to organize slate mining on his own lands was Richard Pennant , who later became nobility and owned the Penrhyn manor. In 1782 the men who worked in the quarries of his land were either bought their rights or were driven out. In the same year Pennant opened a new quarry in Caebraichycafn near Bethesda. This developed into the largest slate quarry in the world. In 1792 500 workers were already employed in the quarry, who mined 15,000 tons of slate annually. In 1787, the quarry in Dinorwig was initially taken over by a single large joint venture; from 1809, the landowner Thomas Assheton Smith from Vaynol began to take the management of this quarry into his own hands. The Cilgwyn quarries were taken over by a company in 1800. This concentrated the previously scattered three mining sites in a single, large quarry. The first steam engine used in slate mining was a pump that was installed in the Hafodlas quarry in the Nantlletal in 1807. Most of the quarries, however, used hydropower to power their machines.
Wales was extracting 26,000 tons of shale as early as 1793, more than half of the 45,000 tons of total production in the whole of Great Britain. As of July 1794, the British government imposed a 20 percent tax on all domestically sold clapboard that was transported through coastal ports. This tax put the Welsh quarry operators at a significant competitive disadvantage, as shale extracted in England could mostly be transported via the well-developed network of canals. The tax was not levied on slate exported abroad, however, and Welsh quarry operators increasingly began to ship to the United States . The Penrhyn quarry grew continuously during this time. In 1799 mining methods were improved by moving large "galleries" into the slate slope. These were terraces with a depth of 9 to 21 meters, which made it possible to dismantle on several levels. From 1801 the shingles were removed from the quarry using a horse-drawn train, the Penrhyn Quarry Railway . This extension of a railway that had existed since 1798 was one of the first railway lines in Great Britain. The shingles were shipped via Port Penrhyn , which the now ennobled quarry operator Richard Pennant had built in 1790. The Nantlle Railway opened in 1828 and used horse-drawn wagons to transport slate from several quarries in the Nantlle Valley to the port of Caernarfon. The Padarn Railway of the Dinorwic quarry, which went into operation in 1842 , ran from Gilfach Ddu near Llanberis to Port Dinorwic near Y Felinheli and replaced a horse-drawn tram from 1824.
The height of slate mining in 1831–1878
Blaenau Ffestiniog
In 1831 the government lifted the tariff on slate that was transported through the coastal ports. Since the tax on clay bricks was not revoked until 1833, this led to a strong expansion of the slate industry. The Ffestiniog Railway was built between 1833 and 1836 to transport slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coastal town of Porthmadog and transfer it to ships there. The railway line ran from the quarry with a slight gradient, so that loaded wagons rolled to the port without any further drive. Horses pulled the empty wagons back up. This transport system contributed significantly to the expansion of the quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog, as the shingles first had to be transported to Maentwrog , then transferred to boats that transported the shingles down the Dwyryd river until they are reloaded into larger ships at the mouth of the river could. In 1846 another slate deposit was found along the road to Betws-y-Coed . The Llechwedd quarry was founded here. The major fire that destroyed Hamburg in large parts in 1842 caused the demand for slate to rise sharply. Germany developed into one of the most important sales markets for the Welsh quarries, and slate from this region was mainly used for the reconstruction of Hamburg. The Cologne Cathedral and factories of the German Edison Society for Applied Electricity in Berlin were also covered with slate from the quarry in Oakeley .
Railway as an expansion factor
The improvement of transport options through the use of the railroad contributed to the expansion of the slate industry. Some routes were built solely for the purpose of being able to transport the slate from the quarries to the ports.
In 1842, the Padarn Railway was the first quarry railway to use steam locomotives . The transport of slate to the ports was made even easier when the London and North Western Railway began connecting the ports of Penrhyn and Dinorwic to their main line in 1852. The Corris Railway was built in 1859 as the horse-powered Corris, Machynlleth & River Dovey Tramroad to connect the slate quarries around Corris and Aberllefenni with the quays in the Dyfi Estuary . The Ffestiniog Railway switched to steam locomotives in 1863, and the Talyllyn Railway opened in 1866 to transport the slate that was being mined in the Bryneglwys quarries above the village of Abergynolwyn . Bryneglwys became one of the largest quarries in central Wales. 30 percent of the production in the Corris region was dismantled here, and more than 300 workers were employed in the quarry. The opening of the Cardigan Railway took place in 1873. When the line was built, the transport of slates was one of the main reasons. The Glogue quarry was then able to employ 80 men.
