Snowdonia Slate Trail, day 1: Bethesda to Llanberis

I’ve had my eye on Llwybr Llechi Eryri, the Snowdonia Slate Trail, ever since it opened in 2017, and especially since two seasoned long-distance walkers, Eirlys Thomas and Lucy O’Donnell, told me in 2021 that it was one of the best long treks they’d ever tried.  So the three of us, C1, C2 and I, have come to Eryri to walk the first half of the Trail, leaving the second half till spring 2026.

First, a confession.  This isn’t actually Day 1, but Day 2 of the Trail, which starts not from Bethesda but from Porth Penrhyn.  I’ve had to miss the first day of the walk, and joined the other two in our Llanberis B&B yesterday evening.  The long, sunny, drought-filled summer of 2025 has finally come to an end, and the forecast is for rain and wind. Yesterday’s walk, C1 and C2 tell me, was rainy, but a short and gentle introduction to the five days.  The reason the Trail begins where it does is that Porth Penrhyn was the port of export for slates mined at Penrhyn Quarry, once the largest slate quarry in the world.  Close to the port lies Penrhyn Castle, the home of Richard Pennant and his successors, the millionaire owners of the Quarry.  The neo-Norman style of its architecture faithfully mirrors Lord Penrhyn’s feudal and ruthless rule over the quarrymen and their families.

In the Indian restaurant last night the vapours from the super-hot curries coming from the kitchen nearly asphyxiated C1 and me.  We’ve recovered by morning, and the taxi takes us north to Bethesda.  We start out alongside Afon Ogwen, cross on a pedestrian bridge and then climb up a track, its stone wall smothered in mosses and lichens.  At the top is a gate, the first of many ‘slate gates’: in this case, the metal gate is sandwiched between two massive oblong slabs of slate.  On the road, behind a tall, smooth-faced wall of slate, is the Felin Fawr works, closed in 1965, with the remains of the Penrhyn Quarry workshops and the old railway terminus.

Here, paint is the new slate: as we turn towards Mynydd Llandegai we pass the Little Greene paint factory.  C1 tells us their National Trust-approved paints are fashionable in places like Richmond, London.  A couple of workers stand outside the plant, smoking, their heads buried in their phones; they don’t acknowledge us.  As we walk along, we’re accompanied by a towering regiment of black slate waste from the quarry.  A lane branches off towards ‘Tai Duon’: everything here is black.  Along the road are rows of ‘crawiau’, flat slate posts bound with metal to form fences: the first of many we see through the Eryri slatefield.

Before long we’re on open moorland.  Rain has swept in from the south-west.  It stays with us, on and off, so that our waterproof leggings don’t come off for the rest of the day.  Low cloud hides the tops of Elidir Fawr and Elidir Fach to our left, as we thread our way across the boggy land, along a path that’s indistinct at times.  This is hard country, with little to see except a single line of telegraph posts.  A sheep carcase, its fleece half-shorn, lies across the path.  Later we find a sheep’s skull, and honour its owner by placing it on top of a path marker (one with a yellow plastic cap: what we call a ‘Pembrokeshire top’).

The bleak landscape somehow puts us in philosophical mood (it should be said here that C2 is a trained philosopher).  We talk about Galen Strawson’s idea that human identity has no unified continuity over time, that our minds are simply a numberless succession of different simultaneous thoughts and sensations. We’re not convinced by this.  It runs against our sense of inner coherence of consciousness, and, if true, would take us uncomfortably close to solipsism.  But we concede that rejecting it leaves us with the mind-body problem unsolved.

Eventually we come to an unusual stile, made of long laths of slate with metal steps, and reach a lane.  Below we can see the quarry village of Deiniolen, home of so many notable people, including Gwenlyn Parry, Peter Prendergast, Eurig Wyn and Malcolm Allen.  The Trail avoids Deiniolen and works its way on rocky paths along the contours between isolated low, white cottages, with views over the lower land to the north, Ynys Môn and the sea.  Next comes Dinorwig, a scattered hillside settlement.  We take advantage of a brief dry spell to eat our sandwiches under a gaunt Baptist chapel, ‘Sardis B’, thought to be the highest chapel in Wales.  The newspaper Seren Cymru reported in February 1905 that the Revival had reached ‘old Sardis’, its pews full to overflowing with ecstatic worshippers: ‘mae’r chwarelwyr wedi eu deffroi o’r diwedd’.  Today the Revival is a distant dream, the quarrymen are asleep, and Sardis long closed.

We descend via a series of paths and through gates made of slate and ingeniously sculptured metal, and enter Padarn Country Park.  The Park is a long, deciduous wood full of twisty-trunked dwarf oaks overlooking Llyn Padarn.  After a level section the path falls steeply to the lakeside and the old Quarry Hospital, a reminder, if one were needed, of the exceptionally dangerous life of the slate workers.  The building’s now part of the National Slate Museum, and we take a look at the exhibits inside, including an early X-ray machine: the Hospital was an early adopter of new medical techniques.  As they recovered the patients could enjoy a fine view over the lake to Dolbadarn Castle on its hill, and Yr Wyddfa beyond.

The rain gathers force again.  We skirt round the perimeter of the Slate Museum, closed for restoration and extension, and make for the centre of Llanberis.  As we cross the last field we pass a train on the Lakeside Lake Railway.

Not a lot has changed in Llanberis since Ca lived just outside, in a cottage called Cwm Eilir Uchaf, in the 1970s.  Joe Brown’s is still there. Another fixture is Pete’s Eats (est. 1978), and that’s where we have a hearty meal tonight.  All meals are hearty in Pete’s Eats, since it serves mainly climbers and walkers.  One of our fellow-diners is a huge man with a leafy beard, and we wonder whether he might be related to the original Pete.