Qualla: Penrhyn Quarry https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Penrhyn Quarry https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry Penrhyn Quarry: Introduction https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry/ Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the air it looks like a wound. A great stepped pit nearly a mile long and twelve hundred feet deep, hacked into the western flank of the Ogwen valley, with grey terraces stacked like the rings of an inverted ziggurat. The Penrhyn quarry was the largest slate quarry in the world at the end of the nineteenth century, and almost three thousand men worked it. The slate that roofed Victorian Britain, that travelled to Germany and America and Argentina, came out of this hole. So did the wealth that built Penrhyn Castle. So did three years of bitter silence between neighbours that has not entirely faded after a hundred and twenty years.

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/gcmn-penrhyn-quarry-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Penrhyn Quarry: Sugar, Slate, and a Title https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry/ Photo credit Geoff Charles, CC BY-SA 4.0. Slate had been worked at Penrhyn since at least 1570, when a Welsh poem mentioned the quarry, but it was Richard Pennant who industrialised it from the 1770s onwards. Pennant did not make his fortune in Wales. His family fortune came from Jamaica, where his ancestors had built up...

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Image: Geoff Charles | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/gcmn-penrhyn-quarry-sugar-slate-and-a-title.mp3 0:06 2 full Penrhyn Quarry: A Vote, a Sacking, a Warning https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry/ Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The relationship between the quarry's owners and its workers was unequal from the start, and the owners did not hide it. In 1868, eighty quarrymen were sacked for failing to vote for George Douglas-Pennant, the owner's son, in the general election. The secret ballot was not yet l...

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/gcmn-penrhyn-quarry-a-vote-a-sacking-a-warning.mp3 0:06 3 full Penrhyn Quarry: The Great Strike https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry/ Photo credit Nigel Swales, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 22 November 1900, the second strike began. It lasted three years. It is still the longest industrial dispute in British history. The conflict was not only about wages and safety, though it was about those things. It was a clash between a wealthy Anglican English-speaking landl...

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Image: Nigel Swales | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/gcmn-penrhyn-quarry-the-great-strike.mp3 0:06 4 full Penrhyn Quarry: Memory and Markers https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry/ Photo credit Public domain. In 2003, on the centenary of the strike's start, the Transport and General Workers' Union unveiled a plaque to the strikers. Modern historians have moved beyond the union ledgers and the management accounts to recover the women's lives, the families who chose hunger over capitula...

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Image: Public domain

]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/gcmn-penrhyn-quarry-memory-and-markers.mp3 0:06 5 full Penrhyn Quarry: The Quarry Now https://qualla.com/penrhyn-quarry/ Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Alfred McAlpine bought the operation in 1963 and ran it until 2007. The Irish businessman Kevin Lagan then bought it and renamed it Welsh Slate Ltd, before the Lagan Group was itself absorbed into the Breedon Group in 2018. The workforce is around two hundred. In 2019 the Interna...

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/m/n/penrhyn-quarry-wp/gcmn-penrhyn-quarry-the-quarry-now.mp3 0:06 6 full