Okay, so these are the abandoned buildings shots from my trip to wales. There were several abandoned cars too, which I wanted to snap, but a navigation error on my part lopped out the important part of the A470 on the way back.
The image quality isn’t great, nor’s the framing to be honest. They’re quickly shot digital camera shots, quite a lot of the shot in heavy rain – some of them got deleted because the rain was so heavy you could barely make out the object being photographed!
Near Plas Gwynant; I think. Sadly the rain made most of these photos unusable.
There were several buildings, or ex buildings around this patch; one still standing but too far into the woods for my camera (even with flash) to get even a single shot in the deluge; this one appears to have been leveled deliberately; bits of it lie on either side of the footpath.
In this one you can see the upended remains of a range / stove; sadly the lighting was terrible; but on the underside you could make out that it still had the covers for the hot-plates; the fuzzy gunky stuff on the side was once insulation.
These shots were all taken around the various tracks up to Mt Snowden; particularly around Llyn Llydaw and Glasyln. The area was once home to a copper mining I think, also there’s been an awful lot of quarrying over the years.
This last shot was taken near Beddgelert – it’s in line with a bridge over the road and a rather abruptly ending embankment – visible here as a road crossing the A4085 just below Beddgelert. I’ve no idea what it was. My first guess of being related to a bridging structure seems unlikely, ‘cos the walls are so thin….
You can see two parallel lines leading to it in the field in this arial photo, too.
That last picture is the bridge that never was…
Back in 1906ish, a company was building a railway line from Porthmadoc to Caernarfon. It ran out of money near Beddgelert, leaving several works unfinished.
Those abutments were for the railway to go over, there should have been an embankment built up to them from the bridge over the road. As it was, because funds ran out, it was never completed.
In 1923, the work on the line was resumed, but round Beddgelert, the route was changed, so as to ease the gradient. (The original route was very steep)
Those two abuttments and the road bridge now merely serve to confuse and bewilder the many visitors to the area.
Incidentally, the railway, which closed in 1936, is currently being reopened, with the completion being scheduled for about 2009
Wow, cheers for that.
They definately work in the confusing and bewildering stakes, my first thought was that they must have been part of a railway viaduct or bridge, but they were, well, in the middle of no-where.
Heh, oh yes, you can see it here: big map the railway would have gone straight down – onto that teeny chunk of embankment which presumably would have continued all the way across the field…. and given a much straighter route at a hideous gradient.
Mmm. Yes. Cheers for that.