Historical background
An area apparently developed by hoteliers in the late nineteenth
century. Hyde Hall comments on the picturesque nature of the
area in 1809-1811, with its ‘florid plantations' in an otherwise
treeless area. It was then owned by the Williams family of
Marle in Creuddyn. A corn mill and a scythe-grinding mill were
established here. Two small slate quarries also operated in
the nineteenth century.
Key historic landscape characteristics
Picturesque, tourist landscape
A narrow pass in the Gwyrfai valley in which there are several
substantial late nineteenth-century hotel buildings, in continued
use, as well as some older farmhouses. Plas y Nant may be an
adaptation of the house of the Williams family. This development
appears to have been caused by the opening of the North Wales
Narrow Gauge Railway through the area in 1877, though there
was no station here until 1922. There has also been deliberate
planting of Alpine trees and of rhodod endrons,
which partly cover the slate tips. The area conforms to a late
nineteenth-century notion of the picturesque.
Back to Caernarfon-Nantlle
Landscape Character Map
