Monday, March 28, 2022

dolgarrog dam disaster

hello there


when off on my travels here, there and everywhere i do like to at least try and explore where i end up, look you see. predominantly such travels are for verk so i am doing stuffs of verk, but we are human, we get treated as such, so there is margin to do this. my exploration is hardly too adventurous, but every now and again i get to find something of interest or, as is the case here, historical significance. 

such an instance happened on my (most) recent visit to North Wales. a remarkable, beautiful place, by the way, and i thoroughly recommend a visit. on my travels around for verk, mostly to and from a most agreeable hotel, i noted a memorial close by. as luck, or fortune, would have it, one late afternoon with not as much rain as you might think enabled me to take a stroll up to see it. 


on walking up to it, then, i discovered it was a memorial to a quite terrible incident from 1925. two dam walls broke, sending billions of gallons of water, carrying boulders, downhill, devastating the village of Dolgarrog below. 

there is no way, with my basic research, that i could do justice to the story. instead, then, here's a link to information on the History Points website, as well as a good article on the BBC website


it strikes me as being more suitable, or appropriate, to not write so much here. as chance allowed me to be there, i took the images you can see. should they be of interest to anyone who has happened across my blog, well that's fantastic. 


according to the plaque in the above picture, these are some of the boulders which came crashing down on that fateful night. to make it a bit easier to read, there's a close up below. 


you might well note that the information is presented in two languages, English and Welsh. or, for the latter, it is perhaps appropriate to refer to it as Cymric. most, if not all, signs i saw on my travels in North Wales were presented in both languages, and rightly so. the only issue or problem i had was with the variations on road signs. sometimes English was at the top, in other instances at the bottom. this made it difficult to quickly seek and read the information i clearly needed when driving. yes, to state the obvious, they do indeed drive on the proper, non-French side of the road there. 


below and above are two further signs from the memorial, with the one below giving information on the memorial walk. sadly, or alas, no, i did not take the walk. the sun setting was somewhat against me undertaking such a stroll, and if we are honest my present physical condition might have rendered an attempt unwise. also, i did not have proper walking shoes on. 


hopefully these pictures, the information and (more likely) the links have been of some interest to one or two of you. 




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





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