Occurrence of Attributes in Original Text
The text related to the cultural heritage 'The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales' has mentioned 'Slate' in the following places:
| Occurrence Sentence | Text Source |
|---|---|
| Splitting of the slate blocks with hammer and chisel to produce roofing slates requires great skill. | WIKI |
| This process was not mechanized until the second half of the 20th century, and some slate is still produced in this way. | WIKI |
| The existence of a slate industry in Wales is attested since the Roman period, when slate was used to roof the fort at Segontium, now Caernarfon. | WIKI |
| The slate industry grew slowly until the early 18th century, then expanded rapidly until the late 19th century, at which time the most important slate producing areas were in northwest Wales, including the Penrhyn Quarry near Bethesda, the Dinorwic Quarry near Llanberis, the Nantlle Valley quarries, and Blaenau Ffestiniog, where the slate was mined rather than quarried. | WIKI |
| Penrhyn and Dinorwig were the two largest slate quarries in the world, and the Oakeley mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog was the largest slate mine in the world. | WIKI |
| [1] Slate is mainly used for roofing, but is also produced as thicker slab for a variety of uses including flooring, worktops and headstones. | WIKI |
| Up to the end of the 18th century, slate was extracted on a small scale by groups of quarrymen who paid a royalty to the landlord, carted slate to the ports, and then shipped it to England, Ireland and sometimes France. | WIKI |
| After the government abolished slate duty in 1831, rapid expansion was propelled by the building of narrow gauge railways to transport the slates to the ports. | WIKI |
| The slate industry dominated the economy of north-west Wales during the second half of the 19th century, but was on a much smaller scale elsewhere. | WIKI |
| In 1898, a work force of 17,000 men produced half a million tons of slate. | WIKI |
| Slate production continues on a much reduced scale. | WIKI |
| The slate industry in North Wales is a World Heritage Site, whilst Welsh slate has been designated by the International Union of Geological Sciences as a Global Heritage Stone Resource. | WIKI |
| Contents 1 Beginnings 2 Growth (1760xe2x80x931830) 3 Peak production (1831xe2x80x931878) 3.1 Expansion at Blaenau Ffestiniog 3.2 Mechanization and increased production 3.3 Workers 4 Industrial unrest and decline (1879xe2x80x931938) 4.1 Labour disputes 4.2 Decline in production 5 End of large-scale production (1939xe2x80x932005) 6 Welsh slate today 6.1 Quarries still producing slate 6.2 Visitor attractions 7 World Heritage status 8 Cultural influences 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links | WIKI |
| The most important slate deposits in Wales are the Cambrian deposits south of Bangor and Caernarfon and the Ordovician deposits around Blaenau Ffestiniog. | WIKI |
| The slate deposits of Wales belong to three geological series: Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian. | WIKI |
| There is another band of Ordovician slate further south, running from Llangynnog to Aberdyfi, quarried mainly in the Corris area, with a few outcrops in south-west Wales, notably Pembrokeshire. | WIKI |
| The virtues of slate as a building and roofing material have been recognized since the Roman period. | WIKI |
| [5] During the mediaeval period, there was small-scale quarrying of slate in several areas. | WIKI |
| [6] The first record of slate quarrying in the neighbourhood of the later Penrhyn Quarry was in 1413, when a rent-roll of Gwilym ap Griffith records that several of his tenants were paid 10 pence each for working 5,000 slates. | WIKI |
| [7] Aberllefenni Slate Quarry may have started operating as a slate mine as early as the 14th century. | WIKI |
| Transport problems meant that the slate was usually used fairly close to the quarries. | WIKI |
| [10] Slate exports from the Penrhyn estate are recorded from 1713 when 14 shipments totalling 415,000 slates were sent to Dublin. | WIKI |
| Until the late 18th century, slate was extracted from many small pits by small partnerships of local men, who did not own the capital to expand further. | WIKI |
| [13] Penrhyn introduced larger sizes of slate between 1730 and 1740, and gave these sizes the names which became standard. | WIKI |
| The Cilgwyn Quarry, the oldest in Wales, was one of the most important producers of slate in the 18th century. | WIKI |
| The same year, Lord Penrhyn opened a new quarry at Caebraichycafn near Bethesda, which as Penrhyn Quarry would become the largest slate quarry in the world. | WIKI |
| [18] By 1792, this quarry was employing 500 men and producing 15,000xc2xa0tons of slate per year. | WIKI |
| [20] The first steam engine to be used in the slate industry was a pump installed at the Hafodlas quarry in the Nantlle Valley in 1807, but most quarries relied on hydropower to drive machinery. | WIKI |
| Wales was by now producing more than half the United Kingdom's output of slate, 26,000xc2xa0tons out of a total UK production of 45,000xc2xa0tons in 1793. | WIKI |
| [22] In July 1794, the government imposed a 20% tax on all slate carried coastwise, which put the Welsh producers at a disadvantage compared to inland producers who could use the canal network to distribute their product. | WIKI |
