I am on the last mile or so of my walk and I stop to take a breather beside a dry-stone wall, backed by wind-blunted trees. A robin, feathers arrayed like armour against the cold wind, sings from a small branch nearby. In the shelter of the trees, the song seems unreasonably loud when compared with the size of the bird, a piercing yet fluid call to help establish a breeding territory and defend it from competitors.
The lane climbs higher, through a notch in the ridge where a wall of rock shows the steeply dipping strata. Then the view to the south opens out to deliver a panorama of the harbour town of Porthmadog, with an expanse of hills, marsh and open water beyond.
Separating land and sea is a narrow causeway, the Cob, which today carries a road and the Ffestiniog narrow-gauge railway. Built in about 1810 by the entrepreneur and landowner William Madocks, the bank was originally intended to allow the reclamation of the wild, sandy expanse of Traeth Mawr – roughly, the “great beach” – for agriculture. As a bonus, the embankment trained the waters of the Afon Glaslyn into a narrow channel, helping carve out a harbour deep enough for sailing ships to dock. Significant wealth was generated from the 1820s onwards, as quality roofing slate from the Ffestiniog quarries arrived by river, tramway and later by train, to be exported around the globe.
Safely ensconced in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, some documents of the Ffestiniog District Slate Quarries Proprietors’ Association speak fondly of these exports – a trade that never recovered from the impact of the first world war. So the slate trade faded, and before me now is a harbour given over to leisure and heritage – yet odd aspects remain. To the west of the harbour a low island, covered now by scrub and small trees, carries the name Cei Ballast (Ballast Quay). Here, sailing ships would arrive “in ballast” to keep them stable, dump tons of stone and debris, before loading with slate for export. The island remains today an interesting geological smorgasbord, replete with samples of rock aggregated from the slate-hungry countries of the world.
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