Penrhyn old quarry: drainage tunnel survey.

It's time I placed survey results of the great Penrhyn old quarry drainage tunnel into the public domain.

Penrhyn old quarry in 2023, now mostly flooded. The level of the lake is defined by the drainage tunnel's level, which exits into the Ogwen river, nearly 2km downstream, opposite Bethesda rugby ground.

 

First, a bit of context: Penrhyn and his ilk operated a harsh and despotic system of industry in north Wales that has often - correctly - been described as 'white slavery'. This is because money made from black slavery in the Caribbean was reinvested in north Wales slate. Penrhyn ensured his gentrified and political position allowed him to 'steal a mountain' - land that locals had exploited on a small scale as common land for centuries.

 

In surveying and celebrating the structures of the Penrhyn slate quarry, my work absolutely does not idolise Penrhyn and his managers; they were crooks, interested only in power and, above all, personal wealth. 

 

Stereo viewer pair of Penrhyn old quarry in 1902. It is possible for many people to generate a stereo image simply by crossing one's eyes to create a centre, '3D' image. Library of Congress.

Rather, I examine and celebrate the ordinary working men who slaved away for no life-changing benefit to create indsutrial structures and machinery that reveal them as the capable, intelligent and tough folk they were.

My work, which has been accepted for inclusion on the RCAHMW's 'Coflein' database since around April 2026, has yet to appear due, I am told, technical issues with their system. 

In the meantime, you can find my work, for free, here. 

Edward I and the Misplaced Court

 

Recently, I submitted a work that corrects an intriguing error in the modern account of Edward I's court and its movements in north Wales.

 

In very brief summary, modern accounts since at least 1974, but with origins going back to 1900, assert that Edward's court was located for three weeks (every author has a different period, of course!) at Llyn Cwm Dulyn.

As my work shows, this was not so. Primary evidence is clear, despite slight spelling variations that never obscure the true location, that the court, between June 9th and 29th, 1284, was located at Baladeulyn - modern-day Nantlle. 

There's little point in repeating my work here, so please have a read of the report, for free and without adverts or such like, here. 

Enjoy! 

 

 

 

Bryn Cader Faner: Some Thoughts

The weather has finally improved over North Wales, getting us all out into the open after another lengthy period of winter-enforced indoor-ism.

That said, when I turned up in the northern Rhinogau the other day, I was mightily annoyed to find an easterly wind roaring over the ridges of said mountains!  It would be 3 hours of waiting around before the wind abated enough to get the drone up.

Time hanging around, of course, can be useful, as we'll see.

I made my way along the beautiful sandstone landscape, walking against an incredibly strong and desiccatingly-dry wind. Eventually, I caught sight of what I'd come to see: the iconic Bronze Age funerary cairn at Bryn Cader Faner.

Bryn Cader Faner, as it appears some distance along the trackway to the south-west. It would also have skylined, probably more so, had it been positioned on the flat ground behind and to the left.

 

This is a very remote but very highly-photographed monument, some 10m in diameter. Surprisingly, I can find no real academic work about it. The Army certainly took notice of it during WW2, shooting the site up and damaging it badly. Earlier, during the 19th century, treasure hunters dismantled the cist burial lying at the monument's centre, leaving it with a prominent depression.

As far as I'm aware, the Army has never done anything to compensate for this loutish behaviour so characteristic of Imperial English attitudes of the time.

Descriptions of the monument are confused about how many recumbent stones lie around the perimeter. Some say 15, others 18. I counted 24. It's possible that stones have been added in more recent times in an effort to 'repair' it. In some ways, that's a bit misguided. Yet in another sense, it's a nice part of its continuing presence and relevance.

The spectacular Bryn Cader Faner Bronze Age monument, viewed from the SW.

 

Waiting around, I had a walk to one of many steps in the sandstone landscape, a sign of endless layers of sedimentation laid down over millions of years. The rock here dips downwards towards the north-west, but the sandstone strata themselves are arranged and slope on a SW-NE line. I had a look around for any fossilised ripples from ancient beaches, but couldn't see any.

