Today we mostly spent traveling from Ffestiniog to Liverpool, with a pause to visit another mine, this one four thousand years old. We also bade Wales goodbye after eight very pleasant days and not a bit of rain. The Welsh with whom we made contact were gregarious and pleasant.

The railroad journey north from Ffestiniog (on the standard-gauge Welsh railway system) was a beautiful one of mountains, forests, and farmsteads that took us to Llandudno, a popular resort town on Wales’ north coast and site of the Great Orme Head, a mountainous penninsula north of the town.

You can (and we did) ride a cable car system to the summit, changing cars at a halfway house. Once there, we had lunch at the summit house, then hiked down a trail a short ways to the Great Orme Mine. This copper mine was worked in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries, but in recent decades has been excavated (starting by removing the modern dumps) to reveal a four thousand year old mine that may have been the largest mine in Bronze Age Europe.

The Great Orme’s ores were extracted by people using rock hammers, bone picks, and candle illumination. The archaeologists think they recovered about 1700 tons of ore from exceptionally rich diggings, first at the surface, then by following the veins into the depths.

Of course with stone and bone tools, these folks desired to extract as little rock as possible. This meant following the narrow and twisting veins, often into places only a child could reach. Keeping with the idea of moving as little as possible, the ore was rough sorted undergound, and smelted and manufactured into bronze by combining it with tin at the surface. The self-guided tour into the upper two undergound levels and around the surface workings was very interesting.

Also, as we emerged from the undergound we came across a film crew visiting the site. The support crew was the usual assortment of scruffy types, while the on-camera personality was a young woman in a mid-length dress and two-inch heels. She’d even picked out a hardhat colored to match the dress. To my surprise, once they’d finished their surface bit, the lot of them, heels included, proceded undergound. We didn’t see an ambulance or a chopper racing up there on our trip back down, so I guess heels got through it alright.

After we finished the Orme Mine tour, we climbed back up to the top of the hill and rode an aerial tramway, featuring inspiring views, back down into Llandudno. From the tramway station we worked our way back to the railroad station by way of the waterfront promenade. This too was impressive in its way.

Llandudno was one of the most popular British beach resorts during the Victorian era. It was heavily invested in and visited by the English. The waterfront consists of a mile-long row of gloriously and unabashedly Victorian hotels. When they ran the world, the British knew what to do with their profits!

From there goodbye to Wales on a quick trip to Liverpool, checkin at a nice B&B—hotel a few blocks from Liverpool Central station, and a good meal and brief walk around the waterfront before dark.