The Age of Slate by Michael Burn ND [1980?] 20 pp, 4 illus, SB good condition.
The visitor to North Wales who passes through Blaenau Ffestiniog sometimes complains that the vast tips of slate above the town are a desecration of the landscape. The visitor may be wrong. Even if a commercial use is one day found for these black pyramids of waste, or they are removed for some other reason, part of them should be kept as they are, a monument to what was once one of the most vivid working communities in the world. The opening to the public of the stately homes of England has revealed places where people have lived for generations; the opening of a section of the Llechwedd Slate Mines does the same for places where during a century-and-a-half thousands of Welshmen worked.
This small book can only give a summary account. It starts with the pioneers, goes on to a brief description of the Llechwedd, and the quarrymen in general, and concludes with a little of the history of the industry and its present state.
In the year 1765 John Pennant, of a Flintshire family who had made an immense fortune on their own and by marriage as sugar planters in the West Indies, married his son Richard to Anne Susannah Warburton, co-heiress of half the Penrhyn estate in North Caernarvonshire. By 1785 Richard Pennant had completed purchase of the other half and succeeded his father in control of certain remote Snowdonian wastes, from which about fifty quarrymen, individually or in small groups, had built up a local market in slate. They had also developed a small trade with Ireland, bringing their loads on ponies down perilous tracks, sixty slates a load, to creeks or the estate wharf on the Menai Straits. At first they paid the estate royalties of one-eighth the value of their load. Later this was commuted to an annual rent of £1 for 21-year leases. Richard Pennant bought them all out for £160, kept them on as hired labourers.
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Cutting coal in my spare time.