What I could see, looking back towards the monument 'from the side', was clear confirmation of what is immediately apparent as you reach it: it's not positioned at the highest point of the local landscape, which also happens to be the most horizontally-level (as opposed to sloping-but-level) ground here. 

The positioning is on ground that mirrors the line of the sandstone strata, which is very clear in the photo I took, seen below:

 

The monument could have been set on horizontally-flat ground at the very top of the hill. Instead, it was positioned on and reflects the sandstone strata slopes.

The only official words I've come across that comment upon the monument's location is that it is "probably deliberately set to skyline when approached along the ancient trackway to the south". This may be correct; I'm not sure. It would have been much more prominently visible, if that were the aim, and would have skylined from more directions, had it been placed on the horizontally-flat ground just a few metres beyond. 

Bryn Cader Faner is notably not installed on the very summit of the local ground, which is also, as can be seen at upper centre left, an otherwise useful piece of flat ground.

Was there a reason why the very convenient-to-build-on, flat ground wasn't utilised for the monument? Maybe it was used for something else?  Perhaps a now lost monument?  It seems unlikely, but then there is another ring of stones, 20m in diameter, and as far as I know, and remarkably, only formally recorded in 2019 yet is quite obvious to the careful observer,  935m to the SW (a line of 220 degrees true as viewed from Bryn Cader Faner).

What is clear from visiting this site is that it is a natural pass through the hilly terrain. It has a series of lakes and pools for water and food in the form of fish and birds. There's a ready source of freeze-fractured stone blocks. Nature was generous to anyone who wanted to live here, and many clearly did over a very long period of time. The landscape of blocks and straight-line layers itself suggests and inspires monument building, though those that were built are, even allowing for the ravages of the Army, slight.

A small part of the fractured landscape in the area, providing suggestion for monument-building and the stone materials, in a range of sizes, needed to do so.

 

We'll probably never fully comprehend the significance of and intent behind the building of this spectacular monument which remains described on official OS maps today as merely a 'cairn'. It deserves much better than this description and a dusty legal document at Cadw to protect it that nobody really knows about.

If you visit, please respect our Welsh heritage and note that this is a scheduled ancient monument, protected by law. It is a criminal offence to damage or deface such protected monuments. 

 

 

North Wales Today: Slave Legacy?

North Wales - or at least those parts of it which have slate strata in the area - has always been proud of its slate quarrying heritage. 

Long before anyone in Gwynedd Council understood they could protect their jobs for a fair few years by getting behind the UNESCO World Heritage bid, locals in the area discussed, walked around and celebrated slate in their own, respectful way.

By the fist quarter of the 21st century, slate has transitioned from a useful roofing material to an infinitely more valuable commodity: tourism.

Like practically every UNESCO bid, the underlying motivation is 'economic development' through attracting hordes of tourists. In North Wales, this need for economic development - money - is desperate. What few good job there used to be in the post-WW2 era - jobs such as nuclear energy, metal smelting and chemicals - have all long ago packed-up and left. 

So you can't blame folks from trying to do something. And tourism is inevitably that something, because it's relatively easy and cheap to set up and the money will tend to roll in forever. As will the problems - and there has been an abundance of those in the post-Covid era, where millions got used to not visiting the Costa Brava and came to trash North Wales instead.

But I digress. 

Today's point is this: are we simply glorifying slate in a way that those who experienced the worst of Penrhynism, the all-controlling system of production applied at most sites, that ensured workers were constantly in fear of their livelihoods and the very homes they slept in?

The answer is complex and interesting. For sure, those in the 19th century who crossed over into the 20th would have had a pretty dim view of their working conditions, constantly eroded by the landed elite, Lord Penrhyn, who is widely despised, even today, as the man who "stole a mountain", an objectively true assertion.

