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 “My Whole World, Penmaenmawr”

Extract given by Kind Permission of Anne Forrest (the author)

“it had all happened not too far off-shore where in the sixth century, prince helig, the wicked son of clannawg, lived in his palace among his people, for fun, he captured and tortured peasants from neighbouring hamlets, he murdered them in violent orgies for his entertainment.

Just as another massacre was about to take place, the prince’s wickedness was punished by the sea.

A gigantic wave thundered in from the north and engulfed the village in darkness, it claimed the lives of the inhabitants of the palace, and as the raging waters destroyed the buildings, it drowned the evil revellers, prince helyg and his henchmen were killed outright. 

Mercifully, the intended victims and other survivors triumphed, they scrambled ashore when the sea calmed, climbed up on to trwyn-yr-wylfa and sat, watching and weeping as their homes disappeared.

At very low tide, rocks are seen which are said to be the remains of the buildings. At high tide we were told, a church bell can be heard ringing beneath the waters – the rough sea crashing against the belfry causing a mournful clanging.

Populating the Past, Penmaenmawr Mysterious Beginnings

Extract given by Kind Permission of Alwyn S. Evans (the author)

The rise and fall

It has been there since the dawn of time. Long before humans walked upright, the great bulk of Penmaenmawr dominated the northern coast of Wales between Conwy and Bangor; a distinctive landmark, visible for many miles. The mountain has been home to and has cast its shadow over many generations: from the ice age to the computer age its slopes have been occupied and worked, from summit to sea’s edge.

Modern Times : A brief overview 

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought unexpected prosperity to many rual areas, provided indirectly by the birth of the French republic. After 1789 the once popular ‘grand tours’ of Europe undertaken by the wealthy had been made too hazardous by the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the resultant military and social unrest on the continent: an alternative was urgently sought.

Wales and Scotland, until then considered rather boring and primitive backwaters, suddenly blossomed. Artists and poets had for years sought inspiration in their wild places and extolled their virtues to a largely apathetic public: now that public became the travelling classes and they clambered to see for themselves what had caused the artistic community to wax lyrical.  The newly improved roads and developing railways brought previously remote areas of midlands and the northwest of England and even the sedate Home Counties were only hours rather than days away.

Dwygyfylchi, as Penmaenmawr was more usually referred to at the time, was one such ‘remote area’ and the ‘grand Tourists’ flooded in. The mountain, its name translates as ‘Great Rock Head’, with its summit intact overlooked all. Its high Moorland walks and the sea at its foot attracted the professional and the famous. Prime Minister Gladstone was a devotee and Elgar the composer, seeking escape from his clashing imperial music came to relax in its peace and rural isolation. Families fleeing the depressing and debilitating effects of smog and soot of urban life drank in curative and bracing mix of sea and mountain air.

In the nineteenth century sea bathing had become a ‘fad’ and the tiny hamlet with its grand sweep of safe sand became famous as a kind of mini spa: at first, almost exclusively for the higher echelons of Victorian and Edwardian society. In 1861 Dr Norton built his Penmaenmawr Hotel overlooking the beach. A designer built spa hotel, it was provided with salt water bathing facilities both hot and cold. The water was driven up from a steam driven pump on the high water line. In keeping with enthusiastic expansion of the time the name of the hotel was soon afterward changed to The Grand Hotel. Later, two world wars would prove to be great social levellers and the little resort with its modest apartments and solidly impressive boarding houses became a firm favourite with ordinary families who returned year after year.

Boom

Penmaenmawr had a further, less idyllic attraction; it was the nationally recognised producer of the hardest granite in the kingdom. Since the early nineteenth century the great hill’s quarries had provided a livelihood for many of the families living in the village named after it. From its water streaked cliff faces too was hewn the stone to build the grand boarding houses and hotels to accommodate the well-heeled visitors.  The iron hard setts or small blocks, chipped to shape by hand, resisted the iron shod wheels of carts and coaches without blemish. As the outside world became aware of the qualities of the stone, demand for it grew and the village attracted people for a different, more mercenary reason.

