BLAENAU Ffestiniog is a sudden assault on the eyes, the shock compounded by its contrast with the wild beauty of the surrounding countryside. Rows of grey houses cowering at the base of steep cliffs of dingy shale, monsters that survive the death of their creators.
For this small North Wales town, a sore within the Snowdonia national park, epitomises the rise and fall of a nation that wanted to be left alone, to retain its individuality behind its own Celtic language, but must now look to tourism to provide its bread and butter.
When the slate boom of Blaenau Ffestiniog and other such mines began to die, whole families moved to South Wales to work in the valleys, underneath towering man-made mountains of a different type, slag heaps from coal mines.
Sadly, most of the machinery of the once mighty coal mines now lies rusting, for they died too, their tight-knit communities have broken up, and like Blaenau Ffestiniog, it is tourists who now don the metal helmets and mining lamps for short 'shifts' for a glimpse of life in the good old bad old days.
Sandwiched between these great relics of the industrial revolution is the agricultural heartland of mid-Wales with its old moorland droving trails, fiercely clinging to the Welsh language in spite of the fact that its siblings are moving out, to be replaced by new-age 'invaders' from across the border, buying up smallholdings for a song for organic farming.
Motorways have cut through South and North Wales, opening it up to hordes of weekend tourists, but not so mid-Wales with its twisting country lanes and gently rolling landscape, which I chose as my border crossing point.
