Driving down into Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia to walk the recently-opened Quarrymen's Paths is, for a flash in the mind, like seeing island Greece for the first time. Old women in headscarves and aprons sit on sunlit doorsteps gossiping as dark-eyed little girls skip to a Welsh rhyming song and a long line of cars stops as a couple of old sheep amble across the road in pursuit of a tourist dishing out crisps.
Paradoxically, life for those old ladies' ancestors was harder when Blaenau was busier. In the early 19th century it was The Slate Capital. The beautiful, fine-grained, blue-grey slates, called Empresses, Small Duchesses, Broad Countesses and Wide Ladies, roofed much of the world.
In the 1800s, more than 4,000 quarrymen blasted and then wrestled the slate out of the earth, where it had hidden for 400 million years since the Ordovician age. But since the 1960s, when it was cheaper to buy German, Spanish or even Chinese slates and mass-produced tiles, the number of working quarrymen has fallen to a few hundred.
Unemployment is one of the highest in Britain, particularly since the ageing Magnox nuclear power station at Trawsfynydd went off line in 1991 to remain a blot on the landscape for 100 years. It is all very quiet in an area once deafened by dynamite blasting. There is an atmosphere of that heavy pathos felt in any place that has seen great energy enjoyed or squandered.
Before I began the walk up to the Manod quarry, I stood in the town centre. Only a tiny red-and-green quarry locomotive, No 2207, and two wagons mounted on a slate plinth, hint at the history of a place where men worked for three shillings a day for the quarry owners - Lords and MPs who built mansions and even castles, on the fortunes.
Blaenau Ffestiniog crouches below galleries, canyons and mountains of slate waste which drop down to the cottages' back yards. Blaenau is an oddity: an exclusion zone in the heart of the 840 square miles of Snowdonia National Park. It is so because it was classed an "industrial development area" when the park was created in 1952 to protect natural and wild places. Including it would have inhibited new industry, they said then. In the event, few came to stay.
Ironically, it is this exclusivity that today makes it a unique place. It is not, by any measure, a bespoke "tourist experience", but to walk for a day on carpets of sphagnum moss, through lichen-spotted granite and in between slate blocks the size of a small house is sensational. On sunny days, the heat-waves bounce and shimmer over the slate mountains. Rainy days (and there are many of them) are probably even better. Then the photograph is a glistening monochrome, relieved by the liturgical purple of Rhododendron ponticum, the shallow-rooted weed that kills all competition and thrives in the grey slate waste.
Gwynedd Council has established walking routes within the five valleys of the so-called Slate Valleys Initiative. I took one of the paths that were once used by the quarrymen going to and from work. It was not uncommon for men to walk 10, even 20 miles to start work at 6am, and the same distance home that evening.
I went to the Manod Quarry with Steffan ab Owain, one of several erudite local historians and an authority on the quarries where he once worked. In 1968, when Steffan left to study and eventually take a degree in archaeology, he was a fitter's mate earning £9 and 15 shillings a week for three weeks and £11 and 10 shillings on the fourth "big money" week.
The Manod is a cold and lonely place, 1,750ft above sea level. Its isolation caused it to be one of the most secret places in the second world war. The entire National Gallery Collection was hidden in its underground labyrinth in case Trafalgar Square was bombed, which, of course, it was in 1940. Londoners feared for their lives each night, and sheltered from the bombs wherever they could. But the Ministry of Works gave top priority to a nine-month building programme at Manod to ensure the paint ings would be safe beneath a 300ft thick slate ceiling in the highly unlikely event of Hitler deciding to bomb a lonely mountain in north Wales.
Six vast underground chambers were installed for the treasures. Each had its own air-conditioning system, which ensured four changes of air an hour, and a constant atmosphere of 65F and 42% humidity. Five thousand tons of slate were removed from the moutain entrance increasing it from a 6ft square hole through which generations of miners had passed, to one 13ft by 10ft. This allowed masterpieces by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Constable, Turner, Monet, Degas and Rembrandt, as well as the remainder of the British, French and Dutch Schools, to be unloaded unobtrusively from lorries driven inside the mountain. The road surface under the railway bridge at Ffestiniog, was lowered two and a half feet so that the lorry carrying the vast Van Dyck canvas Charles I on Horseback and Piombo's Raising of Lazarus could edge underneath with inches to spare.