mechanization
At the same time as the introduction of the railroad as a means of transport, the mining process began to become increasingly mechanized. Leading here were above all the quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog, whose Ordovician slate was less brittle than the Cambrian slate, which was mined further north. Shingle mills developed mainly between 1840 and 1860. A single conveyor line ran along the building and combined processes as varied as sawing to size and cladding the shingles. In 1859, JW Greaves invented the Greaves saw table, on which slate blocks could be sawed. The manufacture of thin roof shingles, however, turned out to be a process that could not be mechanized very much. Roof shingles were still made with a hammer and chisel. From 1860 onwards, a market for thicker and larger slabs of slate also developed. These were used for floors, tombstones and billiard tables , among other things .
The large quarries turned out to be very profitable. The Mining Journal estimated the net income of the Penrhyn Quarries at £ 100,000 annually in 1859 and that of the Dinorwig Quarries at £ 70,000 annually. From 1860 onwards, the prices that could be obtained for slate slabs also increased. With the expansion of the quarries, the towns in their vicinity also grew. For example, the population of the parish of Ffestiniog rose from 732 in 1801 to 11,274 in 1881.
In Wales, 350,000 tons of shale were mined in the late 1860s. More than 100,000 tons came from the Bethesda region, with the Penrhyn quarry as the most important mining site. Blaenau Ffestiniog produced almost as much, and 80,000 tons came from the Dinorwig quarries. The Nantlle Valley's annual production was 40,000 tonnes, while the rest of Wales, outside the main shale mining centers, only produced 20,000 tonnes a year. In the late 1870s, Welsh mining volumes were around 450,000 tons. In contrast, only 50,000 tons of slate were mined in the rest of Great Britain, including Ireland. In 1882, 92 percent of Britain's total mining volume came from Wales. The large quarries in Penrhyn and Dinorwig alone extracted almost 50 percent of the total annual amount. Alun Richards underlines the importance of the slate industry to Wales by pointing out that in the mid-19th century almost half of the Welsh gross national product was obtained from slate mining. As an economic factor, it was only comparable to coal mining. In north-west Wales, the slate was even completely dominant.
A number of other branches of the economy also benefited from the flourishing of the slate industry. This included shipbuilding in a number of Welsh port cities. At least 201 ships were built in Porthmadog between 1836 and 1880. A supplier industry for the quarries was also established. The best known is the mechanical engineering company De Winton, which was based in Caernarfon. De Winton built a complete production line for the Dinorwig quarry in 1870, the machinery of which was powered by the largest overturned waterwheel in Great Britain. It was more than fifteen meters in diameter.
The workers
Only half of the workforce in a typical quarry were quarry workers. These usually worked in small groups of three, four, six or eight men, known as bargain gangs . A bargain gear with four workers consisted usually of two Rockmen that broke out the slate blocks of the rock, a splitter or splitter , the processed blocks using a hammer and chisel, and a dresser , that can handle the cut slates. A boy who learned the quarry work was called rybelwr . He offered to help the bargain gangs who worked in the galleries , and occasionally the workers would give him a block of slate to practice splitting on.
Bad Rockmen ( overburden men ) were the workers who broke out the unworkable slate from the walls of the quarry. They usually worked together in groups of three people. Rubbish men (garbage collectors) removed the spoil from the quarries and built the large gravel heaps that surrounded the quarries. One ton of salable slate could account for up to 30 tons of unsalable rubble.
The Bad rockmen and the Rubbish men were usually paid for every ton they removed from the quarry. The actual quarry workers were paid according to a more complicated system. Part of the pay was based on the number of slates a group produced. However, this number was also dependent on the quality of the slate in the section allocated to the workers. The men therefore also received a so-called poundage , a share of the monetary value of the slate. This share was set for each quarry section. If the section was productive, the workers received a lower poundage and a higher one if only a few slate slabs for sale could be obtained from a quarry section. On every first Monday of the month, the conditions for slate mining were agreed between the workers and the management of the quarry. This day was therefore called the bargain letting day . The men had to pay for ropes and chains as well as for sharpening and repairing the tools themselves. The men received a weekly advance on their wages. Billing took place at the end of the month, the day of the big pay . If the conditions in the quarry were poor, the men occasionally owed the owner of the quarry money at the end of the month. This wage system partially existed until after the end of the Second World War.
