The Mountain and the Roofs — Marlene at Dinorwig

The Mountain and the Roofs

In the afternoon, Marlene walks along the terraced slate hillside at Dinorwig. From the path, the grey galleries look almost orderly: one long cut above another, edges catching the light. Then the scale becomes harder to take in. These are not lines laid over a mountain. They are places where part of it has gone.

She stops to write. Building stone went out from here; the opening stayed. A roof elsewhere and a missing piece of hillside belong to the same account, though they are seldom seen together.

The old incline runs downhill. Its straight course makes the work of moving stone visible even without anything moving on it. At Anglesey Barracks, the thought shifts from loads to sleeping space. Workers needed somewhere to rest before more work. The remaining walls do not tell her whether anyone rested well.

It would be easy to make a pleasing sequence of pictures: terraces, incline, barracks. Marlene leaves room in her notes for what such a sequence would leave out. The quarry was a place of skilled labour and a source of livelihoods. That does not make the loss of mountain small, or turn hard conditions into a test people ought to have welcomed.

The Llechi Cymru account begins with a hymn sung at strikes and rallies of the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union. She notes that connection without imagining a chorus rising from the empty buildings. The songs were made and sung by people, not by the scenery. Here, their place in the story includes workers gathering to make demands, not simply enduring their work.

Before walking on, she looks back at the steps in the rock. The light has made some edges clearer. It has repaired nothing. Her last line stays plain: remember what was taken from the hillside, and remember the people whose work took it out.