Great Orme

Llandudno, Conwy, Wales, UK

The Great Orme is a limestone headland jutting out near Llandudno in Wales, which hides a huge amount of historical settlement and mining.

It is famous as a tourist attraction, and is also important for scientific reasons – historical and archaeological evidence, rare wildlife and plants, and modern collaborative art.

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Malachite specimens from the Great Orme, Wales
£4.00 – £7.00

The Great Orme is known for a number of reasons, including minerals and fossils, rare wildlife, iron and stone age history, and modern art.

The name ‘great orme’ is interesting in itself, as the old Norse word ‘orme’ means ‘worm’, or ‘sea serpent’ – this site was essentially named ‘great sea serpent’ by the Vikings.

Excavations during the 1980s proved that the mines of the Great Orme dated back 4000 years, with Bronze age Britons using the mines for copper ore to manufacture bronze. The mine is currently the only Bronze Age mine worldwide open to the public, as far as I’m aware.

The Orme also contains a neolithic burial chamber, round huts, stone circles, and an ancient hill fort. Many, many areas can be spotted that have simply not been examined to date by archaeologists.

A victorian tramway assists visitors to the top of the headland, although I enjoyed the walk up (and the bus ride down..).

One of the things I liked most about the site was a quarry, which I wrote a post about back in 2019.

The ‘hill of names’ rises over a quarry and essentially, is a hill where people arrange stones to write messages, and form pictures, etc. Underneath the hill of names, a small quarry full of fossiliferous limestone provides a very easy location to spot bivalves, corals, and brachiopods, although no collecting is allowed as the entire Orme area is a SSSI.

British / UK locales

I have only included the pieces attributed to specific places; not simply 'Weardale' for example.
Click here for a full list of our stock of minerals from the United Kingdom.

Angus, Scotland

Bridgend, Wales