I mean, I would rather the rope was still intact, if I'm going to be honest.
Where's your sense of adventure Yussef?
My sense of adventure? Come on off the beaten track.
My sense of adventure is down there right at the bottom where it's safe.
Hidden all around the world are places we've abandoned,
But these ruins don't always lie empty.
I'm wildlife filmmaker Dan O'Neill.
And with my zoologist mate Yussef Rafik.
I'm on a mission to see what moves in after we've gone.
We're heading to Wales to explore the biggest abandoned site we've tackled yet.
More than 700 acres of slate landscape filled with abandoned quarries and derelict buildings
that are creating new kinds of habitat.
So this is The Vivian Quarry.
You see that Dolly there with the cart on top of it.
That would have been used to drag materials across the quarry, and it looks like it's not that high off the ground
right now. But this water didn't used to be here.
This has come in through natural springs and basically run off,
but it's 18 meters deep now and all the stuff down below is still there.
So there's buildings that houses,
there's machinery all still left abandoned underneath.
Here you're seeing some trees and this type of habitat,
this slate is really, really slow to colonize,
there's very little nutrients in there.
And so trees take a huge amount of time to take hold.
But one of the first ones that will do is Birch, and you can see one right there.
For decades now, nature has been slowly reclaiming this quarry,
and what was once a gray, barren wasteland is now showing signs of life.
He's in the tree.
Ok, where are you, Mr.
Owl? Oh, my God.
Hello, look. Oh my God.
There it is. It's a Tawny Owl!
In the middle of the day in an old, abandoned slate quarry.
Such a wise and dignified animal,
Just like other nocturnal owls like the barn owl.
They have ears on different levels on their head.
They're slightly asymmetrical, which allows them to pinpoint exactly where sounds
are coming from. And at night, which I typically would imagine seeing this bird in that allows them to stop using their
eyes and to rely on their hearing to pinpoint exactly where something like a little vole, a
mouse might be.
They have the slightly curled over feathers that are serrated,
And that means that when they're flying through the air, they're completely silent.
And it means that they can use that sound still and not make any sound to scare their prey.
What a wicked thing to find.
And I think, well, this has just given me a lot of hope.
Because one of the things that I really want to see here is the fastest animal in the world, the peregrine
falcon.
This place might make for a good wildlife habitat now, but it was a different world not long ago.
The slate industry dominated the whole of this area until the 60s,
When even the biggest quarry shut their gates, leaving all this behind.
Oh wow. The forest all around me is now a site of special scientific
interest. It's what's known as a Celtic rainforest, and it's one of the rarest habitats in the world.
Forests like this one are thought to be even more threatened than tropical rainforests.
But in these woodlands, you're never more than a step away from the past.
Right, so this is the powder house, and first of all, we've got the door,
which you wouldn't really know was a door because every time they use this building,
they would break it back up again.
So this is the main part of the building that contained the gunpowder inside here.
And then we've got the outer wall here, which just acts as a secondary barrier.
But yeah, you can really see how much effort they went into in ensuring that any disaster
that did happen would be contained right here.
You can see there's some orb weaver spiders, you've actually got two here, got a male and a female.
I think they might be having a little bit of sexy time.
You can see the female is that chunkier one on the right,
bigger abdomen and the male is really, really going at it, and I think this is a successful mating.
It looks pretty aggressive.
Sometimes it can go either way, so sometimes the male will become dinner.
He will transfer a sperm web essentially over to her,
and they'll do that using those pedipalps at the front of their bodies.
The fact that this is happening in the middle of the Powder House is pretty weird,
but it shows that it's now a perfect habitat for so many bits of wildlife.
and all these these walls make great support systems for their webs.
But I think we had better leave them to it.
Let them do their thing.
Just coming into a little crevice here as part of the Old Quarry,
A big bar of slate there, and it's created this tiny little microclimate.
That is living up to that name of being a proper Celtic rainforest in here.
And I think one of the main reasons it feels like that.
Is that these forests in the UK and Ireland.
have one of the most important places in the entire world
for the diversity of the Bryophytes, Liverworts, Hornworts and Mosses.
These colonize and they set the ground for everything else to come forward.
Amazing. Look at that.
You can hear that water. It really sounds like a tiger could just walk past.
There might not be any tigers, but there is one big mammal that has made itself at home.
To find it, we're going to go to what's left of the Dinorwic Slate Quarry.
The closer we get, the more we see traces of the workers who used to make this climb every day.
