"My nain (grandmother) told me the history of the Copper Ladies, as her mother and grandmother had worked in the copper sheds. I decided to look more into their history, and looked at the censuses of the 1800s, but there's little to find about these women. Women weren't considered to be so important then, so the enumerators looked upon them as a man's wife or daughter.

I've discovered that the Copper Ladies used to work in these really long sheds, which were built near to where the copper ore was mined. Up to 80 women would work in one shed, all sitting on the floor or kneeling in front of the knock stones for 12 hours at a time. Using a knockstone - a small metal hammer which weighed about four pounds - they would knock pieces of rock into smaller chunks for the smelters.

The women wore heavy leather aprons and a headscarf, usually in a spotty patterned cotton, and a 'jim cro' soft hat on top. The scarf would be wrapped right around their heads, to probably keep out the noise and the dust. They also used to wear thick, leather gloves with metal rings on each finger to protect their hands against injury.

They wore clogs on their feet, because the acid in the water and in the rain which flowed from the mines would eat through any other kind of shoe in no time. There were many clog-makers in Anglesey at that time, especially in Llanerchymedd and Pensarn. I remember one of the last clog-makers when I was a little girl. Clothing was still on ration then, so you'd save your vouchers and take your parents' old shoes along to be made into clogs. I still have my old clogs, which are the same pattern as those worn by the Copper Ladies.

Although there isn't any real proof, I believe that the Copper Ladies used to sing whilst working, beating their hammers at the beginning of each bar. This would help them with the loud noise of the constant hammering, as just random knocking would be enough to drive them all mad.

Owen Griffydd has written a great book about the people who worked on Parys Mountain. He talks of an old lady called Phoebe Morris, who is described as singing bass. I'm not sure whether this was because she sang out of tune or, as I suspect, that the singing was in more than one voice. Owen Griffydd also talks of a song sung by the Copper Ladies which has at least 12 verses, and is about life on the Mountain. One verse is about the food - as they kept a few chickens, eggs were always cheap and they sang about the pancakes swimming in butter.

I've also looked into the history of the miners of Parys Mountain. Before the new management took over the mine in the 1860s, the men used to work well into their late 80s, as there was no other way of earning an income. When the new management wanted to get rid of them because they weren't worth their wages, they wrote letters on the men's behalf to the Marquis of Anglesey, the mine's owner, to ask for pensions. From reading these letters, for example one on behalf of a Huw Hughes, you can calculate that these men must have started work down the mines when they were five or six years old. These little children may have been carried down underground, strapped to their fathers' backs, to work in the smaller tunnels. Otherwise, they worked on the surface, carrying the copper ore from the mine's head to the sheds. It was a very hard life for everyone who worked on Parys Mountain.

There's lots of information about Parys Mountain in the Plas Newydd papers within the Mostyn Collection, at Bangor archives."