The developing quarry became a honey pot, attracting labour from within and without Wales. The Village began to grow. The continuing inward migration of quarry workers and their families took the permanent population of Penmaenmawr from 826 in eighteen fifty-one to 3403 in nineteen hundred. From a tiny, self supporting farming and herring fishing hamlet at the turn of the eighteenth century, Pen’ had exploded into a burgeoning, chapel building quarry village which doubled as a rather sedate holiday resort.

This was an unusual combination but strangely the destruction being wreaked upon the hillside did not appear to detract from the village’s popularity. On the contrary, the small ships, first sailers and later coal and oil burners, which came to take away the stone, proved to be an added attraction on the sea front.

Decline

It was inevitable however that the quarry would eventually share the fate of nearly all other labour intensive industries. Technical advances in the quarrying industry resulted in the immense workforce of the late eighteen hundreds and the first half of the twentieth century being drastically reduced. Shortly before the first world war the records show that 1,082 men tore 517,000 tons of stone from the 2 quarries, Graiglwyd and Penmaen. Today, some forty men and their machines produce over 900,000 tonnes from the bowels of Penmaen alone and the visitors, grand and not so grand, have migrated like summer birds to destinations with more predictable weather.

The tide of holiday makers may have receded and the quarry work force declined; the population of the village on the other hand, although it has expanded slightly, has neither grown nor depleted significantly since the mid nineteen forties.

The villagers of today are less and less dependent on the quarry. The days are gone when just about every family in Pen’ had at least some connection with it. As a result people seem to have lost the intimate contact that they once had with the mountain and its surrounding ridges. Ask someone under sixty today where Fox Bank was and it is unlikely that they would know it from the high street bank. They would probably be equally as unaware of places that rejoiced in names such as Yr Attic, Pen Marian, Kimberley, Bonc Jolly, Brake Bach, Y Gloch / Bell Yard, Pen Coed or Braich Llwyd. These and many others were house hold names a few decades ago but sadly no more. The whole thing has now come to be known, rather colourlessly, as ‘The Quarry’.

‘The Mountain,’ on the other hand is popularly considered to be that relatively unspoiled part to the east of Ffridd Graiglwyd: beginning at Cwm Graiglwyd and including Moel Lus and the moorland behind which still attracts many walkers. It remains a convenient and attractive gateway to the Carneddau range.

Today the industrial face of Penmaenmawr has been cleaned up considerably. Commendable effort and no little expense has resulted in attractive change. The slopes of waste have been landscaped and re introduced trees, after years of struggle, have finally established themselves. It wasn’t always so.

For most of the older inhabitants, and those brought up in its shadow during the nineteen thirties, forties and fifties, recollections of the quarry will undoubtedly be of ugliness and devastion, of heaps of chippings and cement-like waste, of unsightly and dilapidated buildings and busy railway inclines.

At the foot of the mountain, where the expressway now runs and just to the west of the railway station there was a small marshalling yard popularly known as ‘the sidings’. This was always full of row of wagons, filled to the brim with granite chippings, being constantly nudged and clanked into the correct order for despatched to the towns and cities of the Northwest England and beyond. On the beach, two loading jetties ran out into the sea and small coasters took the produce of the quarry to a hundred destinations, at 500 to 1100 tons a time. In Britain and on the continent, streets, avenues and stately boulevards were made of pen’ ‘setts’: railways ran on lines embedded in Penmaenmawr ballast and the crushed stone was used in concrete for a thousand construction enterprises.

Without a doubt though, for those living in the villages of Llanfairfechan and perhaps particularly Penmaenmawr, the most enduring though not endearing memory of the quarry’s heyday is of dust. The fine grey dust was inevitable results of the activity in the stone crushing mills and was carried up on open conveyor belts to the constantly patrolling breeze. As the wind regularly changed direction, the dust spread and impartially laid a grey white coat on the dwellings of great and humble alike. It could find a line of washing or a polished windowsill with unerring accuracy within a radius of two miles around the quarry and penetrated even the most skilfully sealed house.