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Penmaenmawr
Uplands
Historic background ,
Historic
landscape characteristics
Though the
fourteenth century Record of Caernarvon records eight free gafaelion (holdings)
in the township of Dwygyfylchi, maps of the eighteenth century reveal the
paucity of settlement along this coastal strip, though a small nucleated
settlement may have existed around St Gwynan's church and at the foot of the
road through the Sychnant pass. The local family of consequence in the
eighteenth century were a branch of the Coetmors, and lived at Ty Mawr. Their
last survivor sold the estate to one George Thomas Smith, who constructed a new
house called Pendyffryn nearly two miles away, thereby earning the praise of
Edmund Hyde Hall for having given "a polish and a social look to a tract that
was heretofore sufficiently desolate." Pendyffryn was later inhabited by Samuel
Dukinfield Darbishire, secretary of the Chester and Holyhead Railway Company,
who was responsible for much of the subsequent development of Penmaenmawr as a
community. The existing settlements at Penmaenmawr and Dwygyfylchi both expanded
rapidly in the nineteenth century. At Penmaenmawr an initial quarry-workers'
settlement of 1838 on the newly-built post road grew into a substantial town,
housing both holidaymakers and quarry families.
A ridge of upland
that extends from Conwy Mountain (Mynydd y Dref) in the north-east to the
uplands around Bwlch y Ddeufaen in the south-west. This area shows evidence of
human settlement from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century.
Immediately to the
south east of the Penmaenmawr outcrop lies a tight knot of ritual/ceremonial
monuments with the embanked stone circle of the Druid's Circle as their
centrepiece. The monuments lie near a purported Bronze Age trackway that
traverses the plateau from the Afon Ddu valley in the west to the Conwy Valley
in the east. Immediately below the plateau, the trackway bisects a small
cemetery of ruined barrows. A second Bronze Age trackway links Aber and the
Conwy Valley via Bwlch y Ddeufaen. The two trackways are further conjoined by at
least two north/south cross-routes. The most westerly cross-route flanks the
cairn field of Bryniau Bugeilydd, a group of low stone and turf covered
sepulchral mounds. Within the same area there are numerous unenclosed and
enclosed hut groups of round houses in association with lynchet boundaries and
field systems which may be pre-Iron Age. The road through Bwlch y Ddeufaen was
in use in Roman times, and was still a through route until the late eighteenth
century.
The Iron Age is
represented by the hillfort at Castell Caer Lleion on Conwy Mountain.
Upland land use in
the Medieval and Modern periods is associated with the seasonal movement of
stock from the lowlands in winter to the higher pastures in summer. There is
also evidence for peat-extraction, and small-scale quarrying of diorite, as at
Penmaenbach from c. 1873 until the 1940s. Millstone was also quarried on Mynydd
y Dref during the Napoleonic wars, and slate at Tal y Fan, a remote site of
possibly Medieval origin which limped on until 1914 mainly because of H.L.
North's use of its distinctive green-brown roofing slates for his buildings.
The present
workings at Penmaenmawr continue a tradition of stone-quarrying which begins in
the third millennium BC, when Graiglwyd was worked for stone suitable for
axe-making. It was the third most productive of the Prehistoric axe-making sites
in Britain, after the factories of Great Langdale and Scafell in the Lake
District and around St Ives in Cornwall, whose products vied with each other in
Neolithic markets throughout the island. The first leases which indicate modern
exploitation of the Penmaenmawr outcrop for stone are dated 1833. In the first
instance operations amounted to extracting suitable material from the
unconsolidated scree slopes, flaking them into setts, and transporting them as
ballast on ships bound for Liverpool. The early extraction pits were surveyed as
part of the detailed survey of the north slopes below Graiglwyd. Within a decade
two independent quarries had been developed, one on the Eastern flank (Graiglwyd)
and the other occupying the western extremity (Penmaen). Both quarries
concentrated on sett production although loose stone for ballast was of
increasing importance. Crushing mills were therefore established from the 1890s
onwards and production increasingly concentrated on this commodity thus
expanding at the expense of the sett making enterprises. The two quarries were
amalgamated under the same management in the early part of this century and the
joint operations linked by a quarry railway. In the late 1930s the Graiglwyd
quarry ceased as a sett production unit and the eastern workings were
accordingly abandoned.
The present quarry
at Penmaenmawr occupies the western part of the outcrop and concentrates on
producing aggregate for road construction and for railway ballast. A new
crushing plant was installed in 1983 and the present output of the quarry is
600, 000 tonnes per annum. The planned reserve of the quarry concession is
approximately 40 million tonnes, giving an estimated life span for the whole
operation of sixty years. Since quarrying has been concentrated on the western
Penmaen end of the outcrop the summit of the mountain has been reduced by
approximately 400 feet and in the process the whole prehistoric hillfort of
Braich y Ddinas was consumed in an operation that paid only minimal attention to
archaeological detail.
Historic
landscape characteristics
The town of
Penmaenmawr is characterised by quarry workers' dwellings, which predominate in
the western half of the town, and by holiday villas, boarding houses and hotels,
which predominate in the eastern half. The east-west axes of the Telford post
road, the Chester to Holyhead main line railway, and the modern A55 dominate the
settlement, and the courses of the former quarry inclines, one of which is in
re-use for a conveyor belt system to a sorting plant at the railway station,
pass through the residential areas.
The town includes a
wide variety of workers' housing, ranging from the very simple early buildings
at New York, to the Lancashire-style terraced housing at David Street and
Erasmus Street, to the attractive range of buildings for staff employees at St
David's Terrace. These, and their associated community infrastructure, reflect
the paternalistic regime of the Darbishire family at the quarry.
The resort
buildings are for the most part late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and
are laid out following the lie of the land. The broad but winding street from
the railway station to the main shopping area on the post road is especially
prominent, but other streets in this part of the settlement are narrow as well
as winding. The main street is noted for its covered walkways, supported by
cast-iron pillars, in similar to Llandudno.
The dominant
building material for both the quarry and the resort dwellings is Penmaenmawr
granite, though there is considerable use of glazed Rhiwabon brick for
decorative work. Slate is the dominant roofing material, but there is some use
of tile.
The smaller
nucleated community at Dwygyfylchi to the east is made up partly of villa style
architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and a modern
housing estate, interspersed with older agricultural buildings and a cluster of
nineteenth century dwellings at the foot of the road over the Sychnant pass to
Conwy. The substantial Regency dwelling Pendyffryn survives as an office complex
and a social centre for the caravan park established on its demesne. A
golf-course has been laid out north of the Old Conwy Road.
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