Abandoned Wales...

[pyoor_excuse]

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.

Comments

[howlsthunder.livejournal.com]

wow.... those are amazing - we don't have things like that in America, and especially not in Alaska. The oldest buildings here are probably the Russian orthodox churches from the 1700's, but those are wooden and still standing and in use. No stone buildings.

The pictures are amazing - the buildings, rather - some of those look absolutely HUGE for people back then. It's gotta take EFFORT to build something well out of (what is it, slate? shale?) and to just leave it abandoned like that....

[pyoor_excuse]

Aye, it's amazing how different the cultures were really; although, obviously, Alaska's a bit more inhospitable than the UK...

The buildings must have taken a phenominal amount of effort, you've got to remember that they're 450meters up a mountain; and yet there's a huge track built by the miners all the way up there. The engineering feats of previous centuries really make the stuff we do now, with the aid of huge cranes and technological advancement seem piddly small.

Mind you, they did tend to treat humans as a disposable asset.

The mines (and levels) there were slate (although copper, zinc and various other things have been mined on snowdon since the bronze age) but I'd guess they're built of some sort of Gritstone, and were once roofed in slate (the majority of which has disappeared and is presumably off being reused somewhere else. Ahh, recycling).

[howlsthunder.livejournal.com]

ROFL -- uhh, Russians aren't Alaska culture, per se. The different tribes of Eskimo indians are the indiginous cultures -- Inuit, Yu'pik, Haida, Athapaskin, Tlingit, Aleut.... They have different means of building homes - like, the coastal tribes would dig into a hill or down into the ground and put a roof over that. Or build sod walls in a dome-fashion. Tribes with acess to forests built houses out of wood. I don't know what the oldest surviving building IN Alaska is, really, since wood rots. And if you don't count the Russians, white folk didn't really get here til the gold rush era at the end of the 1800's. Some of those wooden structures are still around.

Yeah, mines are particularly fascinating to me, too - - just the mines we have here in Alaska stun me, and those were built in the last 150 years! Buildings clear up on a mountain ridge that you literally have to climb to... if you have to CLIMB to something, how the HELL did they get all the equiptment up there before the advent of helicopters?!? Crazy!

I wish we could all go to Kennicott. You'd have to come here in the summer for that. It's an old copper mine in the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park, near the Canadian border. The mine was the largest copper strike in the history of the world and when it was shut down it was STILL producing 98% pure copper. It also has the distinction of having the tallest wooden structure in all of the Americas, which is the mill building. Kennicott is in much better condition than Independence Mine (the big gold mines in Hatcher Pass near Palmer) and in a gorgeous location. I mean, Hatcher Pass is gorgeous but the area around Kennicott is damn near surreal.

[pyoor_excuse]

Um, that's what I meant. The Eskimos and the native americans; the staggering difference between the cultures never fails to amaze me.

Russians and Europeans, well, we're all much of a muchness in many ways :)

[howlsthunder.livejournal.com]

*pokes you*
The Eskimos *are* native Americans. :P