Where Have The Days Gone?!

Where Have The Days Gone?!

Yes, well; where have they gone? I haven't been lazy, gone into early hibernation, or decided to stop writing... (how could I ever do that?) ... so this is a brief resume of what I have been working on, over the past few weeks.

Visiting Barbara on her 86th Birthday in August was a highlight, and I was also working on a second piece for Welsh Country Life magazine, "The Mountain Spirit That Delights All Who Ride With Her." This has now been published, and has gone down extremely well; as a result, I've been asked to write more articles featuring interesting aspects of Wales.

I'm working on a piece about Welsh slate, with emphasis on Blaenau Ffestiniog, also known as "The Town that Roofed the World" - and I've discovered that is no idle boast. 

I'm not a geologist, so my research about how slate deposits belong to three geological series - Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian - has been very slow! but I am learning a lot. 

Slate production in Wales has been known since the Roman period. The industry grew slowly until the early part of the 18th century, but during the Industrial Revolution it expanded rapidly; by then, northwest Wales was the most important slate producing area.

The Cambrian deposits run south-west from Conwy to near Criccieth, and were quarried in Penrhyn and Dinorwig and the Nantile Valley.  

The Ordovician deposits run south-west from Betws-y-Coed to Porthmadog, and these were the deposits mined, rather than quarried, at Blaenau Ffestinog.

I have also read about a devastating fire in Hamburg, that broke out in a cigar factory on 5 May 1842. Fifty-one people died; it destroyed 1,700 houses and several important public buildings, and about 70,000 people fled for their lives. The fire was finally extinguished on 8th May, and almost 7 million marks were raised to help survivors of the fire, donations coming from Royal houses of Russia and France, and funds being raised by the cities of London, Antwerp, Rotterdam and St Petersburg, as well as donations from German writers. 

A Technical Commission was established, with a British Engineer, William Lindley, proposing a reconstruction plan for the city, and Hamburg was rebuilt quickly; building with wood was no longer allowed, and brick and stone were used for new buildings. These new regulations also led to a great demand for slate, and Germany became an important market, especially for Ffestiniog slate.

I don't want to give away too much detail about my current "work in progress," but I hope this will have whetted my readers' appetite to read more about the slate industry in Wales, Blaenau Ffestiniog's rise to great production over almost 2 centuries of operation, and its diminishing production and closure in 1955.