The Blaen y Cwm quarry was a slate quarry located east of Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales. It was first worked in some time between 1813 and 1818 and sporadically after that until 1914. The quarry was connected to the Ffestiniog Railway at via the Rhiwbach Tramway.
History
Blaen y Cwm and the nearby Cwt y Bugail quarry are both situated on Blaen y Cwm farm, an area of around in Penmachno which was owned until the 1860s by the Wynne family of Peniarth. The Wynne family attempted to sell the farm in 1813 by auction, and the sale document mentioned that veins of slate ran through the property. The farm did not sell, but quarrying probably began shortly afterwards and the first indication of quarrying activity on the Blaen y Cwm site is a map from 1818 that shows a modest quarry there. These early workings continued for some years on a small scale, for the farm was again offered for auction in 1826, when it was noted that a 'valuable slate quarry has been opened', but again a sale did not occur. Thomas Roberts, who lived at Betws-y-Coed but later moved to Penmachno, was the first person known to have worked the quarry, creating one of the upper levels, which was probably the quarry site later known as Gregory's Twll, close to the route of the tramway branch which later served Bwlch y Slaters quarry.
After a period when there is no evidence that any activity took place, with part of the quarry being abandoned in 1834, the quarry was leased for 21 years to Captain Adam Gregory in 1838. Gregory originally came from Tal-y-cafn, but by 1838 was living in Worksop, north Nottinghamshire, and he also held the lease for Cwt y Bugail as well as a number of other Welsh mines and quarries. Despite spending considerable sums of money on developing the site, Gregory's operations were not a financial success and in 1849 he surrendered the lease to Blaen y Cwm, after he fell behind with the rent payments.
In 1853, brothers Thomas and James Swinton Spooner, both sons of the Ffestiniog Railway's engineer James Spooner, leased the mineral rights of Blaen y Cwm for two years. The renewed the lease in 1855 but surrendered it in 1857. The Spooner family planned to extend the Ffestiniog Railway to the nearby Rhiwfachnoquarry, with branches to serve the local cluster of quarries at Blaen y Cwm, Cwt y Bugail and Rhiwbach. Despite a bill being put before Parliament in 1854, the scheme was dropped. The quarry does not appear to have been worked at all during this period.
In 1861 a new takenote for Blaen y Cwm was granted by Wynne to Hugh Beaver Roberts of Bangor. Roberts was a solicitor, although he was also involved in many slate quarrying enterprises throughout the region, including the construction and ownership of the Croesor Tramway serving quarries to the west of Blaenau Ffestiniog, and was chairman of the George Hotel Company in Bangor. The takenote allowed him to extract minerals for three years. Roberts then sold half of the rights to an engineer from Bangor called Joseph Haywood, another engineer from London called Robert Lecky, and a London-based sharebroker called John Taylor. For the half share, he received £2,500 together with shares in a company proposed to run Cwt y Bugail quarry nominally worth another £2,500. In 1866, Wynne granted two leases to Roberts and his associates, backdated to when the takenote ran out in 1864, and lasting for 42 years. One covered the northern half of the area, on which the Cwt y Bugail quarry developed, and the other covered Ffridd Nant, some on which the existing and future development of Blaen y Cwm quarry took place. In a series of dubious transactions, the Ffidd Nant lease was sold on for £3,000 within a month, to Edwin Dixon and Richard Morris Griffith, a slate merchant and bank manager, both of whom resided in Bangor. After failing to sell the lease for £15,000 almost immediately, and for £7,000 a year later, Dixon and Griffith finally sold it for £6,000 to William Henry Gatty of Market Harborough in 1869. Gatty had married a rich lady, and it was her money that financed the venture.
