Down to Llanberis again

Apart from a weekly shop for food on a Sunday morning, this is my only “outing” of consequence at the moment, whereas in normal circumstances it might not merit an entry here. There are several ways of walking down the hill from Dinorwig, so you can ring the changes more easily than your shorter daily walk. This is the hillside viewed from the bottom, the old Dinorwic quarry hospital can be seen on the far side of the lake, and Vivian quarry on the right hand side. I live beyond the top of the treeline.

On the way down, you pass the bottom of Vivian quarry, which was a later nineteenth century excavation separate from the main quarry workings, here is the view from the access road to the Quarry hospital, although the sunlight is now so strong that the greenery is rather overwhelming.

Nowadays it is used as a diving centre (closed of course at the moment), and also rock climbing takes place here though there have been some rock falls in the recent years. The rusty metal “Blondin” suspended across it is a modern recreation for show purposes, not there when it was a working quarry. A little further on, again obscured in lush vegetation, is the point where two high voltage transmission lines come down the hill across the quarry to a point where they go underground across the valley floor, before reemerging on the far side of the valley.

The nearer post, with the transformers on it, is the local electricity supply at 12000V, the rather obscured one behind it is the 32000V National Grid supply to Caernarfon – I got this information some years ago from an engineer marooned on a pole near my house during some work on the line. They are shown on OpenStreetMap, but not Ordnance Survey. They must have been a daring installation whenever they were first done, and not the easiest lines to maintain, although I believe engineers are used to far worse.

Returning from the village the same way you come to the steps used by the quarrymen to get to the various levels of Vivian as they were opened up, which now carry a health and safety notice about their potential dangers.

Technically these steps form the public right of way up the hill at this point. You then come to the first level, and the incline for the quarry comes into view. This is it going uphill, although the photograph doesn’t do justice to how steep it is!

Nearby, now nearly lost in the woods, is one of the toilets that was installed for this quarry, the first such examples I am aware of. My house itself had such a “Ty Bach” installed when we first moved in, superseded by a septic tank in 1974, which has never had to be emptied.

As you move up the hill, you come to the “Doctor’s Road”, so named because it was the route by which the doctor (on horseback I would presume) travelled from his house in Dinorwic village down to the hospital when it was first built around 1870.

In fact the route is older than that, because it is shown in a sketch map from the Vaynol archives in 1788, and may have been one of the first routes for getting slate from the quarry to lakeside, a “drag route” ie by sledge, before inclines were created. The road was cut in half by the development of Vivian, and similarly for the western end of the proposed Spooner tramway mentioned in my previous article – which is still the public right of way. Clear at this point that it has been constructed but never used. It ends a couple of hundred metres further on.

You are most of the way up now, and a little further you go through an abandoned gateway which means you have nearly reached the top of the hill. It was a hot day and hard work. The change in the weather at the time of writing makes it a distant memory.

Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *