INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW, XXVII: 1, 2005

The Landscape Archaeology of the Vale of Ffestiniog

DAVID GWYN

Landscape studies of the archaeology of industrialisation have now become an accepted part of the
discipline, and the ‘Manchester methodology’ as applied by the University of Manchester Archaeo-
logical Unit to the Tameside region has made possible a comprehensive narrative of regional
industrialisation that has identified the poorer members of the community as the motors of techni-
cal, economic and social change. The following paper outlines the ways in which this methodology
has been applied to other areas, particularly the vale of Ffestiniog, in north-west Wales, and
suggests ways in which the methodology might be developed.

INTRODUCTION economy, and local tenant-farming families

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became in the fullness of time major mill-

Study of the archaeology of the Industrial
and Modern period has traditionally been
dominated by technical antiquarianism and
by a preoccupation with the leading sectors —
specifically, it has been argued, with mining,
textiles and the food and drink industries
(Riley, this volume). Re-assessment of what
is, or might be, meant by industrial archae-
ology has led to much debate, but little
resolution; more than one practitioner has
concluded that it is its fate, even its mission,
to disappear in favour of an inclusive form
of post-medieval archaeology. Even among
those of us who neither advocate nor antici-
pate such an outcome, there is at least a
generally-voiced agreement that industrial
archaeology must acknowledge its social
dimension, and that the fascination with
the machine has run its course. This paper
examines one of the more potentially reward-
ing approaches to the archaeology of the
Industrial and Modern period to have been
developed in recent years, and suggests ways
in which it might be developed.
THE MANCHESTER METHODOLOGY
The University of Manchester Archaeologi-
cal Unit has increasingly taken an explicitly
social approach to the archaeology of the
Industrial period, in the form of a research
strategy which examines the process of transi-
tion from an agrarian to an industrial society
through the archaeological remains of the
period. These are then related to the contem-
porary social stratification — lord, freeholder
and tenant — of the study-area. This method-
ology has been applied to Tameside, a metro-
politan authority within Greater Manchester
which encompasses the ancient lordships of
Ashton and Mottram, where it traces the
evolution of a thinly-populated margin in the
17th century into a major industrial region by
the 19th. In the process, the cotton-spinning
towns of Ashton, Droylsden, Hyde, Mossley
and Stalybridge grew to serve a world
© The Association for Industrial Archaeology
and land-owners. The social distribution of
emergent sites indicates that the main thrust
for industrialisation came from the tenant
farmers who were seeking ways of expanding
their income, whilst land-owners continued to
invest in areas they traditionally controlled,
such as mineral rights (Nevell, this volume).
This methodology has enabled study of the
archaeology of industrialisation to move
beyond both the functional preoccupations
of traditional industrial archaeology and also
the ‘object-fixation’ (Newman 2001) of post-
medieval archaeology, to write a narrative
which can comprehend the transformative
nature of social change at this scale, at least
within this defined region.
It has never been UMAU’s claim that this
methodology could stand on its own as a
comprehensive approach to the archaeology
of the industrial period. Instead, the Unit
has looked for opportunities to apply it to
other regions, with their own distinct natural
resources and pre-industrial social and eco-
nomic structure, in order to establish how and
in what way it might be modified and refined,
and whether in turn this might inform study
of the area where the methodology was first
defined. The notion of social ownership of site
types in part informed the present author’s
study of a dual economy (small-holding and
slate-quarrying) landscape in North Wales
published in The Archaeology of Industri-
alization; yet the focus here was primarily on
the archaeology of identity (Gwyn 2004). In
2003 the present author and UMAU obtained
a grant from the Heritage Council of Ireland
to commission a scoping study of County
Offaly, Republic of Ireland, to determine
whether the ‘Manchester methodology’ was
truly applicable outside the north-west of
England, and what results it might produce in
the light of detailed surveys in Tameside and
preliminary surveys in north-west Wales. The
survey was carried out by Dr Colin Rynne of
University College, Cork, and examined the
DOI: 10.1179/030907205X50478
 130 GWYN: THE VALE OF FFESTINIOG
Grand Canal and the estate towns that grew
up along its banks (Rynne 2004). Detailed
research agenda must await the full publica-
tion of Dr Rynne’s results, but the project
concluded that the methodology which had
been successfully applied in Tameside to
