Historical background
A river valley which has lent itself to the use of water power.
The mill at Felin Wen is recorded in 1475, and the area also
includes the site of a nineteenth-century mill (though identified
as a bacon factory on the 25inch Ordnance Survey map of 1914,
and now the Seiont Nurseries and garden centre) and a woollen
factory. The land here was owned by the Vaynol estate by the
eighteenth century.
Key historic landscape characteristics
River valley with mills
The immediate area is made up of the floor of the valley of
the Afon Rhythallt and
its slopes. The substantial mill building at Seiont nurseries
is a box-like structure with hipped roofs, typical of late
nineteenth-century local milling practice and very similar
to the mill at Bontnewydd. It is likely to have been rebuilt
from the remains of an earlier building, probably a corn mill.
The area also includes the site of the mill known as Felin
Wen, now a nineteenth-century building by the side of the road
from Caernarfon to Llanberis but attested in 1475, and a woollen
factory, probably the one attested in 1812. The area also includes
the mill race for Melin Bodrhual.
Back to Caernarfon-Nantlle
Landscape Character Map
