The Smear of Slavery on a Welsh Village

In April 2023 Cyngor Gwynedd (Gwynedd county council) announced that Abergynolwyn, a village with a population of 400 in North Wales, will in future be known by its somewhat obscure relationship with the slave trade. Abergynolwyn is in “the slate landscape of Northwest Wales”—a landscape the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) designated a world heritage site in 2021. Gwynedd council manages this landscape on behalf of UNESCO. The village sits at the southern end of Lake Talyllyn in the foothills of the Snowdon massif and beneath Wales’s second-highest peak, Cadair Idris. A nineteenth-century village in the Dysynni valley in Merioneth, it was built to house quarrymen at nearby Bryn Eglwys slate quarry, and “stands close to the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway, which served both the quarry and the village”.