explore proto-industrialisation as well as
industrialisation did also prove capable of
explaining why, even within an economy
directly locked into that of Britain from 1800
to 1922, these processes were not prevalent in
Ireland. The study concluded that, given her
extremely limited mineral resources, Ireland
worked to her strengths, and that the bur-
geoning industrialisation of Britain became
the main market both for Ireland’s agricul-
tural produce and agricultural processing
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industries.
This project in turn demonstrated that
the UMAU methodology, with some modifi-
cation, is able to interrogate not only the
archaeology of Tameside’s tenant-farmers’
successful evolution over time of the condi-
tions for sustained industrialisation, but also
a radically different case, the failure in Offaly
of an initiative sponsored by a landed élite —
the canal — to make possible anything more
than limited development. What results might
emerge from a study of a third area, one
with very different cultural traditions and
industrial potential?
THE VALE OF FFESTINIOG
As yet, no detailed study comparable to those
undertaken on Tameside has been under-
taken of any area within north-west Wales,
yet for several reasons it suggests itself as a
location in which the methodology can be
tested in the same way in which it has been
tried out in Ireland. The level of existing his-
torical and archaeological knowledge is high.
Industrialisation, based on the quarrying and
export of slate, was patchy, enabling areas
within the region that directly experienced the
process to be compared with those that did
not. It served markets world-wide, yet the
region is still distinctive in terms of its built
environment. It took place at a time when
literacy was common — indeed, when plebe-
ians were readier than the élite to put pen to
paper — so sources are unlikely to be unduly
biased towards particular monument-types.
Transport networks were all-important to the
successful export of slate, enabling compari-
son with the network of roads, canals and
railways identified in the Tameside and
Offaly studies. The Vale of Ffestiniog has
been identified as a ‘test-bed’ landscape for
the purposes of this paper because, unlike
other industrial areas within the region, no
one landowner was all-powerful, and the
interplay of the various social groupings
might be more apparent.
The precise boundaries chosen are those
of a Landscape Characterisation exercise
carried out by the Gwynedd Archaeological
Trust (Gwynedd Archaeological Trust 2003
— Figure 1). They straddle the historic
counties of Caernarvonshire and Merioneth,
covering an area of approximately 120km2.
Topography varies from the ruggedly moun-
tainous, reaching 770m aod at the summit of
Moelwyn Mawr, enclosing the upper pastures
of the parish of Ffestiniog and the hanging
valley of Cwm Croesor, as well as extensive
areas at sea-level, around the broad estuary
known as Traeth Mawr, where the Glaslyn
river met the sea, and along the Traeth Bach,
the lower reaches of the river Dwyryd.
In terms of its post-medieval development,
the story, at least in broad outline, is relatively
straightforward. Statistics are elusive,
because the area does not fit neatly into the
parish structure, but it is clear that in the mid-
18th century the great majority of the land
was held by a comparatively small number
of landowners, all Welsh, ranging from non-
residents like the comparatively wealthy
Wynns of Glynllifon and the impecunious
Wynnes of Peniarth through the resident
families — Gryffydd of Tan y Bwlch,
Williams-Ellis of Plas Brondanw — to
squireens like Humphrey of Coed Cae Du.
The freeholder/yeoman class was practically
unknown, though some of the tenant-farmers
were comparatively wealthy men, as both
documentary evidence and the archaeology
of their substantial farmhouses makes clear
(Gwynedd Archaeological Trust 2003). Even
so, the social grouping which most clearly
affected the area in the late 18th and early
19th centuries were the landowners, at least
from when two arrivistes made their home in
the area, one through marriage, one through
purchase.
In 1789 William Oakeley (1750–1811), the
son of a Shropshire clergyman (and nephew
of a Governor of Madras), married Margaret
Gryffydd of Tan y Bwlch, the estate which
dominated the parish of Ffestiniog. He and
his son William (1790–1835) were keen build-
ers, not only reconstructing their own home,
Plas Tan y Bwlch, but also creating the mark-
edly gentry village of Maentwrog at the tidal
head of the Dwyryd nearby. This river had
already seen a long trade; from when records
begin in 1750, there were regular exports of
slates and hardwoods, especially oak, as well
as imports of limestone, culm and consumer
goods (Lewis 1989).
The other was William Madocks (1773–
1828), of a Flintshire family, who bought a
small estate at the mouth of the Glaslyn in
1798 and secured an enclosure act. As well as
building the Italianate village of Tremadoc
(‘Madocks’ town’) nearby, between 1808 and
1813 he built an embankment, ‘the cob’, to

