Chris Hughes has often passed by the Dinorwig quarries across the lake from Llanberis and has photographed them from afar. For this photographic essay he got inside, to reflect on the miners, the climbers and the wildlife that have staked a claim to this corner of North Wales:

In the late 1960s we visited the slate quarries of Tilberthwaite in the Lake District, usually on wet days when we had been rained off climbing on the ‘better’ crags. Later we set up long abseils in the Cathedral quarry to impress the PE students we took there as part of their outdoor activities course. But it wasn’t the activity that was remembered, it was the incredible grandeur of the rock architecture, the wonderful effects of light and shade created within these deep pits and the quiet and stillness where once there had been the noise, constant movement, and the general mayhem of the hard and dangerous job of quarrying slate.

Driving through Llanberis you could not fail to notice the monstrous heaps of slate waste and vast rock faces of the Dinorwig quarries across the lake. The whole side of the mountain, and a good part of the inside, had been chopped, sliced, split and generally smashed into pieces. Much of it was thrown away, creating the huge heaps and screes of spoil, whilst the good bits were carted off for roofs, walls and garden rockeries, until it all came to a grinding halt as the price of slate made it all financially unviable. Continue reading →