Plas Tan y Bwlch
There are 15 national parks in Britain and Snowdonia was amongst the first to be created in 1951. Apart from the Peak District it’s the only one to have a professional training centre and this is based at Plas Tan y Bwlch, which translates to ‘the mansion beneath the pass’.
What we see of the Plas today are the results of substantial rebuilding during the 1800s but the history goes back a lot further with the first house probably built in the early 1600s.
William Oakeley, a former Mayor of Shrewsbury, married into the family and was the first of many ‘William Oakeleys’ remembered as Oakeley ‘Mawr’, the ‘big’ one. It was under his stewardship that the tidal marsh was drained and embankments built to create a beautiful patchwork of pastures either side of the meandering Afon Dwyryd. He died in 1811 having established the family as major players in the slate industry to such an extent that his son, William Griffith Oakeley, received £25,000 in royalties for the ten percent share of slate sales in the year 1825 – inflated relative to today’s earnings that was a massive £20m.
His four year old nephew, William Edward Oakeley, inherited in 1835 but was almost forty by the time he took control of the estate from his strange aunt. As well as re-building the Plas, he borrowed large amounts of capital to take over more quarries and build much of the village at Maentwrog. This was a bad time to be in charge. After years of digging vast chambers into the mountain at Ffestiniog there was an inevitable collapse, the “Great Fall” of 1882, when six million tonnes of rock crashed in on the various workings. Luckily it was a Sunday and no-one was killed. Recovering from this, against a declining slate market and the interest payable on massive loans, was impossible. Not to mention subsidising his wayward son, ‘Teddy’ Edward de Clifford William Oakeley, blowing a fortune in the gambling clubs of London and Monte Carlo.
In the late 1800s the Plas was quite a place, one of the first houses with electricity from a water powered Pelton wheel supplying a ‘battery room with fifty nine cells’. The views were carefully manipulated with only the church and none of Maentwrog’s chapels in sight – church being for the wealthy or English with chapels for the Welsh working class. Across the valley on the steep sided oak woodland the initials WEO had been planted in conifers – they disappeared long ago but you can still make out the gaps. A team of twelve gardeners tended the gardens which supplied fruit and vegetables to the family’s London home in Grosvenor Street.