The National Slate Museum

The National Slate Museum (originally known as the Welsh Slate Museum and the North Wales Quarrying Museum) is located in the Padarn Country Park, Llanberis, Gwynedd, in Gilfach Ddu, the 19th-century workshops of the now-defunct Dinorwic quarry. The museum is committed to preserving and displaying relics from Wales' slate industry. The workshops that supported the quarry and its locomotives were built in 1870 on land generated by the continual tipping of debris from the adjacent Vivian Quarry and were built to replace the store sheds that had previously been located there. Rails entered the main yard through the main entrance as well.

The Llanberis Lake Railway, which uses part of the museum as its workshops, currently connects the museum to the nearby village of Llanberis. After winning a £1.6 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the museum reopened with displays of Victorian-era slate workers' cottages that originally stood in Tanygrisiau, near Blaenau Ffestiniog. They were dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt on the site. To Steal a Mountain, a multimedia exhibit at the museum, depicts the lives and activities of the men who quarried slate here.

The museum also has the largest working waterwheel on mainland Britain, which may be viewed from many pathways. The waterwheel was built in 1870 by De Winton of Caernarfon and measures 50 feet 5 inches (15.37 meters) in diameter, 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 meters) in width, and is built around a 12-inch (305 mm) axle. The partly restored Vivian incline, a gravity balance incline where filled slate trains drive empty wagons back up, is close to the museum.

Location: Gilfach Ddu, Wales