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| The new cafe |
Margaret Walters |
The Raliway (1) |
The Railway (2) |
Interview by Natalie Moyce
Christmas Countdown for Panoramic Café
| ABSTRACT |
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| New facilities including a café and visitor centre, which will help to preserve the appeal of Aberystwyth's constitution hill, with its 360 degrees view around the town and countryside are nearing completion. "Consti" used to be regarded as Aber's main tourist attraction 430 ft above sea level, where one can see 1000 square miles of scenery, 100 miles of coastline and 26 mountain peaks from its summit. The 400k project received a £190k Objective One grant back in 2001, plus contributions from Wales Tourist Board, CADW and private sector money. The café is set for completion by Christmas of this year. |
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FULL
INTERVIEW Natalie Moyce gets the low-down on Consti's new Plans Interview
with Margaret Walters (Manager)
How much did you receive from Objective 1? 190k from objective 1. We've had other grants as well from other various organisations; some of them will be paid on completion of the project. What was the money for then? A café and a new visitor centre, the building over there that's almost finished. The building we are in now will be turned into an education centre. We've half changed that now. How long ago did you apply for it? 2001. We've had problems getting a builder, because of the location. What is of interest with Constitution Hill apart from the obvious good view from up here? Well originally it was built as a tourist attraction, as fairground attractions, and then the quarry where the new café now is used to be a ballroom, they used to have dances here, it used to be called Victoria Hall. There were gardens, all lit up at night with Japanese lanterns. The company who has got it now is a registered charity a not-for-profit business so every penny after wages gets ploughed back into all the projects, and we just try to get it back as a nice tourist attraction with some of the old features. When was it first built then? It was built in 1896, Aberystwyth was one of the most popular places at the time, a lot of Victorians travelled here and it has the biggest camera obcsura in the world, and it's like an observatory. You go into a dark room and the mirrors on the top work as a periscope, and they show all the views of Aberystwyth, onto the dish, the biggest one in the world apparently. Not the size of the room, but the size of the lens. The one in Edinburgh is 12 inches and we've got 14 inches. The wooden shack it was in fell to bits in the 1920s, and then they redid now the one we got in 1985. The new building you can see there is the café we are building, that started in January this year. The café will create new jobs and also allow us to be open longer hours and make our season longer. There will be at least a couple more jobs. It will also create 2 more jobs on the train, as it will allow us to be open for longer, so there will be more part time jobs. Who currently comes up here? Tourists, but also locally, WI groups and school trips, and we'll also rent it out for exhibitions. Last year we had just over 61 thousand people use the train and a lot of people walked up as well so that's not inclusive. All in front of the new café is going to be a play area, the lorries are still delivering you know. The majority of things we carry on the trains, but there is a track around the back that the farmer lets us use. How long do you think it will take to finish the whole project? On the building side we hope the whole thing will be finished by Christmas. At Christmas we do Santa specials, we will transform this building into Santa' grotto. We had quite a lot of children come up last year. We also do craft workshops for children as well. We did one all about wind last year, we have a teddy bears picnic every August, and next year we are hoping to hold a craft show. How many people work here already? What it is, café, gift shop, we rent it out to Plas Lluest, and they help people with learning disabilities there, so they come here 2 or 3 times a week to train, washing up and cleaning windows and we'll continue to do that when the new building is done. So when did the place fall into decline? 1939. The gentleman who bought it after that wanted to build a model village on top of here, but he couldn't get planning permission for it and now we've got it. We've done a lot of repairs on the trains over the summer. Although you can't actually see, we've changed all the haulage ropes; we had to shut for 15 weeks as special rope had to be manufactured. But now we don't have to change anything for another 14 years or so. There are 2 main ropes on them and one of them would take a full load on its own, no problem at all. It used to be water balanced, it changed in 1921, 22. At the top they used to pump water into a big tank on the front of the train, and the weight of it used to pull the other one up and when it had got to the bottom it was empty and the one at the top would fill again. There was no big supply of water up here so they used to use a big tank. In the foyer where you came in used to be a pump room, which used to pump the water back up by a steam pump which used to run on coal, but the coal got too expensive, they used to bring the coal in by ship and it got too expensive to bring here, and so they changed it to electric. When they came to do the street maps, that's when they changed it. There used to be a man standing on the front, working the handbrake, my theory is they didn't run out of water and the coal got too expensive, I reckon they ran out of brave men to stand on the front! I don't think I would like having to travel down that hill with the weight of the water and nothing to stop it apart from a small handle you had to turn. ENDS. |