Old mine buildings - Moel Siabod

I find the old mine buildings in Snowdonia fascinating - these are at about 400m round the back of Moel Siabod. It must have been a cold, hard place to work, especially in winter. Spoil heaps and an incline are visible in this picture; the workings themselves are represented by a deep, water-filled hole in the ground.

It's a few years since we were last here, and the buildings have collapsed some more and were smaller than we remembered. The sides of the path had been partially washed away as well, so that the spoil heaps are encroaching more than they used to. It's interesting and a little sad to see everything blending back into nature.

On the way up here we went past a couple of cottages which had been seriously run down and empty for years. We've come red, with Brew Apprentice, that it would be good to see them done up and used. Well now they have been done up - as holiday cottages of course.... They're probably a bit high up and remote for a lot of people, but for sure there's controversy around the use of buildings for holidays rather than for local people in National Parks. And I guess that there's going to be a lot of controversy around fracking as well given recent announcements, so this blip links the past to the present in a couple of ways...