Out of Sight

Subterranean Heritage in Northwest Wales

Lecture by Alexa D. Spiwak, PhD Fellow (University of Oslo).

Abstract

Many of the hills in Northwest Wales are hollow, quarried out after more than two centuries of intensive slate mining. Since the industry died in the 1970s, dozens of mines have been left open to the surface, their auxiliary buildings left to ruin. These underground worlds exist in a state of limbo: neither tourist destination nor forbidden ground, inscribed as world heritage but left largely without formal care. In the “fruitful darkness” of liminality (Turner 1967), communities of explorers, caretakers, and vandals have made these spaces their own, curating collections of artefacts, undertaking conservation treatments, and leaving their names on the walls next to those of past quarrymen.

This lecture presents preliminary results from interdisciplinary fieldwork undertaken in the slate mines of Gwynedd County, Wales, to bring stories – both past and present – of underground slate quarries out of the darkness and into the light.