15/10/2026
The Great Orme Mines -
Discovery: Uncovered in 1987 during a surface landscaping scheme, rewriting the history of early British metallurgy and prehistory.
β’ Scale: Features over 5 miles (8 km) of underground tunnels, galleries, and shafts carved using stone hammers, bone, and antler tools.
β’ Visitor Tour: Visitors can explore a self-guided 200-meter route through 3,500-year-old underground passageways leading to the massive Great Cavern, taking roughly 45 minutes.
β’ Surface Sights: Includes a 4,000-year-old opencast mine, a smelting shelter demonstration area, a Victorian-era 145-meter (470-foot) deep mine shaft, and an informative Visitor Centre.
βοΈ Regular followers of our page will already know how in 1849 Victorian miners of the Great Orme broke into a massive cavern where they saw stalactites the size of tree trunks. So I am not going to rehash what Iβve already posted before, but instead quote from a correspondence dated February 5th 1907 where William Hughes writes to his nephew, local historian and journalist Arthur Hughes. Williamβs father had been a miner of Great Orme.
In his letter William is preserving what he recalls of the minersβ discoveries:
ββ¦when I was lad I used to listen to the miners talking. On their way cutting levels deep in the bowels of the mountain, continuing the veins of the ore, would sometimes come across a level being worked by the old Romansβnot Britons. They use to say Gwaith yr hen Rhufeiniaid: and as you are aware dripping waters in time will form by petrifying different kind fossilβin shape of miniature treeβand some of the recesses found some stone with places upon them where it could held to strike the kind of chisel.β* [sic]
Some of what William recalls here, particularly when he mentions the βtreesβ, sounds as though he may have overheard the miners talking about the discovery of the cavern on this day in October 1849. He mentions the stalactites found inside along with ancient tools the miners also discovered. Youβll notice how William attributes this ancient excavation to being Roman, not Bronze Age as we now know it to be. Ancient discoveries made at the site the Victorian miners often attributed as being Roman and sadly were seldom preserved. By 1858 this cavern is reported as having been destroyed by blasting for copper ore and any artefacts that were within it are now lost.
Thankfully the Bronze Age cavern our visitors view today survived (pictured), allowing us to gain insight inside the enormous scale of the Bronze Age mining operation at the Great Orme.
*Conwy Archives, Conwy Country Borough Council, record reference: CX140/1/3
