1.

The remains of a deserted village built in the 1850s to serve Gorseddau Slate Quarry (NPRN 40557). A planned village was laid out after the quarry was taken over in 1854 by Robert Gill and John Harris. The village was laid out on the hillside a kilometre west of the quarry, consisting of three parallel streets with eighteen pairs of rubble-built, single-storey cottages. The streets with their straight flanking walls survive, and the ruins of the cottages stand between 1m and 3m in height. The walls along the tracks are constructed from 0.7m thick drystone. Topped with a coping of edge-laid slate their full height is approx. 1m, although they have been breached by streams and bogs in places. Traces of watercourses and garden plots are visible between the streets. The designed lay-out of the village contrasts with the severe terrain and poor drainage of the inhospitable tract of upland moor it occupies.

RCAHMW 2013.

2.

This site includes the ruins of the house built for the Gorsedda quarry manager in 1856 and the remains of a village built 1857-8 to accommodate Gorsedda quarrymen and their families, laid out on the hillside above the railway a kilometre west of the quarry. The village consists of three parallel streets with straight flanking walls and eighteen pairs of rubble-built, single-storey cottages. The ruins of the cottages stand to between 1m and 3m in height. Traces of watercourses and garden plots are visible between the streets. The course of the Gorsedda Railway runs nearby, and the quarry manager’s house is now in ruins near the course of the railway.

Though the ruinous dwellings were clearly Welsh half-lofted structures, the organisation has parallels with Scottish ‘Highland clearance’ settlements, and may have been inspired by these and other Scottish and Irish planned villages rather than by Welsh traditions and was obviously prepared in an office with no thought for the terrain. Though in plan or on aerial photograph the village looks neat and regularly laid out, the streets and plots follow every bump and hollow on a bare and rocky hillside that can have provided little sustenance. It was not surprising that it came to be described as ‘a sort of Johannesburg’ – a synonym for a wild and lawless place.

Statement of Significance:

Treforys is a deserted settlement built for quarrymen working in Gorsedda Quarry (NPRN 40557) and their families, where dwellings are set out in a planned environment, each with its small-holding plot, along three parallel streets on a bleak hill-slope. Arrangements reflect mid-nineteenth century ideas about how to house workers and their families in an inhospitable location and resemble the Penrhyn estate’s settlement on Mynydd Llandygai (NPRN 16885) as well as possibly drawing on the plans of Scottish and Irish planned villages. The prospect of the quarry provides the social linkage between Treforys and the industrial undertaking it served, and the valley landscape offers the contrast between the permanence of nature and short-lived human endeavour.

This site is part of the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales World Heritage Site, Component Part 4: Gorseddau and Prince of Wales Slate Quarries, Railways and Mill. Inscribed July 2020.

Sources:

Louise Barker & Dr David Gwyn, March 2018. Slate Landscapes of North-West Wales World Heritage Bid Statements of Significance. (Unpublished Report: Project 401b for Gwynedd Archaeological Trust)
Tirwedd Llechi Gogledd Orllewin Cymru / The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales. Nomination as a World heritage Site (Nomination Document, January 2020)
Wales Slate World Heritage Site https://www.llechi.cymru/

Hannah Genders Boyd, RCAHMW, January 2022

Site Record

Treforys Village