Wales’ eerily beautiful slate quarries are getting the recognition they deserve | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

It’s right that these post-industrial landscapes, with their complex history, should have world heritage status

“The slate quarries are beautiful,” a friend told me, having returned from a holiday in Gwynedd, where I grew up. “They are not so beautiful when your ancestors died in them,” I said, half-joking just to see her face. The windows of my childhood home looked out at that landscape, the mountain a series of gradated ledges, like a staircase built for a giant. The workers were long gone, but I used to imagine them, hanging from thin bits of rope hundreds of feet in the air, risking their lives for a pittance, when I watched the rock climbers who flock to the area from all over the world.

Now, after a long local campaign led by bid leader Dafydd Wigley, the slate landscapes of north Wales have won world heritage status in recognition of 1,800 years of slate mining; the people, culture and language, and how the slate from these quarries, as is often said, used to roof the world. The skills of the workers, most of them Welsh-speaking, are now consigned only to museum demonstrations. I was quite small when I first watched a man split a slate with a chisel and mallet and saw the purplish sheet become thinner and thinner beneath his hands. In my father’s house there is a slate fan made by one of our ancestors as an apprentice. There was great pride in those skills, and there continues to be. World heritage status feels like a recognition of that.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3yjfu7e