The wage system meant that the quarry workers did not see themselves as wage workers, but as independent entrepreneurs. Trade unions therefore developed very slowly. Conflicts between the quarry management and the workers mostly revolved around the setting of the poundage and the number of days off. The North Wales Quarrymen's Union (NWQMU) was founded in 1874 - that same year there were clashes in both Dinorwig and Penrhyn. In both cases the quarry workers were able to prevail; in May 1878 the union already had 8,368 members. Morgan Richards, one of the founding members of the union, described the conditions under which he began working in the quarries forty years earlier in 1876:
“I remember that time well […] when my father, our neighbors and I got up very early in the morning, had to walk five miles before six in the morning and had to walk back the same distance in the evening. [We worked] hard from six to six. Lunch was cold coffee or a cup of buttermilk with a slice of bread and butter. Some of us had families with maybe five, eight or ten children with a salary of between 12 and 16 shillings a week to support. "
Strikes, competing products and the decline of the slate industry 1879–1938
Labor unrest
The almost twenty-year growth phase ended in 1879. The slate industry was hit by a recession that lasted until the 1890s. The quarry owners responded with stricter rules. Among other things, it was made more difficult for workers to get days off. The relationship between quarry workers and management was hampered, among other things, by the fact that they did not share language , religion or their respective political views. The owners and managers in the quarries spoke English , belonged to the Anglican Church , and were close to the Tories . The quarry workers, on the other hand, spoke Welsh , were predominantly nonconformists and saw themselves more represented by the Liberal Party . In negotiations between quarry owners and workers, the use of interpreters was usually necessary. In October 1885 disputes over canceled vacation days in Dinorwig led to a lockout of workers, which lasted until February 1886. At the Penrhyn quarry, too, relations between management and workers deteriorated after new management tried to enforce more stringent management methods. This culminated in September 1896 with the expulsion of 57 members of the union committee and 17 other workers by management and a subsequent workers' strike that lasted eleven months. Ultimately, the workers were compelled to resume their work and to accept the conditions of the quarry management.
In 1892 slate sales began to rise again. The quarries near Blaenau Ffestiniog and in the Nantlle Valley benefited from this in particular. Slate mining in Wales peaked at over 500,000 tonnes in 1898. 17,000 people were employed in this branch of industry at that time. A second lockout or strike at the Penrhyn quarry began on November 22, 1900 and lasted for three years. The causes for this dispute were complex. One of the contributing factors was that parts of the quarry had been left to subcontractors, which considerably weakened the workers' negotiating position for their poundage . However, the union's strike fund was insufficiently filled and the strike years were associated with great economic hardship for the 2,800 workers. The owner Lord Penrhyn resumed work in the quarry in June 1901 and 500 of the workers returned. They were called traitors by those who remained on strike. It was not until November 1903 that the strike was finally settled. The returning workers, however, had to accept the conditions set by Lord Penrhyn. However, many of those who held leadership roles during the strike were not reinstated. Most of them left the region to look for work elsewhere. The labor disputes long left bitter feelings in the Bethesda region.
Decline in degradation
The failure of the Penrhyn quarry during the strike period led to short-term supply bottlenecks. The prices for slate rose as a result, but imports from abroad increasingly made up for the bottleneck. France delivered 40,000 tons of slate to Great Britain in 1898; in 1902 it was already 105,000 tons. After 1903 a recession began again in the slate industry, which led to wage cuts and layoffs. The decisive factor was, above all, progress in the production of bricks, which made clay bricks cheaper. Eight of the Ffestiniog quarries closed between 1908 and 1913. The Oakeley quarry laid off 350 workers. R. Merfyn Jones wrote:
“The impact of this recession on the quarry counties has been deep and painful. Unemployment and emigration became constant companions in the communities that mainly lived on slate. Economic hardship was widespread. In the quarries, working hours and wages have been cut or they have been closed entirely. Between 1906 and 1913 the number of people employed in the Ffestiniog quarries fell by 28 percent, and in Dyffryn Nantlle their number fell even more dramatically by 38 percent. "
The effects of the First World War hit the slate industry, which was already ailing economically. Blaenau Ffestiniog, for which the German Reich had been an important sales market, was particularly hard hit . Cilgwyn, the oldest Welsh quarry, closed in 1914 but was later reopened. In 1917 the British government declared slate mining to be a non-war industry. A number of the remaining quarries were closed for the remainder of the war. The demand for new houses at the end of the war caused a new upswing for a short time. In the slate mines of Blaenau Ffestiniog almost as much slate was extracted in 1927 as in 1913, but the amount extracted in the open pit was well below the pre-war level. The global economic crisis in the 1930s again led to a decline in production. Exports fell particularly sharply.
