The Wider Context?

We went over to Nantlle today for a wander around the old slate quarries there. We hadn't been for I guess a good thirty years, although I wrote about the place in these pages last year. It seems that at long last, there is some public admission that there is a major contamination problem in one of the upper quarries of the group, something we two were aware of some forty years ago. It is also the reason why no-one who buys the Nantlle quarries can ever get past first base in developing the place for leisure use for the general public: the cost of cleaning up the quarry in question would simply be prohibitive and could not attract any serious finance so to do. Pictured is an example of signage on the site that never existed before, in the days when the unitary authority simply glossed over the serial failures to complete any sale of the site to commercial third parties, all of whom ran a mile when the truth of the contamination and its scale became manifest at each successive survey.

One infamous initial 'investigation' - as I mentioned in my previous piece - deemed the place to be in serviceable condition; however, subsequently, this was found to be based on woefully thin data collection and thrown out. The truth is that the pollution in this particular quarry pool is still present and clearly dangerous. The presence of notices around this particular pit flags the immediate hazard and warns explicitly against any contact with the water there. However, there is no mention anywhere of the known potential for downstream contamination of lower quarries and waterways, however small that risk might appear, and no warnings of potential hazards outside of the smaller, higher site. More investigation is still needed to assess the risks from this former toxic waste dump in the wider context of Nantlle Vale itself, as there are as many questions over the safety of the place now as there were forty years ago...