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drain the estuary mouth. Fortuitously, the
diverted river scoured a harbour where it
entered the sea through Madocks’ new sluice
gates, deep enough at least for small sailing
ships to enter. Quays were built here from
1824, and the town of Portmadoc (now
Porthmadog) grew up around them (Beazley
1985).
The creation of the harbour enabled the
slate quarries in the hinterland to develop.
Slate had been systematically worked in the
upper part (the blaenau) of the parish of
Ffestiniog since about 1760, and the industry
had developed in the early 19th century with
the arrival of experienced quarrymen from
the English Lake District and the investment
of entrepreneurs such as Lord Palmerston,
who retained an active interest in the Welsh
Slate Company quarry from the 1820s until
his death in 1865. A more transient interest
was that of Nathan Meyer Rothschild, whose
Royal Cambrian Company only operated
from 1825 to 1827, though he bequeathed
a precipitous cart-road up the slopes of
Moelwyn Mawr known to this day as ffordd
yr iuddew mawr, ‘the road of the great jew’.
Export initially was by packhorse and by
cart down to the Dwyryd, whence river boats
took slates to sea-going ships, initially for
transfer in open waters. Porthmadog offered
a more sheltered transhipment point, and
from 1836 the quays here were served by a
railway which gave a more or less direct
INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW, XXVII: 1, 2005 131
connection with the quarrying areas. Every Figure 1.
penny of its original capital came from Map of the area.
Ireland, and the registered office was in Dame
Street, Dublin. Initially only one quarry made
use of it; it was not until 1868 that the last
one pensioned off its carters and boatmen. As
it was, it only very briefly had an effective
monopoly of its traffic, as both the London
and North Western and the Great Western
railways made their way to Blaenau in 1879
and 1881 respectively, but it was this line, the
famous Festiniog Railway, which in the 1860s
and 1870s attracted worldwide attention as a
prototype for a cheap form of secondary rail-
way engineering. Since 1954 it has again made
a name for itself as having, against the odds,
re-opened with volunteer labour and regained
its original terminus at Blaenau Ffestiniog
despite the destruction of part of its earlier
route.
When the railway opened it ran through
a barely populated landscape; yet within two
generations towns which ultimately merited
UDC status had come into being at its lower
and upper terminus (the harbour town of
Porthmadog and the quarry town of Blaenau
Ffestiniog respectively), and a substantial
dormitory village settlement in between, at
Penrhyndeudraeth. This was built by David
Williams (1799-1869), a tenant-farmer’s son
who became a solicitor and managed the
Madocks estate, in the process acquiring
property of his own, and building his own
 132 GWYN: THE VALE OF FFESTINIOG
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Figure 2. mock-baronial castle nearby, at Castell
Ty r’uncorn Deudraeth. Williams, who became an MP
(‘one-chimney house’) and sent his son to Eton, is in this sense a
(Blaenau Ffestiniog classic example of the tenant-to-landowner
© Falcon Hildred).
switch which the Manchester methodology
identifies, but his rise was from the middle
ranks of local society and was achieved as an
administrator rather than as an entrepreneur.
The expansion of the slate industry went
on until the end of the 19th century, and was
followed by a long 20th-century decline, only
arrested by tourism and the establishment of
pumped storage and nuclear power schemes
in the 1960s. Other 20th-century influences
include Portmeirion, where the architect
Clough Williams-Ellis (1883–1978), himself
of a local landowning family, perpetuated
the area’s tradition of designed landscapes
by creating the Italianate fantasy village of
Portmeirion on David Williams’ old demesne
(Williams-Ellis 1991).
Enough has been said to suggest that the
hand of the various social groupings is likely
to be evident in what is still, visibly, a 19th-
century landscape. Can we, by asking who
were the agents of change within this land-
scape, and establishing the time-scale to
which they worked, establish a narrative of
industrialisation for this area in the same way
that the methodology has made possible in
both Tameside and Offaly?
Leaving aside for the moment the problems
in relying on the RCHME Thesaurus classifi-
cation (a point made by David Cranstone in
his review of From Farmer to Factory Owner
[Cranstone 2004]), it is clear that new, distinc-
tively ‘industrial-period’, monument-types
emerge at the end of the 18th century and at
the beginning of the 19th — late compared to
Tameside and even Offaly. The first workers’
terrace made its appearance in 1809 (the first,
so far as is known, in north-west Wales), on
Madocks’ estate at what became Porthma-
dog, a row of three dwellings with distinctive
foundry type windows (SH 5722 3849). On
the other side of the estuary, at much the same
time, Madocks built a two-storey regency-
style barracks for the workmen constructing
the cob (SH 5848 3791). These might be
accounted anomalies, the effusions of a
landowner prone to architectural whimsy and
with a developed sense that workmen should
have their share of the improvements he was
bringing to the area. Yet even in remote
Blaenau Ffestiniog, there were exceptions to
the vernacular rule. The oldest surviving
industrial house (in the sense that it was built
for industrial workers) dates from 1825, and
is a central chimney house of a style that
ultimately dates to a renaissance gentry
pattern (Figure 2), of which other examples
are to be found elsewhere on the Newborough
estate.
As housing styles developed, several differ-
ent idioms become apparent. Porthmadog
builders, doubtless taking their cue from the
agent of the Tremadoc estate, continued to
build in the Regency style along broad,
straight streets until the end of the 19th cen-
tury. In Blaenau Ffestiniog, though terraced
housing is evident as early as 1838, the older
parts of the town are still made up of vern-
acular cabins. It is not until the 1860s that
terraced houses predominate, erected by
speculative builders to a distinctive pattern
that is not local in inspiration, characterised
by height rather than width or depth and with
prominent pointed dormers (Roberts 1988).
The same move away from purely vernacu-
lar idioms to imported or learned styles is
found in the archaeology of religious dissent
within the area. Hen Gapel (‘old chapel’, SH
7114 4261), built in 1784, the first in
Ffestiniog parish (Owen, 92) and the oldest
survivor, looks little different from the ver-
nacular houses in which its first congregation
lived. This is broadly true of most of the first
generation of dissenting chapels in Wales,
though predictably, an early exception to this
rule is to be found within this area, and was
built under Madocks’ sponsorship. Peniel in
Tremadoc (SH 5624 3988) was constructed
for the Methodists just as they were making
the final break with the Church in 1811, and
is based on the design of Inigo Jones’s chapel
in Covent Garden. It was at the time unusual
in having a clear patrician hand in the design
of a nonconformist place of worship, and
though it set the style for what was to become
the dominant pattern of Welsh chapel
architecture (a rectangular-plan structure

