Historical background
An area of crown common enclosed without legal sanction by
quarrymen-cottagers from 1798 onwards, which lay at the centre
of the only successful resistance to aristocratic enclosure
in nineteenth-century Gwynedd in the 1820s. The development
of the slate industry also led to the construction of a number
of industrial roads and railways within the area.
Key historic landscape characteristics
Small enclosures, dual economy settlement
A patchwork of small fields and their associated dwellings.
Some of these are tyddynod within a dual agricultural-extractive
economy, established on the crown commons from 1798, others
are tai moel, houses unassociated with land. In places these
coalesce into semi-nucleated or ribbon development villages.
There is a considerable variety of dwellings. Some are pure
vernacular, generally crog-lofftydd, perhaps dating back to
the earliest phases of enclosure, often with lateral extensions
of later date. Building material is almost invariably field-stones.
A distinct type is a clearly later double-fronted single floor
or crog-lofft type dwelling with markedly large windows, sometimes
with some use of brick in the quoins – suggesting that they
were constructed after the arrival of the railway system in
the 1860s-70s. It is also possible that the large windows represent
cheaper fuel, perhaps a transition from locally-dug peat to
coal brought in by rail. These may represent the work of one
local architect or jobbing builder.
Several short rows of two-up-and-two-down houses were also
noted, though invariably making use of local materials. There
are some modern dwellings, and other twentieth-century structures.
There is much ‘make-do-and-mend' building, using timber and
corrugated iron as well as more traditional materials.
The pattern of small, regular and geometrically laid out fields
survives. In some instances these are now used to pasture horses,
and timber rails have been added to the stone or slate walls.
The rail systems to the quarries, which continue into the
unenclosed mountain, include both inclines and sinuous contour
railways, illustrating the evolution of this particular technology
in the period 1860-1880.
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Landscape Character Map
