North Wales Pilgrims Way (Stage 8 - Waunfawr to Clynnog Fawr)

Any more fares please?

In London the buses are red, in Cardiff the buses are orange and but in Waunfawr the local bus company, Whiteways, painted their buses white of course! Here's a Whiteways double decker in Caernarfon some years ago. It must be some years ago because the Hepworths shop in the background would have disappeared over twenty years ago (because the clothing chain changed its name to Next) and Waenfawr (see the destination indicator on the front of the bus) changed its name to Waunfawr in the 1990's (thanks to the insistence of the Welsh Language Society.)

It was a fine bright morning for the next leg of our pilgrimage, Skip and I tootled past the Welsh Highland Railway station at Waunfawr, climbed up by Moel Smytho, and headed on mountain footpaths across the broad hillside under the shadow of Mynydd Mawr and on towards Y Fron.

The blue lagoon!

As we then left the wild upland spaces we began to encounter a landscape defined by the slate quarrying industry of the Nantlle valley. Virtually all of the quarries are now closed; however to get a real sense of the enormous extent of the industry requires a walk (or run in our case) through the vast area covered in spoil tips and ruins of pump houses and workshops heading down to Talysarn and Penygroes. Here's one of the flooded quarries above Y Fron, in this case coloured a brilliant blue thanks to mineral salts in the water, the fence between us and the cliff edge didn't seem very robust! There's a white buoy on the surface of the water (the Prisoner comes to mind!) and I think that's a crow flying overhead - the beak looks a bit small for a Raven. Or maybe it was a drone shaped like a bird, I couldn't hang around to find out because we were on a mission.

The UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites makes for interesting reading, included as might be expected are the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge and Venice and its lagoons, there are National Parks and archaeological sites aplenty and some sites have been delisted for various reasons (e.g. Liverpool). But there are less obvious choices on the list such as the Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site, the Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape in Uruguay and our current whereabouts, the Slate Landscape of North West Wales! This action photo is from the huge Dorothea Quarry in its heyday, the buildings are all gone apart from the Cornish Beam Engine House at the fore front of the picture, a solitary reminder of the thriving industry that once provided abundant employment.

It would take days to thoroughly explore this area and the map below shows the vast area covered by the quarry workings which are criss crossed by footpaths and old railway lines. We jogged down from the top right of the map skirting the northern edge of the biggest flooded pit shown and by the entrance to Tal y Sarn Hall into the village itself where huge quantities of slate were loaded onto the main freight line to Caernarfon to be shipped around the world.

Fancy a drop?

Nowadays Talysarn seems quite a sleepy place, on a warm May afternoon I spotted little traffic and just a couple of pedestrians,  surely a contrast to a century ago when it was a hive of industry. The old train station is the site of a bus terminal and the railway line out of town has been replaced with a by-pass. However new industries are springing up - look at this - a Welsh vineyard between Talysarn and Penygroes! Thousands of vines and apple trees have recently been planted for the production of wine, cider and apple juice - this includes 700 trees bearing the rare Bardsey Apple a rediscovered variety probably the survivor of trees planted by monks on Bardsey Island a thousand years ago.  Alas we had no time to stop and sip and stare and we carried on the remainder of our jaunt from Penygroes to Clynnog Fawr which was, by contrast, through rolling farmland. Two consecutive days of long running had tired us out and we needed to rest and recuperate.