Snowdonia National Park's boundary actually swerves to exclude Blaenau Ffestiniog. The park's designers, drawing their lines in 1951, decided the town and its surrounding mountains of slate waste were too industrial, too scarred, too un-pretty for inclusion. The mountains they refused to claim were not natural. They were made entirely of broken slate, hauled out of the holes that produced the roof tiles of half the British Empire. At its peak in the 1880s, Blaenau Ffestiniog produced enough slate to roof a million houses a year and supported a population of 12,000 people. The market collapsed; the population fell to 4,000; the trampolines arrived underground. Today the slate tips loom black and steep around the town, and if you ride a zip-line over them you can land in a cavern where giant nets let you bounce.
Slate had been quarried in this valley on a small scale before 1750. The real industry started in 1765, when eight partners from the Cilgwyn quarry near Nantlle took a lease on Gelli Farm and began quarrying at Ceunant y Diphwys, north-east of the present town. In 1800 William Turner and William Casson, both from the Lake District, bought the lease and expanded production. In 1819 quarrying spread to the Allt-fawr slopes near Rhiwbryfdir, on land owned by the Oakeley family. Within a decade three quarries were operating on Allt-fawr, and they soon amalgamated to form Oakeley Quarry, which became the largest underground slate mine in the world. Llechwedd, Maenofferen, Votty & Bowydd followed. By 1881 the town's population reached 11,274. The Ffestiniog Railway, opened in 1836 to haul slate down to Porthmadog on the coast, was one of the world's earliest narrow-gauge railways. Quarrymen lived in terraces of dressed slate cottages, sang in male voice choirs, played in brass bands, and read books in the libraries the workers built themselves with subscription pennies.
The 1890s broke the boom. Mass-produced clay tiles and cheaper Spanish slate ate the market. Quarries that had run profitably for decades lost money for the first time. Cwmorthin and Nyth-y-Gigfran failed entirely. The town hosted the National Eisteddfod in 1898 in defiance of the trend, but the trend won. World War I took many of the men and they did not all come back. In 1946 the Ffestiniog Railway closed. Most of the remaining quarries followed in the 1950s and 1960s. Oakeley shut in 1970, costing many jobs. Maenofferen lasted until 1998. Only Llechwedd still works slate today, and only on a fraction of its former scale. But there is a strange parallel story from the same caverns. During the Second World War, the National Gallery in London evacuated its most important paintings, the Rembrandts, the Van Eycks, the Turners, into Manod Quarry above Blaenau Ffestiniog, where they were stored in climate-controlled chambers carved deep into the slate. The great steel gates of the storage vaults are still in place, silent witnesses to what once sheltered there.
When the slate industry finally collapsed, the town had to find another reason to exist. Tourism arrived almost by accident. The Ffestiniog Railway was rebuilt by enthusiasts and reopened to passenger traffic. Llechwedd Slate Caverns opened tours of the abandoned underground workings in the 1970s. Llechwedd is now consistently among Wales's top five visitor attractions. More recently the slate mountains themselves have been re-engineered for thrill-seekers. Antur Stiniog runs world-class downhill mountain-bike tracks down the waste tips. Zip World Titan strings a network of zip lines across the valleys around the town, including a one-kilometre wire from the top of the Llechwedd workings. Bounce Below, opened in a cavern 70 metres underground, suspends six giant linked trampolines on stainless-steel netting in a vast slate chamber. You climb in by harness and bounce in the dim light of artificial colour. It is one of the strangest tourist attractions in the British Isles, and it works exactly because the cavern is real, mined out by quarrymen a century and a half ago to extract roof tiles for Manchester.
Eighty-three per cent of pupils at the local secondary school come from Welsh-speaking homes, the highest proportion in the former county of Meirionnydd. Most adults in Blaenau Ffestiniog speak Welsh as their first language, a higher proportion than almost any other town in Wales. Llywelyn the Great, the great medieval Welsh prince, was born at Dolwyddelan Castle just up the valley around 1173. The 20th-century artists Kyffin Williams and David Nash were drawn to the town's harsh slate landscapes. The poet Gwyn Thomas, National Poet for Wales in 2006-2008, grew up here. The town is twinned with Rawson in Argentine Patagonia, founded by Welsh emigrants in 1865. A recent regeneration project funded by the Welsh Government has placed forty-foot slate sculptures with poetry engraved on them around the town centre, set Welsh proverbs into slate bands in the pavements, and built new viewing areas pointing at the surrounding mountains. From the air, Blaenau Ffestiniog reads as a small grey town flooded by black: the slate tips, in great curving ridges and conical heaps, dominate every view. The town sits in a basin among them, the highest in Snowdonia. It rains here more than almost anywhere else in Wales. The slate keeps shining wet.
Blaenau Ffestiniog lies at 52.99 degrees N, 3.94 degrees W in southeast Gwynedd, deliberately excluded from the Snowdonia National Park boundary. The town sits at roughly 700 ft elevation in a basin surrounded by slate-waste mountains; Moelwyn Mawr (2,529 ft) and Moelwyn Bach (2,333 ft) lie to the southwest. Best viewed at 3,500-5,000 ft AGL with terrain awareness - peaks rise sharply. The Crimea Pass on the A470 climbs steeply north toward Betws-y-Coed and the A5. Ffestiniog narrow-gauge railway runs south to Porthmadog and also connects via Blaenau station to the Conwy Valley Line standard-gauge. Watch for the kilometre-long zip-line from Llechwedd. Nearest airfields: Caernarfon (EGCK) to the northwest over the Snowdon massif, Llanbedr disused to the southwest on the coast, Hawarden (EGNR) to the northeast near Chester.