‘Roof of the world’: Abandoned English village a hundred years ago still popular (photo)

In the United Kingdom, northwest Wales is home to some of the world’s largest and most productive shale mines, stretching from the Nant Francon Valley in the east to Nantle. The abandoned village of Talisarn continues to attract urban explorers. The mirror writes about it.

The photos show an abandoned quarry village in north Wales, unused for a hundred years, with overgrown ruins and a steam engine. Known as the “roof of the world” in the 19th century, the area has had a significant impact on both the lives of the people and communities living in the surrounding area and the landscape that still carries its traces today.

City explorers can visit abandoned sites here, including the old village of Talisarn, once used by slate miners. Its population was relocated further west, where about 2,000 people still live today.

Some of the old village buildings remained at the location of the stone quarries for a while and their remains can still be seen.

In 1927 the main road south of the valley was moved, but the route of the old road can still be traced. The photos show nature restoring the old village of Talisarn in the quarry of Dorothea. According to Daniel Start, author of The Guide to Wales, what remains of the ruins today looks like “Angkor Wat in Wales”.

“The only thing missing are baboons. This is a huge, wild place with many fascinating, overgrown ruins, including a Cornish beam engine and the overgrown ruins of a chapel at Place Talisarn,” he writes.

Plas Talysarn or Talysarn Hall was built in the 18th century and was subsequently modified and expanded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The house had three floors and a basement. While most of the hall’s roof is now missing, some logs remain on the south front wall.

Nearby is the entrance to the building that was once a barn and kennel and was later converted into a shower room for masons. There is an old boiler house here, the roof of which has been largely demolished, but two dilapidated Lancashire boilers remain.

Other neighboring buildings are covered with moss and tree roots. As with many other quarries, production was carried out during World War II. It declined significantly after the outbreak of World War II. The quarry, which was closed in 1970, has been under water for a long time, and the depth of the lake exceeds 100 meters in places. The site is currently part of the North West Wales Shale Landscape World Heritage Site, declared by UNESCO in July 2021.

It was the depth of the shale below the valley floor that influenced the quarrying technique at Nantle, and the only way to extract the ore was to excavate the ground and create large quarries.

Initially, Diffrin Nantle had many very small quarries, a situation caused by a large number of landowners, and over time mergers and acquisitions resulted in larger operations such as the Dorothea Quarry.

In 1820, the Dorothea quarry was opened, which lasted until 1970. The land where the quarry was located belonged to a man named Richard Garnons, but the main driving force behind the quarry in the valley was William Turner of Lancaster.

The quarry was originally named Cloddfa Turner, but the name was changed to Dorothea after Garnons’ wife. The work grew out of a series of smaller works with names such as Hen Dwll, Twll Bach, Twll y Weirglodd, Twll Coch, and Twll Fire. Over the years, these works deepened and coalesced into the large quarries that can be seen today.

In the 1840s, production at Dorothea increased to about 5,000 tons per year, and by the 1870s it had grown to over 17,000 tons. But while the future looked good for Dorothea, she faced serious problems with the floods.

Many people drowned when the quarry was flooded in 1884, so in 1895 the Afon Llifni River flowing through the valley was changed and deepened to the south of the shale works. This solved the flooding problem to some extent, but as the work deepened, the need to constantly pump water became a constant source of profit for the quarry.

Then in 1904 it was decided to replace the quarry with a Cornish beam engine to replace the water wheels, the remains of which can still be found in the village of Talisarn.

As the quarries in the Nantle Valley continued to grow, this resulted in the old village of Talisarn being abandoned and relocated to a new location nearby.

Previously Focus He wrote that the millionaire complained about expensive real estate. Kürşat Yıldırım quit his job as a crane operator and started overspending, spending over £1.3 million in the first month after winning the competition.

It was also previously reported that only four people lived in the “British Chernobyl”. Marshall Craig is one of those people who refuses to leave the area. The man lived there for the last 20 years of his life and said he would “never leave”.