The mechanization process that had started around the middle of the 19th century had continued. Electricity had increasingly replaced water power and steam engines. The Llechwedd quarry set up its power station as early as 1891. The use of electric saws and other tools reduced the hard physical labor, but produced more fine dust and led to an increase in the number of cases of silicosis among workers . The number of fatal accidents at work caused by explosions also increased. A government investigation in 1893 found that the fatal accident rate among slate mine workers was 3.23 per thousand, higher than that of coal mine workers.
End of large-scale slate mining
The outbreak of World War II was accompanied by a further decline in slate sales volumes. Parts of the Manod or (in Welsh) Cwt-y-Bugail mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog were used to house the art treasures of the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery . The number of people employed in the slate industry fell from 7,589 in 1939 to 3,520 at the end of the war. In 1945 only 70,000 tons of slate were mined annually. With fewer than 20 quarries, the number had halved since the beginning of the war. The Nantlle Valley was particularly hard hit, with only 350 workers left in 1945, compared with 1000 in 1937. The demand for slate shingles has steadily declined as the use of clay tiles for roofing roofs has become more common. At the same time, imports from Portugal , France and Italy increased steadily. The repair of the bombed buildings caused a brief increase in the demand for slate shingles, but the use of slate for new buildings was generally prohibited. The ban was not lifted until 1949.
In 1958 the total slate quarrying was 54,000 tons, in 1970 it was only 22,000. Again a number of quarries were closed. After almost 200 years of operation, the Diffwys quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog stopped working in 1955. In 1963 the nearby quarries at Votty and Bowydd closed. In 1969, the Dinorwig quarry stopped working and more than 300 quarry workers lost their jobs. The following year, the Dorothea Quarry in the Nantlle Valley and the Braichgoch Slate Mine also announced their closure. The Oakeley mine in Blaenau Ffestiniog ended mining in 1971 but was later reopened by a company. In 1972 North Wales employed less than 1,000 people in the slate industry. There were few alternative jobs in this part of Wales: the quarries closed led to high unemployment and a decline in population as young people moved to find work elsewhere. In 1979, after a long struggle, the British government recognized silicosis as an occupational disease affecting quarry workers, and workers who suffered it now received financial compensation. In the 1980s, the demand for slate shingles rose again. Shale was still being mined in the Oakeley, Llechwedd and Cwt-y-Bugail quarries. The Penrhyn quarry continued to produce most of the slate shingles. Lasers were now being used to split the slate blocks.
Slate industry in Wales today
Part of the Dinorwig quarry is now part of the Padarn Country Park. The National Slate Museum is housed in the quarry's old workshops. The museum's exhibits also include the huts where workers in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area lived during the Victorian era . In a multimedia show, the museum shows the way of life of the quarry workers and the working methods in slate mining.
In Blaenau Ffestiniog, too, old mining sites such as the Llechwedd Slate Caverns have been converted into a tourist attraction . Visitors can enter the mine there by train. The Braichgoch mines near Corris now serve as King Arthur's Labyrinth , a tourist attraction. In the former routes , visitors are told the legend of King Arthur , the stories of Mabinogion and Taliesin in a multimedia show . A center for alternative technology is now located in the Llwyngwern slate quarry near Machynlleth. A number of the railways that used to carry slate have been restarted such as the Ffestiniog Railway and the Talyllyn Railway .