The lowered bridge footings are still visible, but a locked barred gate closes the entrance to the Manod quarry. I peered through the bars into the darkness and was hit by an icy blast of air coming from inside the mountain where the six secret storage chambers remain. The paintings were kept under armed guard at Manod for more than six years. The air-conditioned facilities at the quarry were retained by the Government for much longer because of the possibility of another war, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis.
The remoteness of the quarries meant that many of the men would have to leave their homes just after midnight on Sunday in order to start work at 6am on Monday. Some walked to work over trackless mountains, guided in the winter blackness only by markers of white stones. They stayed in the Barracks in the quarries for the rest of the week, only returning home at the weekend for clean clothes, food, warmth and Sunday chapel. The paths they took are all now recorded.
The tumbling, dry-stone walls of the Barracks can be seen on most of the paths today. The lintels and window sills are marked with graffiti recording the "Big Money" pay days by sum, date and the day's weather. The Barracks were infamous in the industry: draughty, flea-ridden and damp. Men ate, cooked, and slept in double beds for warmth, each in as little as 200 cu ft - the equivalent of 30 people in a modern semi. For this they paid one shilling (5p) a month to the quarry owners. They were overcharged. At close to 2,000ft, the winters were cruel, but the men had to buy their own coal and water from enterprising peddlers.
The average age expectancy among the quarrymen was 47 years, the slate makers 34, many dying from the lung disease silicosis. The rockmen who climbed down the sheer faces of cliffs attached to ropes and chains in order to place dynamite charges would have arms and legs torn away by a sudden fall of slate. The remains of the quarry hospital still exist today.
But if the working conditions were horrific, the winter weather in the area I walked was worse. Winter lasted four months. Easterly winds blew so constantly on to one quarry, men called it the North Pole. When the snot froze in their noses the quarrymen would retreat to dress and cut slates in underground shelters called Caban Crwn. One of these circular dugouts with corbelled roofs of heavy slate slabs can still be seen on the Manod.
At the top of the Manod Path an explosives magazine remains. It is an unremarkable, square structure except that it is built of brick and isolated from all other structures because new safety rules were enforced in the 1870s after a series of explosions caused by quarrymen living - and smoking their pipes - close to huge amounts of dynamite.
The magazine is also the site of the Murder on Manod. Before dawn on a Monday morning in March 1898, quarrymen walking to work found the body of Mary Bruton, aged 33, lying in the snow next to the magazine. Police quickly arrested her lover, a hawker called Thomas Jones. He confessed to murdering Mary during a drink-inflamed quarrel. He said Mary had insisted on taking the wrong path over the mountains and they had lost their way. Jones was hanged at Caernarfon gaol that August.
Other attractions
There are two local steam railways. The Ffestiniog Railway travels from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog. The Welsh Highland Railway (01766 512340) has two separate services covering a couple of miles at either end of the track from Caernarfon to Porthmadog.
Llechwedd Slate Caverns (01766 830306, www.llechwedd.co.uk has deep mine tours and underground son et lumière.
Way to go
The Quarrymen's Paths booklet detailing 14 circular walks in the Ffestiniog area is available for £1.76 incl p+p from Tourist Information, Gwynedd Council, Dolgellau, Gwynedd LL40 2YB (tel: 01341 422888). The Slate quarries are on the margins of OS 1:25 Outdoor Leisure maps 17, 18 and 23.
Accommodation: The Queen's Hotel, Blaenau Ffestiniog (01766 830055). B&Bs: Cae'r Blaidd Country House, Llan Ffestiniog, Gwynedd LL41 4PH (01766 762765). Tyddyn Du Farm, Gellilydan, Maentwrog, Blaenau Ffestiniog. LL41 4RB (01766 590281). Details of guesthouses and B&Bs can be obtained from the local tourist information centre (open April-September only, 01766 830360).
Reading: The Slate Regions of North and Mid Wales and their Railways. AJ Richards (Carreg Gwalch) £7.50.
General enquiries e-mail: tourism@gwynedd.gov.uk
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