01/06/2026
⛏️Welsh California!
This was a nickname given to the part of the Orme adjacent to our site (pictured), as what happened in 1849 is said to have resembled the California Gold Rush.
That year, two Llandudno men named William and Joseph Jones were walking between our site and St Tudno's Church when they struck copper! Word got out, and within a week many were in a frenzy, digging for their fortune on this slope of the Orme. Reported in The Liverpool Mercury that May it was said that "at the present time the land is let off in small allotments to the miners who call the mountain 'Welsh California'. Three or four of these take a lot, and immediately sink a shaft for the purpose of digging out the ore...the hill is open with nearly a hundred of these cuttings".
You can see from this aerial photo exactly how pock-marked this prospecting made this part of the Great Orme.
Thomas Rowlands reflected on Welsh California some years later and likened the activity of the miners to ants swarming across this slope in all directions. He said many of the miners had made hundreds of pounds in a short time, and that their children continued to reap the benefits.
This was not the first time people had made their fortunes mining the Great Orme. More than 3,000 years before William and Joseph made their discovery the Great Orme had dominated Britain's copper supply. Bronze Age miners were extracting copper from the headland, and the trade in that metal, which stretched from Brittany to the Baltic would have generated a huge amount of wealth. Different times, different people, same resource, same hill.
More on local Bronze Age wealth in the coming days...