Descriptive Gazetteer Entry for LLANBERIS

LLANBERIS, a village and a parish in the district and county of Carnarvon. The village stands on the river Seiont, in the heart of Snowdonia, 10 miles ESE of Carnarvon r. station; occupies a romantic site at the entrance of a long gorge up to Snowdon; is overhung all round by mountains; contains several neat lodginghouses, for the use of tourists or temporary residents in Snowdonia; is the easiest, most accessible, and most frequented starting point for the ascent of Snowdon; furnishes guides and ponies for making the ascent; and has a post office‡ under Carnarvon, and fairs on 28 June and 18 Sept. The parish is traversed throughout by the route from Carnarvon to Snowdon; and contains Dolbadarn inn and castle, the Victoria hotel, the Llyn-Padarn and Llyn-Peris lakes, the Dinorwig and GlynRhonwy slate quarries, the Llanberis pass, the Cannant waterfall, the Gorphwysfa public house, the GlyderVawr, Llyder-Vawr, Moel-Eilio, and Carnedd-Igyn mountains, respectively 3,300,3,000,2,377, and 2,975 feet high, together with other summits, and with part of Snowdon. Acres, 10,431. Real property, £14,319; of which £12,793 are in quarries. Pop. in 1821,472; in 1841,1,024; in 1861,1,364. Houses, 275. The increase of pop. arose from the progress of slate quarries and lead mines. The property is divided among a few. The slate quarries of Glyn belong to Lord Newborough; and those of Dinorwig belong to the heirs of Assheton Smith, Esq. Bryn-Bras Castle is a principal residence. Llyn-Padarn is about 1½ mile long, but is comparatively narrow. Llyn-Peris is separated from Llyn-Padarn by only a short neck of land, and communicates with it by a stream; is considerably smaller, but much more picturesque; and is engirt, from its very brink, by grand spurs of the Glyders and Moel-Eilio. The lakes are very deep, and were formerly famous for char and other fish; but they have been severely damaged by refuse from the slate quarries and the mines, and by poaching on the part of the quarrymen. Dolbadarn Castle has already been noticed in its own alphabetical place. Dinorwig slate quarries are the most extensive in Wales, excepting those of Penrhyn; have been worked to the depth of 300 perpendicular feet; produce, on the average, about 1,200,000 tons of slates a year; are worked by means of powerful steam and water-mills, about 23 miles aggregately of tramways, and a large number of long inclines; and have connexion, by a railway 9 miles long, with Port-Dinorwig on the Menai strait. The rocks around the quarries, and in the adjacent cliffs, exhibit remarkable flexures of the Cambrian formation. ' ' Containing the best roofing slates in the world, and subordinate courses of grit, with rocks of igneous orign in intermixed, they are seen to fold over and plunge to the ESE, so as to pass under the great and massive succession of schists which constitute the distant heights of the Snowdon range. ''The cliffs, in many parts of the Seiont's glen, also exhibit distant indications of glacier action. ' ' The rocks, when unweathered, are round and mammillated, and their smooth surface sometimes grooved, the striations running NW in the direction of the valley. ''The Llanberis pass, upward from the village, exhibits more wild grandeur than almost any other gorge or glen in Great Britain; is traversed, for nearly 4 miles, by a road overhung, on each side, by precipices and cliffs of mountainous altitude, sometimes 2,000 feet high, and crowned with peaks; and is strewn, over slopes and bottom, with the debris of shattered slate, fallen from the precipitous crags above. At Pont-y-Cromlech, 1¾ mile from the village, is a large block of fallen stone, misnamed a cromlech, and formerly called Ynys-Hettws, from the fact of an old woman, called Hetty, having lived amid its angles; and here ' ' bosses of felspathic porphyry rise like little hills in the middle of the valley, sometimes like miniatures of that behind the Grimsel; ''and opposite this a deep ravine, called Cwm-Glas, strikes off into the very core of Snowdon, and terminates there at the precipices of Crib-y-Ddysgyl. Professor Ramsay pronounces this ravine the wildest in Wales, ' ' bounded on three sides by tall cliffs and mountain peaks, in the midst of which lie two little deep clear tarns, 2,200 feet above the sea, each in a perfect basin of rock, resembling on a small scale the Todten See and the lake behind the hotel of the Grimsel. ''Numerous reaches of romantic scenery, besides that of Llanberis pass, may be explored from the village.-The living is a rectory in the diocese of Bangor. Value, £182. Patron, the Bishop of Bangor. The church is one of the most picturesque and interesting buildings in Carnarvonshire; has a remarkable timber roof of the 15th century, resembling a ship with the keel uppermost; and was recently well restored. The Queen, when Princess Victoria, visited Llanberis in 1832.


(John Marius Wilson, Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870-72))

Linked entities:
Feature Description: "a village and a parish"   (ADL Feature Type: "populated places")
Administrative units: Llanberis AP/CP       Carnarvon RegD/PLU       Caernarvonshire AncC
Place: Llanberis

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