Qualla: Nant Gwrtheyrn

Nant Gwrtheyrn: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Llywelyn2000, CC BY-SA 4.0. The road down is called Screw Hill. It used to be unpaved, single-track, with six hairpin corners, no passing places, no crash barriers and a maximum gradient of one-in-two-and-a-half. British Pathe sent a film crew here in the mid-twentieth century and produced a short newsreel called Climbing the Unclimbable, in which a car -- driven, with visible terror, by a brave man -- successfully ascends the road for the camera. At the bottom of Screw Hill, in a steep valley by the Irish Sea, sat a village called Porth y Nant. Its people quarried granite for the cobblestones of Liverpool and Manchester. When the quarry closed in the Second World War, the village emptied. For thirty years the cottages stood roofless, occupied briefly by hippies in the 1960s. Then, in 1978, a Welsh doctor saw something else in the ruins.

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Image: Llywelyn2000 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nant Gwrtheyrn: Vortigern's Valley

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Nant Gwrtheyrn means Vortigern's stream. Gwrtheyrn is the Welsh form of Vortigern, the fifth-century British king who -- according to Bede, Gildas and Geoffrey of Monmouth -- invited the Saxons Hengist and Horsa to Britain as mercenaries and then watched as they turned o...

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nant Gwrtheyrn: Setts and Silence

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The quarry called Nant Gwrtheyrn opened in 1861, producing setts -- the small stone blocks used to surface Victorian city streets. A village called Porth y Nant grew up alongside it, two terraces of workmen's cottages named Trem y Mor (Sea View) and Trem y Mynydd (Mountain View)....

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Image: Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nant Gwrtheyrn: Dr Clowes and the Welsh Centre

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diomedea Exulans (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. In the 1970s a local trust led by Dr Carl Clowes, a Manchester-born GP who had moved to the Llyn and become a passionate Welsh-speaker, acquired the site. Clowes had a specific idea: turn the abandoned village into a residential centre where adults could come to learn Welsh by im...

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Image: Diomedea Exulans (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nant Gwrtheyrn: The New Road and the Old Walks

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Screw Hill was realigned and improved in 2007. It is paved now, and the gradient has eased to one-in-four. There are passing places and crash barriers, and the hairpins have been reduced from six to two. It is still single-track. It is still steep enough that a hire car will smel...

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Image: Public domain