Slate is still being mined in the Penrhyn Quarry, albeit on a much smaller scale than it was at the end of the 19th century. In 1995, 50 percent of all UK mined slate came from this quarry. Penrhyn is now part of Alfred McAlpine PLC, a company that also owns the quarries and mines in Oakeley, Cwt-y-Bugail and the Penyrorsedd quarry in the Nantlle Valley. The Greaves Welsh Slate Company in Llechwedd still makes shingles for roofing. The Berwyn quarry near Llangollen is also still working. Slate rubble was deliberately used in the construction of the Wales Millennium Center in Cardiff : purple slate from Penrhyn, blue from Cwt-y-Bugail, green from Nantlle, gray from Llechwedd and black from Corris.
Cultural influence
The slate industry in Wales was an industry in which Welsh was spoken almost exclusively . Most of the labor force in the main slate mining centers in Wales was local. Industry had a significant impact on Welsh culture. The caban , the hut in which the quarry workers gathered during their lunch break, was often the place of far-reaching discussions, which were often even formally recorded. The logs of the Caban in the Llechwedd mine near Blaenau Ffestiniog from 1908 to 1920 have been preserved . They document discussions on topics such as the movement to separate church and state (church disestablishment) , customs reforms and other current political issues. Eisteddfodau were held, poems recited and discussed, and most of the large quarries had their own marching band . The Oakeley Band was particularly well known. Burn estimates that around fifty influential men in Wales began their working lives as quarry workers.
A number of Welsh writers have made reference to the lives of quarry workers in their works. This applies, for example, to the novels by T. Rowland Hughes : Chwalfa , translated into English in 1954 under the title Out of their night , is set against the backdrop of the strike in the Penrhyn quarry. Y cychwyn , translated into English in 1969 under the title The beginning - tells of the apprenticeship of a young quarry worker. Several novels by Kate Roberts , the daughter of a quarry worker, describe the area around Rhosgadfan, where the slate mining was carried out on a smaller scale and most of the quarry workers were also part-time farmers. Her novel Traed mewn cyffion from 1936, translated into English under the title Feet in Chains in 2002, describes the struggle for survival of a family who lived from quarrying between 1880 and 1914. The 1935 film Y Chwarelwr ( The Quarryman ) was the first film to be produced in the Welsh language. The film shows different aspects of the life of a quarry worker who quarries shale in Blaenau Ffestiniog.
literature
- Michael Burn: The age of slate . Quarry Tours, Blaenau Ffestiniog, 1972, OCLC 498246731 .
- Alan Holmes: Slates from Abergynolwyn. The story of Bryneglwy's Slate Quarry . Gwynedd Archives Service, 1986, ISBN 0-901337-42-0 .
- Emrys Hughes, Aled Eames: Porthmadog ships . Gwynedd Archives Service, 1975.
- Gwynfor Pierce Jones, Alun John Richards: Cwm Gwyrfai. The quarries of the North Wales narrow gauge and the Welsh Highland railways. Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2004, ISBN 0-86381-897-8 .
- R. Merfyn Jones: The North Wales quarrymen, 1874-1922 . University of Wales Press, 1981, ISBN 0-7083-0776-0 (Studies in Welsh history 4).
- MJT Lewis, MC Williams: Pioneers of Ffestiniog slate . Snowdonia National Park Study Center, Plas Tan y Bwlch 1987, ISBN 0-9512373-1-4 .
- Jean Lindsay: A history of the North Wales slate industry . David and Charles, 1974, ISBN 0-7153-6264-X .
- D. Dylan Pritchard: The slate industry of north Wales. Statement of the case for a plan . Gwasg Gee, 1946.
- Alun John Richards: Slate Quarrying at Corris . Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 1994, ISBN 0-86381-279-1 .
- Alun John Richards: Slate quarrying in Wales . Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 1995, ISBN 0-86381-319-4 .
- Alun John Richards: The slate quarries of Pembrokeshire . Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 1998, ISBN 0-86381-484-0 .
- Alun John Richards: The slate regions of north and mid Wales and their railways . Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 1999, ISBN 0-86381-552-9 .
- Merfyn Williams: The slate industry . Shire Publications, 1991, ISBN 0-7478-0124-X .
Web links
- Dave Sallery: The slate industry of North and Mid Wales , penmorfa.com.
