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Updated: June 1, 2025
Jack Copley declared that it made capital sense, and sounded as if it had happened exactly as stated. Perhaps you will agree with him: . . . We left Bettws-y-Coed yesterday morning, and coached thirty- three miles to this point. I always enoyw a Festiniog yn any country, and my hheart beat hhigh with anticipation.
Charles Spooner, affords sufficient proof that narrow gauge railways are not only of great utility, but may be also very remunerative. In Wales the first narrow gauge railway dates from 1832. It was constructed merely for the carriage of slates from Festiniog to Port-Madoc, and some years later another was built from the slate quarries at Penrhyn to the port of Bangor.
I was about to take the broad road, which led round the hill, when she inquired of me where I was going, and on my telling her to Festiniog, she advised me to go by a by-road behind the house which led over the hill. "If you do, sir," said she, "you will see some of the finest prospects in Wales, get into the high road again, and save a mile and a half of way."
Grand Pipe iron ladder of the abandoned graphite-mine at Barrowdale in Cumberland, half-way up a mountain 2,000 feet high; and visited where cobalt and manganese ore is mined in pockets at the Foel Hiraeddog mine near Rhyl in Flintshire, and the lead and copper Newton Stewart workings in Galloway; the Bristol coal-fields, and mines of South Staffordshire, where, as in Somerset, Gloucester, and Shropshire, the veins are thin, and the mining-system is the 'long-wall, whereas in the North, and Wales, the system is the 'pillar-and stall'; I have visited the open workings for iron ores of Northamptonshire, and the underground stone-quarries, and the underground slate-quarries, with their alternate pillars and chambers, in the Festiniog district of North Wales; also the rock-salt workings; the tin, copper and cobalt workings of Cornwall; and where the minerals were brought to the surface on the backs of men, and where they were brought by adit-levels provided with rail-roads, and where, as in old Cornish mines, there are two ladders in the shaft, moved up and down alternately, see-saw, and by skipping from one to the other at right moments you ascended or descended, and where the drawing-up is by a gin or horse-whinn, with vertical drum; the Tisbury and Chilmark quarries in Wiltshire, the Spinkwell and Cliffwood quarries in Yorkshire; and every tunnel, and every recorded hole: for something urged within me, saying: 'You must be sure first, or you can never be yourself.
About an hour's walk from Tan y Bwlch brought me to Festiniog, which is situated on the top of a lofty hill looking down from the south-east, on the valley which I have described, and which as I know not its name I shall style the Valley of the numerous streams.
Passing through a tollgate I found myself in a kind of suburb consisting of a few cottages. Struck with the neighbouring scenery, I stopped to observe it. A mighty mountain rises in the north almost abreast of Festiniog; another towards the east divided into two of unequal size.
From him I learned that he was a farmer of the neighbourhood, that the horse tied before the door belonged to him, that the present times were very bad for the producers of grain, with very slight likelihood of improvement; that the place at which we were was called Rhyd y fen, or the ford across the fen; that it was just half way between Festiniog and Bala, that the clergyman of the parish was called Mr Pughe, a good kind of man, but very purblind in a spiritual sense; and finally that there was no safe religion in the world, save that of the Calvinistic- Methodists, to which my companion belonged.
But Borrow's temperamental method where he undertakes to do more than sketch his environment in the blurred large method corresponding to ordinary passing impressions is the rhetorical sublime of this mountain lake between Festiniog and Bala: "I sped towards it through gorse and heather, occasionally leaping a deep drain. At last I reached it. It was a small lake.
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