Time & Tide
By Sarah Wardlaw
Commissioned by Conwy Borough Council as part of the Creu Conwy Strategy, Time & Tide was a mixed-reality event based around the quarrying landscape of Penmaenmawr. Situated along the North Wales coastline, Penmaenmawr, which translates in English as Head of the Great Stone, is a town that I’d usually pass through fleetingly via the A55 expressway, and is a place I had always wanted to explore having only ever visited it via Google Maps, with it’s strange alien topography that swirls elegantly across the upland plains to the reduced summit of a mountain formed by igneous (volcanic) rock. The granite here is known to be some of the hardest in Britain and has been quarried since neolithic times with axes made on an industrial scale at Graig Lwyd.
Since the 1830’s, stone setts; cobbles and kerbstones had been fashioned by hand and exported across the UK and mainland Europe. Today the quarry mainly provides aggregates for construction and roads, much like the one that bypasses Penmaenmawr these days. The harshest aspects of this landscape seem to somehow blend well with the unrelenting traffic along this coastline. As a kind of vanquished heaven, I like to think it is alive with possibilities.
Shirley Cox, the director of Penmaenmawr Museum, who had shown me around the various exhibits dedicated primarily to the industrial and neolithic past of the locality, had reminded me that children used to work at the quarry from a young age. The ‘safety gear’ of the hard working quarrymen, and other ephemera, stories, and information about the community are also on display at the museum. The ‘quarry boys’, an infantry of Penmaenmawr, who also feature in Time & Tide, had met their end in a single day on the beaches of Suvla Bay during WW1.
As I became more immersed in the surrounding landscape and its history, I was thinking about the eerie co-existence of past industry and the heavy modern machinery in use today. The huge clock that has been dubbed North Wales’ Big Ben erected in the 1930s, nestles well into the woodlands as sits atop a concrete armature - reminding me more of one of those abandoned Soviet Union structures you find in Eastern Europe as it overlooks the workplace, and still keeps good time.
The ‘Pen Alps’ tour, which is organised by a retired quarry worker Ron Watson Jones had taken us up onto the main open-cast area at the quarry summit and was a unique opportunity to experience first hand it’s vast scale, and felt akin to standing within a crater of a volcano or an ancient amphitheatre that had been hewn from God’s own hands. With a sublime view across Conwy Bay and the Irish Sea to the north and Snowdonia mountain range to the south, one can perhaps imagine a magnificent musical concert or other stage production taking place here.
With heavy industry and battered trucks laden with granite having to negotiate extremely tight bends along the steep inclines of the road that snakes down the mountainside, the quarry environment is evidently not the place for the casual visitor let alone live audiences. With a small window of opportunity, therefore, the Time & Tide project took place after dark, opening up new possibilities for placemaking with light, soundscape and field recordings, amidst the forms, remnants, and buildings of Penmaenmawr’s industrial workings that offered an exciting array of elements to work with.
As a working quarry that in reality has been carved out from centuries of human toil, Penmaenmawr continues to yield to the modern world and has, arguably, given more than it could possibly take back. While we increasingly look to address environmental degradation concerns across the globe maybe we could look closer to home for a more meaningful commitment to a post-extractive transition at Penmaenmawr. The idea that art and free expression across our landscapes that can benefit communities and the wider world, while exposing us to new ideas in art and re-imaginings about what our industrial landscapes can be.