Once you surmount the barriers put in place around the old Dinorwic Quarries, Llanberis to prevent folk from walking on the mountainside – the irony of putting a vertical obstacle in the way of climbers obviously didn’t occur to First Hydro, who own part of the mountain – you enter a landscape dramatically transformed by man. The landforms are unique, and just like the last time I was in Snowdonia, the blanket of cloud burned off slowly, revealing Sinc Juliet from the top of Marchlyn Mawr. Previously I’d climbed Elidir Fawr, and also visited the “Electric Mountain” visitor centre down in Llanberis; this time, I decided to visit the old quarries. As I stood there, with the crows wheeling overhead, and mountain sheep grazing between blocks of blue slate, the light changed many times as the cloud base gradually rose above the tops. 
Dinorwic was one of the world’s largest slate quarries, and rather like Ballachulish on Scotland’s west coast, it was worked as a series of galleries, so the mountainside now consists of twenty or so terraces linked by steep inclines, which also run around dramatic pits. Unlike Scotland’s slate industry, which had died by the start of the 1960’s, Welsh slate was more resilient, and though Dinorwic closed in 1969, other quarries like Oakely and Penrhyn are still live (only just in the case of Oakely). The well-known and oft-repeated statistics are that Dinorwic opened in 1787, and was second only in size to Penrhyn. At its peak, it employed 3000 men and produced over 100,000 tons of slate each year. The workings extend 1800 feet up the mountain, and there are about 20 levels, once linked by around 50 miles of narrow gauge rail track. 
Dinorwic really is the quarry which ate a mountain. It sits on the face of Elidir Fach into which it bit deeply, leaving Elidir Fawr alongside it pretty much untouched. In addition to the galleries, the most obvious parts of the quarry are the inclined planes down which the slate was sent. The “A” inclines on the north-west or “Garret” side of Dinorwic, and the “C” inclines on the south-east or “Braich” side are mostly self-acting inclines with two sets of tables, one loaded with slate which trundled downhill by gravity, and counterbalanced by the empty one travelling back up the incline again. A good example remains at the “New York” level. Several of the inclines still have the winding drums and brakes in situ; likewise some of the pits still have Blondin (aerial cable crane) winders and cables in place. The Blondin was invented by John Fyfe, the granite quarrymaster from Aberdeenshire, and many Blondin-type cable cranes were built by John Henderson of Aberdeen.
“Australia” level is where the interesting artefacts are: the sawmills with lines of rusting circular sawbeds, the powerhouse with its compressors still in place, the caban (bothy) with fleabitten jackets still hanging from pegs. In fact, once more than 20 different mills, and almost 500 saws spread across the site, but this is the most intact set of buildings. Incidentally, all the areas of the quarry were given names, and became its “departments”: Vivian, Wellington, Matilda and Victoria at lower level, then Braich and Garret further up the mountainside. Some of these areas lower down are approached through tunnels cut through walls of slate, some now blocked by rockfalls. Dinrowic’s galleries run in one direction to vast spoil heaps which bloom out over the mountainside, and end abruptly at a precipice. Some, like Sinc Harriet, renamed “Dali’s Hole” by the rock climbers who have adopted it, are hundreds of feet deep. 
When the Welsh slate industry went into retreat, Dinorwic was still making its owners enough money for them to entertain the idea of opening a new quarry further up the mountain, at Marchlyn Mawr. The idea was that it would continue once its parent shut, but in the end Marchlyn wasn’t a success, either. After Dinorwic quarry closed in 1969, an auction was held to sell off all the easily-recoverable plant and machinery, such as saws, compressors and locomotives. However, the equipment on the higher levels was too much hassle to reclaim, so it was left in place and surrendered to the elements. By contrast the newest buildings – modern slate mills, and a concrete block and tile plant which used the quarry dust as aggregate, all of which sat beside Llyn Peris – were razed to the ground completely. Others have been unroofed – for their slate, ironically, given the huge quantities of dressed roofing lying around the place, small heaps set against vast planes of slate scree. Yet the artificial topography left behind at closure is only part of its attraction: what happened next is the real fascination of Dinorwic.
The process of decay is a demonstration of the power of entropy. Anything we create exists on sufferance, as a result of continual human intervention: but once left to its own devices, it quickly returns to its natural state. The buildings weather, roofs collapse, timber rots away, iron rusts to oxide, and the walls of hewn slate merge with the mountainside that gave birth to them. What we think of as the “chaos” of decay and decomposition is really Nature at work, and as that happens the meaning and history Man superimposes are surrendered. As decay strips away machinery, signage, end products, the buildings and inclines come close to being generic ruins. Dinorwic is a powerful demonstration that nature will unmake everything we build, and eventually only the stones remain, and as Robin Hitchcock sang, the stones do not remember.
Some of Dinorwic’s heritage is preserved in a museum – the Vivian department of the quarry – but you know that it’s been cleaned up and curated whereas the castings, wire ropes and motors strewn over the mountain are more or less as the quarrymen left them. They are living, or perhaps dying, history. The museum is about objectivity, whereas the quarry beyond it is more about evoking “saudade”, a Portugese term which combines melancholy and a sense of life irretriveably lost. In amongst the death of an industry, and the gradual erasing of Man’s intervention – is the power of Nature, which is revivifying the quarry and proving that nothing really dies, it is transformed or transfigured. Dinorwic is a poignant place, and provided you respect the lethal drops and rockfalls, makes a thought-provoking day high above the tourists.
There’s a good deal of further material about Dinorwic on Dave Sallery’s excellent website about the Welsh slate industry – Penmorfa.
