Skiddaw Slate (as opposed to Honister slate which has a green hue) and is used for building, in the Lake District. The traditional buildings of Keswick and other settlements are almost entirely of Skiddaw slate. The slate is also used for making souvenirs, monuments, ornaments etc. Smaller fragments are used for gravels or for ornamental pathways. Skiddaw Slate Skiddaw slate is an early Ordovician metamorphosed sedimentary rock, as first identified on the slopes of Skiddaw in the English Lake District. The base of this series is unknown. The thickness could, therefore, amount to several thousand feet of sediment. These sediments were formed
Aberllefenni Slate Quarry slates. Foel Grochan mine consists of eight near-horizontal tunnels at approximately vertical separation. These were bored into the valley side just to the north of the near-vertical narrow vein. Each tunnel connected to a large chamber from which the rock was extracted. These chambers ranged from to in length with of rock left between the bottom of one chamber and the top of the next lower chamber. As more slate was extracted, several of the upper chambers were joined vertically to form an extremely large cavern known as Twll Golau which is open at the top. From the mid-1850s the