THE MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
“ Come forth into the light of things, 
Let Nature be your teacher.” 
Wordsworth. 
PENMAENMAWR * 
BY T. H. WALLER, B.SC. 
Between the villages of Penmaenmawr and Llanfairfeclian, 
O 7 
on the coast of North Wales, there lies a mass of igneous 
rock forming the mountain from which the former place takes 
its name, The seaward face falls so precipitously that to carry 
the road along the coast the solid rock has had to be cut 
away, and to allow the railroad to pass a tunnel has been 
made through the projecting spur. At the height of about 
1,000ft. above the sea there is a considerable space of table¬ 
land, with a nearly level surface, from which a rough peak 
rises to about another 500ft. Several quarries have been 
opened in the mass, as the stone is in considerable demand 
both for squared setts and for macadamising roads. Of 
these the .most westerly lies just above the village of Llan- 
fairfechan, the floor of the uppermost working being about 
900ft. above the sea. In this quarry the sharply jointed 
character of the rock at once strikes the eye, and it is specially 
well seen in a large mass which is just now left in the form 
of a great tooth, at the edge of the floor. It is this jointing 
which makes it so well adapted for paving setts, and the 
smooth, flat surfaces are conspicuous in many of the railway 
bridges of the neighbourhood, distinguishable from artificially 
worked surfaces only by their rusty-brown skin of weathered 
stone. The stone does not, so far as I saw it, exhibit any of 
the gently curved surfaces which are so common in the 
Rowley Rag; and I saw no instance of the spheroidal 
weathering which is so characteristic of our local stone, and 
no approach to columnar structure, unless a very marked and 
curious—almost stratified—appearance in the extreme edge 
of the mass towards the west can be considered such. 
* Transactions of the Birmingham Natural History and Micro¬ 
scopical Society. Read October 28th, 1884. 
