Nantlle Valley
The area is also historically important geologically, and featured in one of the most contentious disputes of the 19th century, between the 'Diluvialists' who believed in the Biblical flood, and the ‘Glacialists’, who supported the Glacial Theory, which was substantially established by studies of the drift sediments on Moel Tryfan.
[2] Some of the communities came into being as a result of slate quarrying in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, and some have a history stretching back to antiquity.
[8] The Nantlle Valley is famous within Wales for being the main setting of the Fourth branch of the Mabinogi, Math fab Manawydan, the story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Blodeuwedd and Gwydion.
The story is set mainly in the area with Gwydion finding Lleu transfigured into an eagle in an oak tree at Baladeulyn (the ground that used to exist between the two lakes before industrialisation).
After the Edwardian conquest in 1282, one of the first recorded jousts in Britain was held on the fields of Baladeulyn near the village of Nantlle as the royal entourage made its way from Nefyn after the war.
This lore was recorded extensively by John Owen Huws in the 1970s and 1980s and published in his landmark three-volume work Straeon Gwerin Ardal Eryri (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2008).
The pass through the mountains at the eastern end of the valley is known as Drws-y-Coed (the door of the trees) and was a path that reputedly was hewn by Edward I's men after the conquest.
At the top of the valley is Llyn y Dywarchen where Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188 told of the lake ‘having a floating island in it which is driven from one side to the other by the force of the wind’.
His explanation at that time was perfectly rational: ‘A part of the bank naturally bound together by the roots of willows and other shrubs may have broken off and being continually agitated by the winds....it cannot reunite itself firmly with the banks.’ The astronomer and scientist Edmund Halley swam out to the island in 1698 to verify that it did indeed float.
The lake is now used for fishing and the car park there is on the site of a former clandestine Moravian lodging and chapel — one of only about 40 to have been built in the UK and therefore extremely rare, before being demolished; it was established in the 18th century (1704-1760s) and one of the forerunners of Methodism.
A report by Gwynedd County Council[13] in 2006 profiled the tourist industry in the Nantlle Valley and made recommendations for the future.
Of these 25 there were 7 caravan / camping sites, 4 hotels, 3 guesthouses or B&B, 3 attractions, 3 educational centres, 2 public houses (who have tourist accommodation), 2 specialist retailers and 1 holiday cottage provider.