- Slatesite , llechicymru.info, with Quarry Proprietors - The Oakeley Dynasty
- National Slate Museum , museumwales.ac.uk
- AditNow - for the mine explorer and mining historian , aditnow.co.uk
- Mine-Explorer , mine-explorer.co.uk
Individual evidence
- ^ Jones, p. 72.
- ↑ a b Lindsay, p. 133.
- ^ The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales. UNESCO website, accessed July 29, 2021 .
- ^ The Newsletter of the Heritage Stones Subcommission, A Subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences, Nº5, p. 4; http://media.globalheritagestone.com/2019/01/HSS-newsletter-2018.pdf
- ↑ Richards 1995, pp. 10f.
- ↑ Lindsay p. 18. Slate was also used as a building material in the smaller Roman camp at Caer Llugwy.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 314.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 13.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 14.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 24.
- ↑ Port Penrhyn website. (No longer available online.) Port Penrhyn Port Authority, archived from the original on February 18, 2006 ; Retrieved September 6, 2006 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The packhorses that carried Penrhyn shingles to the harbors, for example, were usually led by girls, see Richards 1999, p. 19.
- ↑ Lindsay, pp. 29-30.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 36f.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 30.
- ↑ Richards 1995, pp. 16f.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 45.
- ↑ Richards, pp. 21f.
- ↑ Lewis, p. 5.
- ^ Williams, p. 16.
- ^ Williams, p. 5.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 91f.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 99.
- ^ Williams, p. 10.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 49f.
- ↑ a b Richards 1999, p. 15.
- ^ Lindsey, p. 117.
- ↑ Blaenau Ffestiniog was not a quarry in the strict sense of the word, as most of the slate was mined underground. These quarries were also commonly referred to as quarry in Great Britain ; Hughes, p. 23.
- ↑ Hughes, p. 31.
- ^ Peter Sager : Wales. Literature and politics, industry and landscape . DuMont, Cologne, 6th edition 1997. ISBN 3-7701-1407-8 . P. 371.
- ↑ Holmes, p. 13.
- ↑ Holmes, pp. 9 and 11.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 95.
- ↑ Williams, pp. 15f.
- ↑ Williams, pp. 16-19.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 121f.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 122.
- ↑ Richards 1995, pp. 115f.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 123.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 8.
- ↑ Hughes, p. 37.
- ^ Welsh Slate Museum website: The Water Wheel. (No longer available online.) National Slate Museum , archived from the original January 13, 2007 ; Retrieved May 31, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 72f.
- ^ Jones, p. 73.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 81f.
- ↑ a b Williams, p. 27.
- ^ Jones, p. 112.
- ↑ Quoted from Burn, p. 10.
- ↑ Jones, p. 113.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 49-71.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 149-160.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 264f.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 186-195.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 145.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 146.
- ↑ Even after more than a century, the question of whether it was a strike or a lockout aroused strong emotions. See also Richards 1995, p. 146.
- ^ Jones, p. 211.
- ↑ Jones, pp. 210-266.
- ↑ a b Burn, p. 17.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 256f.
- ^ Jones, p. 295.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 260.
- ↑ Pritchard, p. 24.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 294.
- ↑ a b Williams, p. 19.
- ↑ a b Williams, p. 30.
- ↑ a b Lindsay, p. 298.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 182.
- ↑ Richards 1995, pp. 183, 220f.
- ↑ Richards, pp. 183f.
- ↑ Lindsay, p. 303.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 185.
- ↑ Lindsay, pp. 305f.
- ^ Welsh Slate Museum website. National Slate Museum , accessed September 6, 2006 .
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 188.
- ↑ Llechwedd Slate Caverns website. Llechwedd Slate Caverns , accessed September 13, 2006 .
- ↑ King Arthur's Labyrinth website. (No longer available online.) King Arthur's Labyrinth Ltd., archived from the original on October 8, 2006 ; Retrieved September 13, 2006 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Richards 1999, p. 14.
- ↑ Richards 1995, p. 191.
- ↑ Burn, p. 14.
- ↑ Burn, p. 15.
- ^ National Screen and Sound Archive for Wales. (No longer available online.) National Library of Wales , archived from the original on October 2, 2006 ; Retrieved September 13, 2006 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
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