with an ornamented façade facing the street),
for many years Peniel remained exceptional
in Welsh terms as well as within the locality.
This basic plan was only adopted in the late
1850s, when a crop of large self-confident
chapels came to be built, both locally and
all over Wales, reflecting the work of profes-
sional architects. Several examples remain in
use; since 1860 Porthmadog’s Independents
have worshipped in a ‘spacious sanctuary’
(Figure 3) designed by the Revd Thomas
Thomas, a minister of the connection, and a
prolific chapel-architect, which makes use of
his distinctive halo-arch front (Hughes 2005).
Some of the materials were local, such as
blue stone from a local quarry, but others
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came from further afield. Grey marble from
Penmon in Anglesey went into the façade,
though again it is likely that the pine timber
was from Canada (Congregational Yearbook,
1860, 269). As well as the distinctive local
stone, specialised building materials are to be
found in other public buildings in Porthma-
dog, such as the Scandinavian rock known to
later generations of geologists as ‘montague-
burtonite’ because that ‘tailor of taste’ chose
it for his retail outlets across Britain.1 What
is not clear is whether these were specially
imported to Porthmadog or brought in as
ballast and worked over by enterprising
stone-masons.
The use of imported material was not
confined to civic infrastructure, and began at
much the same time. Small, often experimen-
tal, slate mills had been built in or near the
quarries since the 1820s, but it was only in
the 1850s that these were followed by large
integrated mills, in which all the processes of
sawing and splitting were carried out under
one roof. Their walls were slate slab, but the
roof-timbers were brought in by sea. From
this period also dates the fan-tail viaduct
which formerly connected two parts of the
Welsh Slate Company’s quarry (Figure 4 [SH
6961 4672] — ab Owain 1992). It was built
by Thomas Williams the quarry joiner but
designed, almost certainly, by Charles Easton
Spooner, the Festiniog Railway’s engineer,
who had served his apprenticeship with
Brunel on the Taff Vale Railway. Brunel went
on to build many timber viaducts on masonry
piers, to a similar, though not identical, plan
(Binding 1993, esp. 79–83). It was not just
material that came from outside the area.
The photograph of the train in Portmadoc
station around 1870 (SH 5711 3837 —
Figure 5) illustrates this point. The mise-en-
scène is iconic — one might say, quintes-
sentially Welsh, with its narrow gauge steam
locomotive, and one of the distinctive locally-
built and -crewed sailing ships, whose masts
are just visible, in the harbour. Yet to say so
obscures as much as it reveals. There is little
INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW, XXVII: 1, 2005 133
Figure 3.
Thomas Thomas’
chapel for the
Independents,
Porthmadog.
that is demonstrably local or regional here.
Leaving aside the significance of the London-
built locomotive and the Birmingham-built
carriages, the passenger accommodation and
the public area contain many of the common
cultural elements of the mid-19th-century
railway station –- the gas lighting, and the dis-
tinctive railway architectural features, such
as the ornamented barge-boards, patterned
roofing slates, and decorated finials. Possibly
the timbers in Ebenezer Roberts’ shipyard
in the foreground are from neighbouring
Ardudwy, in southern Merionethshire, but
they are at least as likely to be from the Forest
of Dean or the New Forest, if not British
North America Much of the ship is likely to
have been built of imported material, and the
train and the station stand on ballast dredged
from most of the maritime countries of
