Cwm Pennant
31st August 2008
With some decent shots of Cwm Orthin under our belt Dave and I set about the next day looking for a new location.
I had stumbled across details of the Prince of Wales slate quarry in Cwm Pennant which was one of the quarries used to supply the Ynys Y Pandy slate mill before it’s closure in 1906.
I had been intending to shoot Ty Mawr, Ynys Y Pandy for a while, so this seemed the ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
Ty Mawr was a huge mill designed to process slab slate as opposed to the more common roofing slate that most mills handled.
While most mills were single storied buildings this has the air and grandeur of am abbey or church about it.
Unfortunately neither the Gorseddau Quarry or Prince of Wales were able to produce sufficient slate to make this huge undertaking viable and eventually the machinery was striped out leaving this impressive building empty.
After visiting the mill we camped the night near to the Quarry and set out on a drizzly misty day to see what we could find.
While not as big or impressive as Cwm Orthin, Prince of Wales was in a good state of preservation and had a couple of notable features, the most striking of which were the long rows of cottages facing workshops on the hillside.
Again, I suspect this will be a location I might return to in the future.