MAY 2024 · PATINA

Dinorwig Quarry, Eryri

Llanberis, Eryri

Dinorwig operated for over a century. At its peak, three thousand men worked the seven hundred acres of terraced galleries above Llanberis, extracting slate that ended up on rooftops across the British Isles. It closed in 1969. The scale of the excavation — the walls hundreds of feet high, the tunnels disappearing into the mountain, the ordered terraces cut into the rock — is still fully present. What has changed is everything else.

Turquoise quarry pool nestled between tall slate walls covered in lichen and moss — A colour that has no business being here

— Turquoise water

The turquoise pools arrived first. Rainwater fills the worked hollows, the mineral content of the slate tinting it a colour that has no business being in a Welsh mountain quarry. Between the pool and the slate wall: lichen, yellow and rust-coloured, spreading across the stacked rubble in patterns that follow nothing except moisture and time.

The quarry is unmistakably a quarry.
Dinorwig Quarry — May 2024

Stacked slate rubble covered in yellow lichen, moss, and rust-coloured decay — Lichen following moisture and time, nothing else

— Inside the galleries

I walked through the galleries on a May morning, the light diffuse and even. The moss-covered slate columns are what stop you first — massive pieces of cut stone now entirely draped in green, water running across the carved floor at their base. The walls show their industrial origin: straight cuts, drill holes, the marks of tools. The surfaces covering them now are entirely natural.

Weathered slate columns with moss overgrowth and dark tunnel opening in quarry floor — Massive cut stone now entirely draped in green

Stone tunnel entrance framed by massive slate cliffs glowing in narrow opening — Functional once; now it frames a view

— A tunnel entrance

A stone tunnel entrance opens through a cliff face, the interior disappearing into darkness and the far end visible as a bright rectangle. The tunnel was functional. Now it frames a view.

On the waste heaps above the main galleries, ferns colonise the broken slate. A single tree grows from the top of a waste pile against the grey sky. Nothing planted it. The seed found the gap in the rock and took.

Dense fern growth on forest floor amongst scattered slate and moss-covered rocks — Ferns colonising the waste heaps above

— Fifty years of moss

The carved walls, the columns, the floors — all the evidence of the work — remain. The quarry is unmistakably a quarry. But the workers are fifty years gone, and the moss has had fifty years to make its counter-argument.