Incredible isn't. They're so uniform and like organized all in a row?
Actually, they're really small.
It would have been four men to a house with no running water and only a small coal fire for cooking and heating.
These barracks were closed down in 1948, so other than the stone walls,
all that's left now is the view.
What a beautiful place to end the day.
The amount of slate they must have got out of this mountain.
Explosions were used and now it's been abandoned, but now we have this explosion of wildlife.
I mean, it's very beautiful.
But it's the cheesiest line I've ever heard Yussef!
I thought it was poetry.
I can't wait to come back tomorrow and go higher up.
Today, we're going up the steep sides of Dinorwic, once the second largest slate quarry in the world.
It was left empty in 1969, but one resident never moved out from its rocky home
and they now have the entire place to themselves.
Look you can see the males here,
Those horns are incredible.
Yeah, they look like Ibex, don't they?
They do, yeah. When did they first arrive?
Neolithic times? So like ten thousand years ago.
So they really are relics of the environment.
So they were here before the Slate Quarry.
Wow. Wow, that's so cool.
Yeah.
It's currently just at the end of the Rutting season, so, you know, towards the end of their breeding season,
and what happens is the males will do this fantastic display, where they will bump
heads essentially at force,
lock those horns and fight for the right to mate with the females.
Another cool thing is they have what's called a flehmen response.
And what this is is a really weird behaviour.
Where the males will sort of flap their upper lip a little bit and to detect when a female is
in season. And they have a special organ inside their mouths called a Jacobson's organ.
What this does is it picks up pheromones.
They're just there's such incredibly agile animals,
that it's incredible that this used to be a quarry, a very sort of manmade environment.
Yet these guys are just it's just perfect for them.
That one, that one is so majestic looking.
He is the king of the mountain look at him.
There we go. The Flehmen response, he's at it again, he's not done for the breeding season.
Wow. Such a weird face that they pull.
The goats clearly feel right at home in what's left of these buildings.
Slowly but surely, the plants are beginning to reclaim this quarry.
And the empty workshops are gaining new inhabitants.
Wow, this place is huge.
It's crazy, isn't it.
Incredible! Imagine what it would have looked like with the roof on as well.
So this is the old sawmill.
Yeah, Where they would have cut all of the slate.
Processed all the slate and then they would chip that out all over the world, literally all over the world, places like New
York. And these bits here where the columns would have been to support that huge
roof. Yeah. Did this just land on the wall?
Look at it Wow. Oh, wait for him.
Ok, he's in there somewhere.
Ok, got it. I don't want to hold him.
Where is he? Ok, I got him.
Ok.
Beautiful. So Green Tiger Beetle.
They can fly really well.
So these guys, as you can see from these huge mandibles are ferocious predators.
They will hunt things like caterpillars, spiders, ants,
And what they'll do is lay their eggs in sandy burrows.
And the larvae will hatch out into those, and then they become ambush predators.
And one of the fastest insects in Britain?
Yeah, 60 centimetres per second.
But he's been real still right now. Yeah he calms down on you, doesn't he?
Which way are we going? Going up here.
Got to get to the top if we're going to find a Peregrine my friend.
Oh, OK.
The top looks very high up.
Is there like a cable car?
It'll be good for you. Maybe a helicopter that could come and pick us up.
Oh my God. Nothing good was ever easy, Yussef.
True. Check this out, you see that up there.
You see a little hut. Those are blast shelters.
So when they were using the explosives, people would run in there when the sirens went off, when the mountains sort of blew up on
the side
And they had like three minutes.
Was it to get inside the blast shelter?
Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it?
Hey, Yussef. Yeah?
Come and check this out.
What have you got? Have you found a wall?
I've found something very, very cool.
There's a lot of species of moss in the UK.
Well, there's a few species of moss in the UK, that have this amazing adaptation
to completely decimate in the dry, right?
Ok. And it looks totally dead, right?
All this. Yeah, yeah. You assume that might be dead.
but, watch this when water hits it.
You seeing that? Oh, my God, it's changing colour it's going g
reen, Yeah, so that right there, when those cells that have completely dried out and completely desiccated
come into contact with water, they immediately activate and the chlorophyll activates inside.
and immediately comes back and starts photosynthesizing, bringing them back to life an incredible drought resistant plant.
That's amazing how quickly they they do that.
Amazing. That's really coming back in a matter of seconds, and it's perfectly adapted to these kind of stark habitats.
Do you know what this is? It looks like a rope.
