Stones nobody put a gate around
You climb out of a seaside town for an hour and arrive at a Bronze Age circle standing loose on open moor.
03Story
Five thousand years of taking stone off one hill
The same rock runs through every chapter of this town: shaped into axes, raised into a circle, walled into a hillfort, blasted into ballast, and finally left alone.
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The axe factory
On the western slopes of Cwm Graiglwyd, Neolithic workers found a stone that flaked cleanly and held an edge, and they made axes from it on a scale matched almost nowhere in Europe. Roughed out here, the axes travelled: they turn up in Cornwall and across south-east England, five thousand years ago. It is the oldest industry on this coast and the same one the town would return to.
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A circle, and a fort that is gone
On the moor of Cefn Coch, Bronze Age communities raised the ring of stones now called the Druids’ Circle, a name given by antiquarians, since the circle predates the Iron Age druids by roughly two thousand years. Excavation in 1958 found cremation deposits at its centre, including the remains of children. Later, an Iron Age hillfort called Braich-y-Dinas crowned the summit above, one of the largest in Europe. The quarry removed it entirely in the 1920s.
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The quarry town
Penmaen Quarry opened in 1830. The Graiglwyd stone made excellent setts, and from 1881 the works supplied railway ballast: the London and North Western Railway’s engineer had decided to ballast his track with granite. Colonel Darbishire amalgamated the competing quarries by 1888 and merged them with Trefor in 1911 to form the Penmaenmawr & Welsh Granite Co. Around a thousand men worked here, and ships loaded from the Darbishire jetty until 1976.
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The prime minister’s summers
W. E. Gladstone came here on holiday eleven times, the first in 1855, and the well-to-do followed him. A meeting in 1862, which he attended, resolved to build an English-language church for the visitors: Alfred Waterhouse designed it in the local granite, Mrs Gladstone laid the foundation stone in 1867, and it was consecrated the following year. The tower came in 1885, the Jubilee Path round Foel Lus in 1887, and in 1899 — the year after his death — the memorial at the crossroads.
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The road came through, the work stopped
In the 1980s the A55 was driven along the shore and through the headlands in tunnels. It took the traffic off the town’s streets and it took the Edwardian promenade with it; a modern promenade was built to replace it. Quarrying ended in 2008 when the Network Rail ballast contract was lost. The workings are mothballed and closed to the public, and parts of the site are slowly being returned to heathland.
One of the largest Iron Age hillforts in Europe stood on the summit until the 1920s. The quarry that paid for the town also removed it.
Braich-y-Dinas