Europe, with some addition from the St
Lawrence and Pensacola (Hughes 1977, 59–
60). One could go further, and point to other
elements of cultural novelty here –- the very
fact that the photograph formed a carte-de-
visite; the evident pride of the men in their
uniforms and work clothes, and in the jobs
they are doing.
The railway itself acted indirectly as a
sponsor within what was already a fast-
industrialising environment, evolving a
‘metropolitan corridor’ along the valley. It
dictated the location and morphology of
settlement. At Tan y Grisiau, near Blaenau,
Sam Holland (1803–1892), lessee of one of
Oakeley’s quarries, created a village for his
quarrymen which came to be built, in the
absence of any roads, alongside the railway,
often with front doors facing the tracks. It
also altered the community in less obvious
ways. Delivery of groceries to the com-
munity’s first shop, owned by a Porthmadog
captain, was by horse-drawn train, though
Published by Maney Publishing (c) Association for Industrial Archaeology 134 GWYN: THE VALE OF FFESTINIOG
Figure 4. door-to-door deliveries were made by simply
Slate rubble en- throwing parcels into doorways. The locomo-
croaches Rhiwbryfdir, tive-hauled trains introduced in the 1860s
one of Ffestiniog’s travelled too fast, so retail facilities came to be
pre-industrial
farmhouses. The
centralised at a new station where goods-
London and North sheds were built and to which road access was
Western Railway’s constructed, again shaping the community
branch line is under in a different way (Gwyn 2002, 85–6). The
construction. Beyond market halls at Porthmadog (1846), Blaenau
is the quarry viaduct (1864) were rail-served. The railway was the
of 1852 (National first, and the last, link in a distribution system
Library of Wales, wet that transformed this once-remote Welsh
collodion negative,
JTC012). valley from a subsistence economy into a
world economy, at both the ‘industrial’ level
of the primary industry and at the level of
a society eagerly embracing consumerism.
Here, the archaeologies of production and
consumption merge.2
Economic historians have long been used
to the idea that a tightly-defined industrial
region might in fact be tied in to several
‘regional’ realities, encompassing interna-
tional markets and merchant networks, just
as post-medieval archaeologists have traced
widening and contracting cultural regions
through artefactual distribution. The export
of slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog not only
affected the built heritage of towns through-
out Europe and beyond, but also made avail-
able non-local resources within its originating
area –- both in terms of the ‘soft’ archaeology
of financial and intellectual capital, the ‘hard’
archaeology of building materials and
machinery. The Manchester methodology
acknowledges both by restoring human
agency to the archaeological resource, and
provides a descriptive system in which the
transformative capacity of industrialisation
in this region may be quantified. Certainly,
the appearance of monument-types estab-
lishes a generational change in the Vale of
Ffestiniog from the 1780s to the 1860s, very
different from the long story of Tameside,
and the abortive industrialisation of the Irish
midlands; but is this approach subtle enough
to enable us to write the detailed narrative of
industrialisation? Can we go further, and also
accept it as a more general explanatory model
for the industrial era?
DISCUSSION
Applying the Manchester methodology out-
side the north-west of England has produced
interesting results. Offaly indicates that it
requires adaptation to make sense of the Irish
experience. The landscape archaeology of the
Vale of Ffestiniog also suggests a number
of ways in which the methodology might be
refined.