Yeah. This is the metal rope that would have once
held all of this on the side and stop people from falling off.
And we've got to go up there. Yeah.
How does that make you feel? I mean, I would rather the rope was still intact.
I'm going to be honest.
Where's your sense of adventure Yussef?
My sense of adventure.
Come on off the beaten track.
My sense of adventure is down there right at the bottom where it's safe.
My thighs are starting to burn.
Shame are only halfway up,
There are about 20 different levels on each side of Dinorwic, and we're heading to one of the highest.
Turns out there's a lot of steps and mountains are quite hard to climb.
I'm just going to die right here.
How are you feeling, mate?
Great. Yeah, I feel really, you know.
Ready for round two?
Lovely. The higher we go, the more the habitat changes.
We start finding alpine plants, many that are relics of the last Ice Age.
And I'm sinking into the ground.
Goodbye. Oh my God.
Ok, there we go.
Lovely.
Wow. Nice one.
I think we're here. This is Australia plain.
Welcome to Australia.
This is lovely. I love how they named them, like New York, California,
depending on how far, how high up they are.
So we've gone to the furthest one, Australia.
I imagine what this would have looked like before the slate mining.
God we do make a mess of things don't we?
Where are we heading now? We are going to a very special place.
I find that ominous.
So this building here?
Well, we'll find out why they used it for.
Oh God, that sounds even worse.
I'm not sure I want to find out.
This building here, this huge building is where they would have cut the slate.
So this is where they were doing all the sawing.
You can see the machines and if you actually look beneath our feet here look we've got the rail line.
Oh wow. So like the slates collected all the way down, there goes all the way down on this train car
all piled up and they would just grab them and cut them.
And it's all the original stuff.
You can see it. You can actually see some of the saws.
Yeah, the blades.
So that's what they would use to cut the slate.
They would used this to cut it into the rectangles,
and then they would have used a chisel and the mallet to split it by hand.
Are you enjoying yourself?
Yeah, you're going to cut me in half.
No. I'm not because you'll probably sue me,
but you can imagine what the working conditions would have been like in here.
I mean, right now there's no roof that's quite open air.
and you can imagine it would be very enclosed.
The sounds, the noises, the smells,
the dust in the air.
You've got some lichens forming,
You've got life even in this abandoned building.
Lichen is liking the iron.
That was terrible. I know it's terrible and it will get cut, but I had to say it .
Ok. Shh.
If it wasn't on the skyline, there is absolutely no way you would be able to
see that. But it's undeniable that is a Peregrine Falcon that's the fastest animal in the world.
Peregrine Falcon. And their eyesight is absolutely brilliant at least eight times as good as
ours.
Peregrine's like to attack from above, so they use the thermals to position themselves on top of their prey,
And then they fold their wings back and get this incredibly aerodynamic form before plummeting down,
making them the fastest animal in the world.
Travelling at speeds of more than 300 kilometres per hour.
Anything moving that quickly would have huge amounts of air firing straight in
and her nostrils here, if the air was travelling super fast and she had no way to manage it,
she would get all that air straight into her lungs and they would explode.
But Peregrine Falcons, like all Falcons,
have these incredible conical structures called baffles inside their nasal cavities that basically allow that that
air flow to be limited.
so that they can travel at that speed and amazing use of biomimicry
we have used that exact same mechanism and adapted it for our fighter pilots,
which also fly in these valleys.
So it's pretty cool to see the beginning and the end result
of something that we've brought from nature with such an incredible bird.
The Sun is starting to set, so we're heading back before it gets too dark to make it down the steps.
But we do have one more stop to make before we go.
A Caban. Look at this.
It's still just things from the past.
Really impactful.
Like, Oh my god, look at this.
That's a boot. A boot.
That's someone's actual boot.
And old teapots.
Yeah, because although this is like historic, it wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things
like there are still people living today that would have worked here and relatives of those people.
It's crazy to think and you'd think that when these places go into disrepair, disuse, no one uses them anymore
they become kind of obsolete and unimportant.
But this is now been turned literally a few weeks ago,
into a World Heritage site with the same, you know, standing as the Taj Mahal,
the Great Pyramids because of its value.
I think it's deserving.
Well, onto the next one.
What an incredible place.
Yeah, amazing place.
When you think about all the generations of people who built this place, as well as the number of different habitats it contains,
it feels fitting that this is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
For me, it's a recognition that abandoned places like this matter to wildlife, but also to us.