The 1900-1903 'Streic Fawr' (Great Strike), rooted in dissatisfaction going back at least 25 years earlier, remains the longest-running industrial dispute in UK history. It reduced people to poverty and destitution. It turned one family against another. And it led to a very high proportion - at least a half - leaving for the South Wales coalfields and elsewhere, where the going was still tough, but the rewards somewhat greater.

'Papur Pawb', a popular Welsh newspaper, carried a number of poignant cartoons during the three year long Great Strike at Penrhyn slate quarry. The destitution forced upon his workers by Lord Penrhyn isn't something that gets nearly as much coverage as it should. It was a system of 'white slavery' in a very real sense.

 

Penrhyn was so wealthy - on the back of money made in the Atlantic slave trade - that he could afford to disregard his workers' withdrawal of their labour and simply shut 'his' quarry down, or operate it at vastly-reduced capacity, for three years.

This system - Penrhynism - is often referred to as the money made on the backs of black African slaves being reinvested back home to make slaves of white Welsh men. 

And that, too, is an objectively true statement. Quite apart from the money made from slavery itself, the system of compensating slave owners so that abolition could proceed without too much resistance, yielded over £20 million at 2024 prices for the Pennant ('Penrhyn') family, if we use the per-capita GDP deflator as a reasonable measure.

Compensation records for the Pennant slave owners.

 

Whilst quarrymen did not suffer the savage, inhuman and unrewarded treatment of African slaves, their pay was meagre at best and undermined as time went on owing to the introduction of 'middle men' to handle and award extraction concessions within a quarry - the so-called 'bargains'.

Penrhyn men's houses were often owned by the estate and that meant any resistance to the system would mean both a loss of income and a loss of home. It was a calculated system of total control over the workers: do as the Lord says, or else enter immediate destitution. It was as deliberate as it was harsh.

Of course, this was all a long time ago now. Quarries have changed hands many times and conditions within them would be unrecognisable to the men of the 'Streic Fawr'. If you ask some of the now elderly workers who are still alive as to whether they would go back to quarrying, the answer is invariably an enthusiastic 'yes!' 

Maybe they are sincere about that. Or maybe they have forgotten the hardship. In most cases, this embrace of the industry in which they worked is based on the strong comradeship they enjoyed, not what they were doing. Comradeship forged at work, under harsh conditions. Perhaps it's not unlike the comradeship of those who endured WW1 in appalling conditions, leaving a sense that, despite it all, perhaps it was the best time of their lives.

Yet, some things haven't changed. The current owners of Penrhyn quarry, which still has around 25 years' worth of extraction left and has just been granted an extension consent, is owned by those from outside the area.

The Penrhyn (new) quarry, now about to extend further south.

Welsh Slate Ltd is registered in Derby, England. It is a part of the Breedon Group, which is apparently owned by Keith Breedon, the only listed person with significant control, with more than a 75% stake in that latter company. His registration is given as Kent, England. Nothing can be found readily about him online.

So money from the Welsh slate industry would appear to be legging it across the border to England. Though Breedon and Welsh slate have of course done nothing unlawful or otherwise wrong, the money's fate remains pretty much the same as under Penrhyn, who had an imposing, oppressive fake castle home in the area, but was rarely resident there to spend much of it

Altogether, Wales ought to have made quite a large amount of money for itself from the slate industry - had that slate not been taken over - stolen in the case of Lord Penrhyn - by English elite and other capitalists of a lesser stature. 

Wales could have created a sovereign wealth fund, where natural resources on its land fed money into a fund that would pay for infrastructure and other benefits for all the people of Wales. 

But that was the heyday of imperialism. Wales was just a remote part of the UK that the English could take from what it wanted, giving nothing back. That attitude, too, is something we continue to live with today.

Whether we should be celebrating and even fetishising such an industry of exploitation - of both resource and men - is debatable. Personally, I think it's something we should recognise, but with a much better effort to recall just how bad things were for so many, for so long.

 

 

 

 

The Welsh Archaeological industry: a new imperialism?

