Llechwedd Slate Caverns & Zip World
Mine tours, zip lines and trampolines built directly into a working slate mine above the town.
03Story
Roofed the world, then reinvented itself
The name is generally explained as “the uplands of Ffestiniog.” Everything the town became after that — slate, a railway, a national-park boundary drawn around it, and a second life as an adventure town — happened on the same hillside.
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Quarrying begins
Slate quarrying in the area began in the 1760s–80s and boomed through the 19th century. Oakeley Quarry, on the hillside above the town, grew into what was once the world’s largest underground slate mine: the industry that, as the Ffestiniog Railway itself puts it, meant the town “roofed the world.”
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A railway built to carry it away
The narrow-gauge Ffestiniog Railway was built to carry slate down to the harbour at Porthmadog. The industry declined sharply after a recession in the 1890s; the railway itself now carries passengers instead of wagons, seasonally, along the same route.
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The hole in the doughnut
When Snowdonia National Park was created in 1951, its planners deliberately drew the boundary around Blaenau Ffestiniog, leaving the town and its grey quarry tips outside: judged too industrial for inclusion at the time. Later proposals to bring it into the park have not gone ahead; the town remains the one settlement of its kind inside Eryri that the park does not actually contain.
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Manod’s secret cargo
During the Second World War, the National Gallery moved paintings out of London and into the Manod slate quarry above the town, where they stayed safe for around four years before returning after the war. Manod itself has no public visitor access: the story belongs to the town, not to a place you can walk into.
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From quarry to adventure town
Llechwedd’s Miners’ Tramway opened to the public in 1972 and the Deep Mine tour in 1979; Zip World and Antur Stiniog followed decades later on the same hillside. In 2021 the wider Ffestiniog quarrying district was inscribed, alongside five other areas, as the UNESCO Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales: Wales’s fourth World Heritage Site.
The quarry that once sent slate wagons down this hillside now sends mountain bikes down it instead.
Atlas of Wales
