MANOD QUARRY

By 2nd September 1939 some two thousand paintings from the National Gallery had been evacuated from London, travelling by night on special trains with armed guards on the footplate, to temporary safe-houses in North Wales. Most of the pictures found immediate refuge at Penrhyn Castle, the home of Lord Penrhyn, and at Crosswood House, the seat of the Earl of Lisburne. Very soon however serious disputes arose between the gallery authorities and Lords Penrhyn and Lisburne which rendered the houses untenable. Moreover, by the summer of 1941 German bombers were regularly passing directly over the Castle en-route to bomb the docks at Liverpool so its vulnerability became accute. Also, there were ominous signs that a Welsh Nationalist uprising was brewing, and that the English art treasures were at risk of imminent destruction.

Government's immediate response was to order that - very much against previous Treasury policy - a deep underground bunkers should be constructed, whatever the cost, to safely house all the paintings at one location that was totally secure against aerial bombardment and defencible against a civil uprising.
The location was Manod Quarry, a disused slate mine, several hundred feet below ground and situated at the end of a four-mile private track that wound its way high into the Snowdon mountains. Half-a-mile within the mountain a series of special air-conditioned chambers were constructed to house the pictures and a network of narrow gauge railways installed to facilitate their movement