Back in late 2022, I contacted the director of a local archaeological trust to raise an important issue that, you would hope, such a trust would accept without question.

That issue was language, and how Wales' heritage is, according to my thesis, being quietly undermined by non-Welsh speakers who, nevertheless, occupy positions of influence.

A position of influence can be as simple as a contractor undertaking archaeological surveys. For reasons of population density, if nothing else, one is more likely to find surveying companies based outside Wales, rather than within it. Accordingly, there is a very high and almost certain likelihood of non-Welsh speaking contractors being deployed to Wales to conduct surveys on behalf of arch. trusts, Welsh Government and others. 

In the same week as this enquiry - we'll come to the astonishing response shortly - I read a Ph.D. thesis about 17th and 18th century defences of an island involved in slavery. This was the first time I'd ever seen someone write with humility such that the author plainly put forward her position as a white, western female taught by and bearing the biases of the system that she grew up within. It's a remarkable piece of writing, the author explaining to me that it was "the thesis I wanted to write", rather than of a kind she might be expected to write. It's a real credit to her supervisor and institution, too.

What the author highlighted - and something that ought to be standard practice in the industry - was her own background; we are all products of the system that we are familiar with, and we have to be very careful not to become a form of imperialist, forcing our own worldview onto places, people and archaeological sites that we may come to examine in areas not within our usual haunts and direct lived experience.

But this humility is, so far as any texts I've ever read, never seen in works about Wales, despite the regular use of archaeological contractors who do not speak Welsh. By not speaking Welsh, they will strongly tend to miss important clues from place and feature names that very often carry crucial hints or even plain statements of what those places and features were or related to.

Being non-Welsh speakers, these kinds of problems simply do not occur to practically any of the companies asked to survey and work on our archaeological heritage. The further risk that then appears is one of re-interpreting Wales through non-Welsh eyes and minds. And if you think there is no evidence for this, you're very much mistaken.

Coming back to the brief exchange with the director of the arch, trust, he asserted his belief - put forward more as just an assertion and in what would appear to be thinly-veiled pique, that the Welsh (singular) terms, 'buarth' and 'corlan', apply only to single sheepfolds and not to the complex folds the English call 'multicellular' sheepfolds.

The sheer idiocy and, more importantly, ignorance displayed in this assertion made, remember, by a director of an arch. trust, is as breathtaking as it is deeply troubling.

How can we be in this utterly unacceptable situation in Wales, and is the director of the trust simply a 'rogue' actor? 

The answers are to be found in a Freedom of Information Act request I made in the autumn of 2023. It asked, simply, how many people could be considered Welsh-speaking at Welsh Government as a whole, and Cadw, as the Welsh Government's heritage body. The response was again very worrying indeed:

The figures are, to me, unbelievable, a quarter century after Welsh devolution. But the situation depicted by the numbers is even worse, once we take the starred qualification into account. Level 3 Welsh is not at all near good enough to claim proficiency and certainly a very long way indeed from understanding complex, nuanced and archaic language one will encounter when working in archaeological heritage. Worse again is that the numbers are all self-reported, so it's almost inevitably an overly-optimistic assessment.

In recent years, there has been a growing and vocal level of dissent about the anglicisation of place names, notably in relation to the mountains of Eryri, a national park that recently entirely abandoned the use of 'Snowdonia' in its official work, albeit having much earlier embraced English names for places here. This is the kind of resolute action we need to see within the archaeological industry in Wales, too.

The Irish Sea: intervisibility of landscapes.

Recently, prompted by a daughter going off to study ancient history, I re-read an interesting and important paper - 'Fluid Horizons' by Aaron Watson in The Neolithic of the Irish Sea: Materiality and traditions of practice, Oxbow Books, 2004, pp.55-63.

The piece is important not least because, for the overwhelming majority of people who don't live in the right places, there is no recognition that distant lands are in fact visible from any given location and that the degree of visibility changes, sometimes dramatically so.

