If your idea of a museum is based on glass cases, dusty exhibits and incomprehensible, closely typed labels, then you're in for a pleasant surprise when you visit the National Slate Museum Llanberis. This museum-with-a -difference is based in the original Victorian Engineering Workshops that serviced the vast Dinorwig Slate Quarry from its heyday in the 1870's to its closure in 1969.The site was opened as a Museum in 1972 - the world's only national slate museum - and the north Wales headquarters of Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales - attracting over 140,000 visitors a year! The workmen might have gone, but the museum remains a living place with an authentic working atmosphere. The quarry workshops are still in regular use - visitors can see the foundry, the old office and the smithy, where the blacksmith is kept busy producing tools for the museum as well as quality items for sale in the attractive museum shop . The museum carpenter will take you on a guided tour of the saw sheds and you can marvel at the giant waterwheel - one of the world's largest, which drove machinery through a complicated system of belts and pulleys and continues to turn today. Dinorwig Quarry closed in 1969. Today – rather than fashioning wagons and forging rails – the workshops tell a very special story: the story of the Welsh slate industry. The National Slate Museum is sited in the Victorian workshops built in the shadow of Elidir mountain, site of the vast Dinorwig quarry. Here you can travel into the past of an industry and a way of life that has chiselled itself into the very being of this country. The Workshops and Buildings are designed as though quarrymen and engineers have just put down their tools and left the courtyard for home, while an array of Talks and Demonstrations including slate-splitting give you a real insight into quarry life. You'll hear the gripping Story of Slate, encompassing such great events as industrial unrest on the one hand, and the small details of everyday life on the other. Fron Haul recaptures significant periods from the slate industry with a row of quarrymen’s houses on the museum site. Strikes and suffering, craftsmanship and community: all the drama of real people's lives. The National Slate Museum at Llanberis invested a £1.6 million lottery grant into bringing back to life the inheritance of the north Wales slate industry, which roofed the industrial revolution. Now, with imaginative interpretation, the remarkable relics of the slate industry can be understood and enjoyed by the many thousands of visitors to this stunning countryside, on the flanks of Snowdon. The lottery grant made possible unique features and facilities, offering the visitor an unparalleled day out in the richly wooded lakeside landscape of the Padarn Country Park. A day full of enjoyment and education awaits in a dramatically beautiful landscape on the shores of Llyn Padarn, and at the terminus of the Llanberis Lake Railway, one of the 'Great Little Trains of Wales', which runs along the waters port shoreline. The Museum originally opened to the public in 1972. Many of the sites former quarrymen and engineers were employed to present their craft, while equipment was collected from other Welsh quarries. In later years the quarry’s incline was restore to its former glory, and the Museum re-opened in 1999 with new unique features and facilities. In 2005, the National Slate Museum scooped the Wales Tourist Board’s prestigious 'Sense of Place Award'
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