After a not too strenuous climb to the summit of Cnicht, a fascinating explore of two historic slate quarries.

Date walked:  Wednesday  22nd April 2021

Distance: About 7 miles

Maps used:  OS Explorer OL 18- Harlech, Porthmadog and Y Bala and OL 17 Snowdon (or Yr Wyddfa as a new campaign would have us exclusively name it)

Guide used: Walking the Cambrian Way by George Todd and Richard Tyler (Cicerone Press)

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Paul and I had taken it easier than I had planned over the last three days and, sadly,  he had to return home on Monday  so missed out on this section. Monday was also the day I took the car into Porthmadog. The rear brakes had been squealing ever since I had left home and needed urgent attention (new disks and pads, done at a reasonable price on Tuesday whilst I re-visited a small section of the Wales Coast Path). No more car news to report.

Wednesday continued the fine spell  so I returned to the Cnicht car park where we had finished our last walk.

I don’t know why but rather than retrace my steps up the valley and do this section as the guidebook intended, I fancied a clockwise route,

Taking the road north out of Croesor, I passed a rather nice memorial seat to one  Bob Owen.  

A quick google found his biography (see link on his name). He had worked as a clerk in the quarry for 30 years so the slate construction of the seat was very appropriate.

The plaque reads “I Gifio Bob Owen, Croesor, 1885 – 1962” I gofio translates as In Memory

The sharp peak of Cnicht (pronounced Ker-nicht, translation “Knight”) looked rather sharp in the distance. Some have described it as the Welsh Matterhorn, but then there are many silly people out there.

The road section was very brief…..

…..and I turned off it onto a wide stony track through some oak woods strewn with moss-covered boulders.

It wasn’t long before I turned sharp right and began the two-mile ascent over open moorland, the now familiar Cambrian Way waymarker attached to the post of a six bar gate…..

… that I now see had a sprig of bilberry growing on its top.

You’ll have to take my word about the bilberry

If anything the mountain (if I can call it that) looked even more intimidating from here. but having climbed several higher peaks on this trip I was confident that I’d be OK and I had plenty of time to go as slow as I liked. Which was pretty slow.

For much of the Cambrian Way it had not been easy to keep to the path, but this walk must attract a lot of traffic as here there was never any doubt about my route.

The climb was steady  with only a few steep bits and as I approached the summit, so it seemed quite doable.

Hill walking is not the only fun to be had, though, and as I paused to catch my breath a young man carrying nothing but a bum-bag raced passed me.

The views were getting quite splendid…..

… and the ground quite rocky…..

….but there was plenty of room to choose where to put my feet and by 11.30 the runner was on his way back down…..

…. and I had reached the summit, followed shortly afterwards by a young couple with their dog. Cnicht is checkpoint 31 of the Cambrian Way, thus keeping me to my average of a peak a day.

Always nice to be able to ask someone to take your picture for you rather than struggle withy the self-timer.

After an exchange of pleasantries the young couple marched on….

.. leaving me to enjoy the huge pleasure of having the peak and the views to myself.

There is another slightly lower peak to climb after Cnicht and from there the land gently falls away.

At Llyn yr Ardar….

… I turned south-east, picking my way between two more small lakes…..

Llyn Cwm-corisiog

… before catching sight of the impressive remains of Cwmorthin quarry.

According to wikipedia, quarrying on the site started in 1810. In 1860 it was connected to the Ffestiniog Railway. In 1900 it was acquired by the nearby Oakeley quarry and the two were connected underground. In 1970 it closed along with Oakeley. There was small-scale working in the 1980s and 1990s, and the mine finally closed in 1997.  That is the briefest of summaries but the wikipedia entry has much more of its history.

I found the remains of the Croesor quarry fascinating, but these were even more so, several of its buildings being wonderfully intact.

This area is an absolute quarry-fest with at least half a dozen separate workings within a  couple of miles of each other.

Not only built to last, some of the architectural details are quite lovely.

With a decent history of the quarries in hand you could spend days here working out how they all fitted together.

Definitely a place that I would like to return to.

From here it was less than a mile to cross over to the Croesor quarry that Paul and I had passed through last week. A marker post reads that this is part of the Snowdonia Slate Trail. 

Looking back at Cwmorthin, the couple that I had seen earlier had arrived.

I gave them a parting wave but I don’t think they saw me.

On the way to Croesor quarry I passed over the double stone walled track that Paul and I had walked by; I think now that this was, in fact a dam that had created a pond to serve some purpose for the quarry.

At the quarry, Pauls installation was still intact.

I scraped a word into the slate top of the plinth…..

Perhaps it should have been Paul’s name?

…. and after a bit more poking around, made my way down the wide track down to Croesor. On the way up I was passed by an intrepid cyclist.

I offered the greeting that he was going to have fun going back down

So to end what was a very enjoyable day, what could be better than a lamb?

Roasted?

Many of these images are available at Getty images. Here’s a link. The prices quoted are a fantasy – mostly I get about a dollar an image through big picture buyers having what’s called Premium Access.