The Isle of Man under superrefraction as seen at ~86km from the north coast of Anglesey at 100m amsl. Notice the effect is apparent over the distance to the IoM, but the ship at far fewer km out to sea is unaffected from this vantage point.

 

Reducing Watson's paper to the bare essentials, the idea is that the coastal regions of the Irish Sea, centred loosely on the Isle of Man, make up a realm that, from height, can be perceived visually.

Watson gives photographic examples of intervisibility, but these are for the most part from various heights in mountainous parts. He does mention the case of Barclodiad y Gawres' view of Ireland, which is achieved from only about 9m above sea level. But the examples I give here are from just under 100m amsl, showing that mountainous terrain per se is not required for intervisibility in the Irish Sea region.

Container ship off the coast of California, with a superrefracted, inverted image above. The enhanced vertical extent can render objects visible from extended distances.

Watson also briefly mentions "mythologies" of islands appearing on the horizon, though the reference he cites for this - The Enchanceted Lands: Myths and legends of Britain's landscapes, Janet and Colin Bord, Harper Collins, 1995 - draws on one book in a series by that husband-and-wife team that is decidedly of its period and very much plays up the 'New Age' magical, mysterious and mythical elements. That is a particular genre with a particular audience and which we might say does not qualify much as academically-authoritative, however well-intentioned.

Despite the potential shortcomings of that book series, the authors were certainly on to something concrete. After 13 years of living on a low hill (Mynydd Parys) on the north coast of Anglesey, I can testify that changing atmospheric conditions lead to interesting effects in respect of the visibility of Irish Sea locations.

Key in this regard is the phenomenon of Fata Morgana - more technically described as superrefraction. Though it may be more common in colder climates, it nevertheless is conclusively shown from my own and many others' examples to occur anywhere, notably over the sea, the conditions are right. It is by no means a rare phenomenon around the Irish Sea coasts, arising perhaps half a dozen times a year or so.

Most commonly, superrefraction appears when the sea is cold and the weather has suddenly snapped to a hot period, giving rise to a steep temperature gradient over the sea. This can sometimes lead to the spectacular vision of a ship at sea sailing along with a perfect inverted image of itself hovering immediately above. More commonly, it leads to ever-changing, imperfect images of distant lands, often taking the form of partial images with flattened, plate-like tops as light hits a strong refracting boundary.

'Castles in the air' - Mourne mountains, Northern Ireland, appear at 138km from Anglesey as vertically enhanced with tower-like projections - a result of inverted images of the hills. Slieve Donard at right.

 

Mourne mountains under very clear but non-superrefracting conditions. The apparent height is much reduced, relative to that under superrefraction.

Mourne mountains under superrefraction, showing strong horizontal distortion as well as vertical enhancement.

Inevitably, superrefraction will have been an important element in enhancing the view of far-off lands that would, then as now, seem magical and bizarre to people. They would have struggled to explain the phenomenon and no doubt found the images, sometimes displaying castle-like vertical enhancements, a strong draw to investigation.

Cumbria, at 140km, seen from the north coast of Anglesey, with modest backlighting rendering the scene much more visible than is ordinarily the case. Cumbria is indeed rarely visible from this location at all.

 

In future discussions of intervisibility across the Irish Sea and indeed elsewhere, it will be crucial to recognise and take into account the unique and mesmerising role of superrefraction. Other effects, such as the backlighting (silhouetting) evident in the image of Cumbria, snow cover (highlighting landscape features) and variable transparency also need to be taken into account. Even clouds, notably towering cumulus and related species should be considered, as these frequently form over the Isle of Man and Cumbria, revealing the position of those landscapes, if not necessarily their form on any given occasion.

Latest update - Corlannau (Buarthau/Ffaldiau).

'Buarth y Bobl', Cors y Gwaed, Gwynedd.

 

The interest over the past year here has been with sheepfolds, mostly of the multicellular form seen in numbers across north and, to a lesser degree, south Wales.

Noting this is an ongoing and not complete text, the latest update of my text can be found here.