North Wales Independent Mapping Project

Hannah Sweetman

8.0 Economic Geology:

The Snowdonia region has been heavily exploited since the early 19th century for an
broad range of minerals and rocks. The most extensively extracted of these is the
slate that can be found throughout the whole of North Wales.
Slate in the region was formed by regional low grade metamorphism from the
Caledonian orogeny around 400Ma caused by the closure of the Iapetus. Slate mining
in North Wales began during Roman times when the slate was used for the cladding
on houses and at the fort at Caernarfon. Throughout history, North Wales has
produced the greatest slate extraction for the United Kingdom, with the slate
industry rapidly increasing in the early 19th century with a change from mining to
quarrying, and in 1898 approximately 489,000 tons of slate was quarried (Lewis,
1979). The beginning of the 20th century and the start of the First World War saw the
rapid decline of the slate industry as the miners enlisted to fight. After the war and
for the rest of the 20th century the industry never boomed back to the same extraction
rates seen in the 19th century, for example, in 1973 the average annual production
was 20,000 tons (Lindsay, J, 1974).
In the mapping area there are several disused slate tips showing evidence of both
small scale and large scale quarrying. Slate shavings that were not useful for house
cladding or for worktops or flooring were discarded and thrown in piles at the side
of the quarry and are then abandoned, and there is evidence along the access road to
the mapping area of small scale abandoned slit tips [263132, 348462].

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North Wales Independent Mapping Project

Hannah Sweetman

15m

Figure 8.1. An annotated photograph displaying the disused silt spoil heap at locality 032 [263132,
348462].

Larger scale quarrying was also evident in the mapping area. To the east of Cnicht
are large mainly disused slate tips that were once part of the Croesor quarry. The
features left behind from the Croesor quarry such as the tramways shows the new
and improved techniques used in the 19th century to help boost extraction and aid
transportation of the slate down from the mountain.

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North Wales Independent Mapping Project

Hannah Sweetman

Figure 8.2. A photograph of the disused slate tips of the Croesor quarry and the tramways running
down the hillside to the valley floor, taken from the summit of Cnicht.

Also present in the Snowdonia region are metalliferous deposits mainly in the form
of copper, lead and zinc. The copper and other mineral deposits formed during the
Ordovician period when small-scale submarine eruptions occurred from the
volcanoes in a relatively quiet marine environment. The seawater around the
volcanoes was drawn into the rocks at the base of the volcano by convection currents,
was superheated and forced through small cracks in the igneous rock. These fluids
under extreme heat and pressure conditions were able to easily dissolve minerals
such as copper and when they cooled they precipitated out into the mineral veins
that were subsequently mined out. Small scale intensive mining occurred in the
region in the 19th century up to the early 20th century when the mine owners realised
that the small veins being mined was of a poor grade and was rarely profitable.

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North Wales Independent Mapping Project

Hannah Sweetman

One such mine very close to the mapping area was the Sygun Copper Mine just
1.5km north of Beddgelert. Over several decades only around 2,000 tons of ore has
been extracted from this mine and almost all of the copper ore contained sulphide
inclusions which decreased the ore quality. This detail, along with the low prices of
copper in the late 19th century meant that small scale mining in this area was
extremely uneconomic and the mine was closed down. In the 1980s the mine was
cleared out and was opened to the public as a tourist attraction (Sygun Copper Mine,
2011).

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