Llanfair Slate Caverns - Llanfair, Wales, UK
Posted by: 
cldisme
N 52° 50.300 W 004° 06.630
30U E 425197 N 5854864
Explore nine caverns from a former slate mining operation on a self-guided tour.
Waymark Code: WM4M5P
Location: North Wales, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 09/05/2008
Views: 22
The
Llanfair Slate Caverns offers a bare-bones and frank history of slate mining in Wales. Not that it is a bad thing. It is just different if you are not expecting it in a world oriented to a fully catered service industry.
Once you pay your entry fee (Adults: £4.50 & Children: £3.50 - with family discounts available) you are issued a hard hat and a torch/flashlight and sent on your merry way into the caverns.
Along the way, you learn through interpretive signs how the slate was quarried from the hillside and who the workers were and their working conditions.
Although there is lighting inside the caverns, it is kept to a bare minimum to keep sense of the working conditions involved.
This particular mining operation only lasted 33 years (from 1873 to 1906) since the slate was of poor quality.
Today, these slate caverns act as a window into the past, but they have also been used as a on-location site for the movie "First Knight" starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere.
During the Summer months the caverns are open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. There is also a gift shop if you want to take a piece of slate home (they were the one of the best prices I saw during my holiday) and a small cafe next door if you need a snack of tea and scones before or after your visit.