In the first place, the categories of lord,
freeholder and tenant do not, as they stand,
work in this locality, and more neutral terms
such as patrician, middling sort and plebeian
might work better. Furthermore, whereas in
Tameside capital is generated within the area,
here (and to some extent in Offaly) it appears
from outside — a process to which it is hard
not to apply the word ‘colonialism’. Whilst
both Oakeley and Madocks belonged to a
traditional landed élite and David Williams
joined it, the other sources of wealth were
very different — Liverpool industrialists,
Dublin bankers and the counting house of the
great Nathan Meyer Rothschild. This does
suggest that a fourth citizen or burgess class,
representing landless capital, might need to be
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included.
Secondly, the methodology as currently
understood is largely quantitative rather than
qualitative. This is not to say that it ignores
changes within categories, yet possible limita-
tions to this approach are highlighted by the
present paper. Without a doubt it is culturally
significant that the first local chapel should
have been built in 1784, and it is fortunate
that it should have survived largely unaltered.
But it is also significant that the form of this
particular monument-category should have
changed fundamentally in the mid-19th
century. The break with the vernacular form
comes at this stage, not in the late 18th cen-
tury, and is reflected in the extraordinary and
sudden level of change which went on in many
different ways throughout the landscape at
that time. In the Vale of Ffestiniog, cultural
discontinuity is more marked as the monu-
ment category changes form, rather than at
the point at which it is introduced.
These changes can be explored not only
by established methods such as typological
studies and artefactual analysis but also by
examining those most fundamental processes
in any society that has moved beyond subsis-
tence level, the management of resources and
the exchange of goods. It is these that underlie
the categories with which archaeologists
struggle –- with the archaeologies of produc-
tion, of distribution and of consumption, with
the social and the technocentric; it is these
that mediate the cultural space of human
society. By incorporating this approach into
the study of monument-types, details become
more eloquent, whether as building com-
ponents or recovered deposits. Also, relation-
ships between different site categories within
the historic landscape, whether of inter-
relatedness or discontinuity, become more
apparent.
CONCLUSIONS
The broad sweep approach of the Manchester
methodology, and its emphasis on the
INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW, XXVII: 1, 2005 135
primacy of the material evidence, are vital if Figure 5.
archaeologists are to contribute to the narra- Train in Portmadoc
tive of industrialisation. But it also becomes harbour station c.
1870, from a carte-de-
possible to suggest that the methodology visite (Festiniog
might write the detailed story as well. Though Railway Company
its basis is the macro-archaeology of land- photographic
scape, it has the potential to accommodate collection WP/03A).
the artefactual micro-archaeology which
Post-medievalists and American Historical
archaeologists emphasise, and to articulate
social ownership, social mediation and
exchange. On this basis, the Manchester
methodology becomes more than a model by
which to describe the process of industrialisa-
tion; it provides the archaeological commu-
nity with the means to make a distinctive
theoretical contribution to the study of this
transformative era.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to David Cranstone, Dr Colin
Rynne, Dr Mike Nevell and Dr Gwynfor
Pierce Jones for discussing the issues raised
by this paper. For specific items of informa-
tion and assistance, I am indebted particu-
larly to Steffan ab Owain, Dr John Davies of
the Countryside Council of Wales, Professor
Patricia Layzell-Ward, to Falcon Hildred and
to Adrian Gray (Hon Archivist, Festiniog
Railway Company). I also owe Dr Michael
Lewis a particular debt of gratitude for
sharing with me the fruits of his many
years’ archival research and archaeological
examination of this fascinating area.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1
Pers. comm., Dr John Davies, Countryside
Council for Wales.
2
And in recovered artefacts; a curious coda to the
archaeology of commerce and to the relationship
between artefactual and landscape evidence emerged
in the Guardian newspaper in May 2004, with the
claim that a paper bag which surfaced in a York
 136 GWYN: THE VALE OF FFESTINIOG

bookshop advertising the wares of ‘William Roberts, paper bag in England. Maev Kennedy, ‘Leafing
Family Tea Dealer, General Grocer, Flour Dealer through history: Is this England’s (sic) oldest teabag?’
&c.’ of 128 Portmadoc High Street is the oldest Guardian, 21 May 2004.

Dr David Gwyn is an archaeological consultant, and a part-time university teacher. He is editor of

Industrial Archaeology Review. Address for correspondence: govannonconsult@hotmail.com
Published by Maney Publishing (c) Association for Industrial Archaeology