| The Nantlle Railway was built in 1828 and was operated using horse-power to carry slate from several slate quarries in the Nantlle Valley to the harbour at Caernarfon. | WIKI |
| Here the finished slates are being loaded into slate waggons at the Penrhyn Quarry c. 1913. | WIKI |
| In 1831 slate duty was abolished, and this helped to produce a rapid expansion in the industry, particularly since the duty on tiles was not abolished until 1833. | WIKI |
| [28] The Ffestiniog Railway line was constructed between 1833 and 1836 to transport slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the coastal town of Porthmadog, where it was loaded onto ships. | WIKI |
| The railway was graded so that loaded slate waggons could be run by gravity downhill all the way from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the port. | WIKI |
| This helped expansion at the Blaenau Ffestiniog quarries,[29] which had previously had to cart the slate to Maentwrog to be loaded onto small boats and taken down the River Dwyryd to the estuary, where it was transferred to larger vessels. | WIKI |
| [31] A fire which destroyed a large part of Hamburg in 1842 led to a demand for slate for rebuilding, and Germany became an important market, particularly for Ffestiniog slate. | WIKI |
| In 1843, the Padarn Railway became the first quarry railway to use steam locomotives, and the transport of slate by train rather than by ship was made easier when the London and North Western Railway built branches to connect Port Penrhyn and Port Dinorwic to the main line in 1852. | WIKI |
| [27] The Corris Railway opened as the horse-worked Corris, Machynlleth & River Dovey Tramroad in 1859, connecting the slate quarries around Corris and Aberllefenni with wharves on the estuary of the River Dyfi. | WIKI |
| [34] The Cardigan Railway was opened in 1873, partly to carry slate traffic, and enabled the Glogue quarry in Pembrokeshire to grow to employ 80 men. | WIKI |
| The drumhouse at the top of an incline housed the winding gear used to lower the loaded slate waggons down the slope. | WIKI |
| Mechanization was gradually introduced to make most aspects of the industry more efficient, particularly at Blaenau Ffestiniog where the Ordovician slate was less brittle than the Cambrian slate further north, and therefore easier to work by machine. | WIKI |
| The slate mill evolved between 1840 and 1860, powered by a single line shaft running along the building and bringing together operations such as sawing, planing and dressing. | WIKI |
| [36] In 1859, John Whitehead Greaves invented the Greaves sawing table to produce blocks for the splitter, then in 1856 introduced a rotary machine to dress the split slate. | WIKI |
| An extra source of income from the 1860s was the production of "slab", thicker pieces of slate which were planed and used for many purposes, for example flooring, tombstones and billiard tables. | WIKI |
| [38] From 1860 onwards slate prices rose steadily. | WIKI |
| [40] By the late 1870s, Wales was producing 450,000xc2xa0tons of slate per year, compared with just over 50,000xc2xa0tons for the rest of the United Kingdom, which then included Ireland. | WIKI |
| Alun Richards comments on the importance of the slate industry: | WIKI |
| The prosperity of the slate industry led to the growth of a number of other associated industries. | WIKI |
| The quarrymen proper, who made up just over 50% of the workforce, worked the slate in partnerships of three, four, six or eight, known as "bargain gangs". | WIKI |
| Sometimes a gang would give him a block of slate to split. | WIKI |
| [46] One ton of saleable slate could produce up to 30xc2xa0tons of waste. | WIKI |
| The men would therefore be paid an extra sum of "poundage" per pound's worth of slate produced. | WIKI |
| The Penrhyn Slate Quarry, seen here c. 1900, was one of the two largest quarries in Wales. | WIKI |
| In 1879, a period of twenty years of almost uninterrupted growth came to an end, and the slate industry was hit by a recession which lasted until the 1890s. | WIKI |
| [56] Slate production in Wales peaked at over half a million tons in 1898, with 17,000 men employed in the industry. | WIKI |
| French exports of slate to the UK increased from 40,000xc2xa0tons in 1898 to 105,000xc2xa0tons in 1902. | WIKI |
| [61] After 1903 there was a depression in the slate industry which led to reductions in pay and job losses. | WIKI |
| [62] In addition, several countries had placed tariffs on the import of British slate, while a slump in the home building trade had reduced domestic demand; finally French slate producers had increased their exports to the United Kingdom. | WIKI |
| All of this led to a prolonged decline in demand for Welsh slate. | WIKI |
| Unemployment and emigration became constant features of the slate communities; distress was widespread. | WIKI |
| A truck once used for tipping waste stands abandoned in a slate mine near Llangollen following closure. | WIKI |
| The First World War hit the slate industry badly, particularly in Blaenau Ffestiniog where exports to Germany had been an important source of income. | WIKI |
| In 1917, slate quarrying was declared a non-essential industry and a number of quarries were closed for the remainder of the war. | WIKI |
| [65] The demand for new houses after the end of the war brought back a measure of prosperity; in the slate mines of Blaenau Ffestiniog production was almost back to 1913 levels by 1927, but in the quarries the output was still well below the pre-war level. | WIKI |
| [68] The use of electric saws and other machinery reduced the hard manual labour involved in extracting the slate, but produced much more slate dust than the old manual methods, leading to an increased incidence of silicosis. | WIKI |
| A government enquiry in 1893 found that the death rate for underground workers in the slate mines was 3.23 per thousand, higher than the rate for coal miners. | WIKI |
| The number of men employed in the slate industry in North Wales dropped from 7,589 in 1939 to 3,520 by the end of the war. | WIKI |
| [72] Demand for slate was dropping as tiles were increasingly used for roofing, and imports from countries such as Portugal, France and Italy were increasing. | WIKI |
| There was some increased demand for slates to repair bombed buildings after the end of the war, but the use of slate for new buildings was banned, apart from the smallest sizes. | WIKI |
| Total production of slate in Wales declined from 54,000xc2xa0tons in 1958 to 22,000xc2xa0tons in 1970. | WIKI |
| [76] By 1972,fewer than 1,000 men were employed in the North Wales slate industry. | WIKI |
| For many years, the quarry owners had denied that slate dust was the cause of the high levels of silicosis suffered by quarrymen. | WIKI |
| From 1909, they had been responsible for all accidents and illnesses caused by the work, but had managed to persuade successive governments that slate dust was harmless. | WIKI |
| [69] There was an increase in demand for slate in the 1980s, and although this came too late for many quarries there was still some production in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area at the Oakeley, Llechwedd and Cwt-y-Bugail quarries, though the bulk of roofing slate production was at the Penrhyn Quarry. | WIKI |
| Further mechanization was introduced, with a computerized laser beam being used to aid the sawing of the slate blocks. | WIKI |
| Welsh slate today[edit] | WIKI |
| Quarries still producing slate[edit] | WIKI |
| The Penrhyn Quarry is still producing slate, though at a much reduced capacity from its heyday at the end of the 19th century. | WIKI |
| [77] It is currently owned and operated by Welsh Slate Ltd (part of the Breedon Group [78]). | WIKI |
| The Greaves Welsh Slate Company produces roofing slates and other slate products from Llechwedd, and work also continues at the Berwyn Quarry near Llangollen. | WIKI |
| [81] The Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff uses waste slate in many different colours in its design: purple slate from Penrhyn, blue from Cwt-y-Bugail, green from Nantlle, grey from Llechwedd, and black from Corris. | WIKI |
| The National Slate Museum is housed in some of the buildings of the old Dinorwig Quarry near Llanberis. | WIKI |
| Part of the Dinorwig Slate Quarry is now within the Padarn Country Park, and the other part houses the Dinorwig power station in caverns under the old quarry workings. | WIKI |
| The National Slate Museum is located in some of the quarry workshops. | WIKI |
| As well as many exhibits, it has the multi-media display To Steal a Mountain, showing the lives and work of the men who quarried slate here. | WIKI |
| The museum has the largest working water wheel in the United Kingdom, which is available for viewing via several walkways, and a restored incline formerly used to carry slate waggons uphill and downhill. | WIKI |
| In Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Llechwedd Slate Caverns have been converted into a visitor attraction. | WIKI |
| [84] Visitors can travel on the Miners' Tramway or descend into the Deep Mine, via a funicular railway which uses an old incline, to explore this former slate mine and learn how slate was extracted and processed and about the lives of the miners. | WIKI |
| In the chambers, formed by slate extraction, sound and light is used to tell the story of the mine and mining. | WIKI |
| [85] The Braichgoch slate mines at Corris have been converted into a tourist attraction named "King Arthur's Labyrinth" where visitors are taken underground by boat along a subterranean river. | WIKI |
| In July 2021, after development of a bid for over 10 years,[88] the slate landscape of Northwest Wales was inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. | WIKI |
| The Welsh slate industry was essentially a Welsh-speaking industry. | WIKI |
| Burn calculates that there are around fifty men judged worthy of an entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography who started their working lives as slate quarrymen, compared to only four owners, though obviously there was also a distinct disparity in the numbers of the two groups. | WIKI |
| Several novels by Kate Roberts, the daughter of a quarryman, give a picture of the area around Rhosgadfan, where the slate industry was on a smaller scale and many of the quarrymen were also smallholders. | WIKI |
| It showed various aspects of a slate quarryman's life at Blaenau Ffestiniog. | WIKI |