A Slate Saw Mill at Twll Coed Slate Quarry in the Nantlle Valley, Gwynedd

Abstract

A 19th-century slate sawing machine from the saw mill at the disused Twll Coed Slate quarry, in the Nantlle valley, Gwynedd, is to be added to the National Collection of slate quarrying artefacts at the Welsh Slate Museum, Gilfach Ddu, Llanberis. The opportunity was taken before its removal to carry out a detailed study of the machine itself and to carry out a photographic record of the mill building. Whilst the slate industry of Wales has had the benefit of much archaeological study, this has tended to concentrate on whole-quarry surveys. The opportunity to carry out a detailed recording of a slate-saw table and the mill building in which it was housed prior to the removal of the machine sheds light not only on the process by which the industry was mechanised in its 19th-century heyday but also on the way in which it reverted to smaller-scale technology in the harsher climate of the 20th century. Slate saw mills were central to this process, marking the move away from working by barely capitalised independent quarryman-proprietors to highly capitalised factory type production, and in this case a reversion to smaller production units thereafter.