Porthmadog

I was invited on this trip as I hadn't been out with a group for a while, and I was more than happy to accompany, as the school is doing almost a whistle-stop tour of the history of North Wales. Very interesting, and free for me, if I go along!
First stop was Blaenau Ffestiniog, the famous slate mining town, where we went down the Llechwedd Slate Caverns. This was interesting from an industrial point of view, but the information that you got from the tour itself was really rather cheery compared to the horrible, brutal reality of slate mining. We talked to the funicular operator afterwards, who said that they'd 'lightened' the mood of it, after some tourists were coming out of the mine with tears, and were likely telling other people to avoid the depressing experience. I can see where they're coming from, with a business to run, but I'm not sure about the morals of sugar-coating such an important part of Welsh industrial history.

Next, we traced the route of the slate from the quarries and mines to the sea, along the Ffestiniog Railway, to Porthmadog, where it was loaded onto boats and shipped across the world. We piled onto a carriage, and set off, crawling through the valleys in a veil of smoke and steam from the engine at the front of the train.

We arrived in Porthmadog with not too much to look at - the port has changed beyond recognition, so that you have to have a fantastic imagination to see what it would have looked like as a working slate port. The children did some team games while I slunk off in search of a coffee.

We all piled back onto the coach, and headed up north to the Llanberis slate museum. This has an amazing amount of machines and buildings from the height of the slate boom, most of which you can get really close to, touch, smell... always a positive when you're at a museum, I feel. There's also a working 50 foot wide water wheel, which would have driven a large amount of the machinery.

The highlight of the museum was the demonstration of slate splitting, which was done by a lovely gentleman who used to work on the quarries, and told you a huge amount while endearing himself to the whole crowd - the old and young alike. Very skilled, too; he cut slate like it was paper.

He told us a bit about the unfairness of the slate business - the workers would get 10p per slate that would be sold at £4, and they would have 1/3 of all their work taken away for 'breakages'.