Louis and Viorica Naudi spent a few days seeing Welsh heritage from above and below by photographing Snowdonia and former slate mines.

Snowdonia National Park in north Wales is 823 square miles filled with purple-tipped mountains and forests. It’s also a living, working area for more than 26,000 people.

With steam railways, castles, Celtic culture, mountains, lakes, forests, valleys, beaches, moorland and internationally renowned for its geology, the landscape illustrates the area’s history through Stone Age burial chambers, Roman forts, churches, castles, slate quarries and other industrial works.

Snowdonia or Eryri, ‘the land of the Eagles’ as it is known in Welsh, has the highest mountain in England and Wales: Snowdon, at 1,085 metres, also has the largest natural lake in Wales.

It is a place of legend, said to be the burial place of the giant ogre Rhita, vanquished by King Arthur.

Some believe Arthur’s knights still sleep beneath the mountain.

People come from all over the world to climb Snowdon, as I did once! Many take the Snowdon Mountain Railway for its awe-inspiring views.

Viorica had already decided on what she wanted to visit and photograph. These included the world-famous narrow-gauge railways; two contrasting underground mines with their magnificent but challenging deep underground caverns and geological formations; Portmerion, famous for the Prisoner series on television; Harlech Castle, one of the many in Wales; Great Britain’s only remaining cable-operated street tramway; and Stack’s Lighthouse in Anglesey, famous for its surrounding nature reserve, run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), with thousands of seabirds nesting on the cliffs.

Some believe King Arthur’s knights still sleep beneath Mount Snowdon

I was Viorica’s aide carrying the camera bags, tripods and customary bottle of water!

We criss–crossed by car across Snowdonia and our first stop was Llechwedd Slate Caverns in Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Although slate is still worked in the area, the world-famous caverns now only cater for visitors to discover how millions of tons of rock were moved using simple tools, gunpowder and muscle.

Viorica had arranged a private visit so she could photograph these deep caverns uninterrupted.

Our mine tour began on the surface, where we were greeted by a local guide who accompanied us underground.

The 610 mm narrow-gauge Miners’ Tramway apparently opened in 1972 and is a railway travelling 800 metres underground.

Trains are hauled by battery-electric locomotives and travel through tunnels into a series of quarry chambers. The Deep Mine is the steepest passenger funicular railway in the UK with a gradient of 1:1.8 or 30°.

At the foot of the funicular, we walked through a network of tunnels, past caverns of cathedral proportions to the underground lake with its 10 son et lumière sequences, for a photo session.

From Blaenau, we travelled north to Porthmadog, home of the narrow-gauge Ffestinog Railway, known the world over and voted North Wales’ top attraction in the 2013 National Tourism Awards.

At Harbour Station by the port, two narrow-gauge railways with completely different personalities operate and, together, they offer a memorable chance to explore Snowdonia’s beauty.

Originally built to bring the slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog to the harbour at Porthmadog, the line was initially gravity operated.

Wagons laden with slate rumbled down the hillside, kept under control by intrepid brakesmen.

Steam locomotives were introduced in the 1860s and, today, those same little engines have been restored and pull carriages of sightseers through the Vale of Ffestiniog.

Steam railway buffs just love the place where you are encouraged to step back in time, jump on a train and enjoy the mountain scenery and many visitors talk endlessly of the romance of bygone days.

Trains now run through the stunning scenery of the Aberglaslyn Pass, recently voted Best View in Britain by National Trust members.

The line pauses in the beautiful little village of Beddgelert before climbing steeply to its summit in the shadow of Snowdon.

It then gently falls back to the sea beside Caernarfon’s 13th century castle, a world heritage site and ceremonial capital of Wales.

This 25-mile line is one of the great railway journeys of Britain.

Maritime history and culture are everywhere in Porthmadog and the Welsh language is the mother tongue of more than 70 per cent of locals, who speak a mixture of English and Welsh.

The language is a living language and an important part of the Welsh identity and culture.

If you visit Porthmadog, make sure you try a pint or half from the town’s Purple Moose brewery, whose real ales are named after Welsh people or locations.

We then drove to Black Rock Sands, one of the very few beaches in Britain where you can drive a car on to the sands, stretching as far as you can see.

The surrounding sand dunes are designated a site of special scientific interest, affording spectacular views of Cardigan Bay.

On the following day, we headed South West to Harlech with its stunning 13th century castle overlooking Cardigan Bay. It is a medieval fortification, constructed on top of a spur of rock close to the Irish Sea.

It was built by Edward I during his invasion of Wales between 1282 and 1289 and its battlements spring out of a near-vertical cliff face.

Mines full of winding tunnels and colourful chambers­­­­­

Men of Harlech, the nation’s unofficial anthem, loved by rugby fans and regimental bands alike, is said to describe the longest siege in British history (1461-1468) that took place there during the War of the Roses. It was impregnable from almost every angle.

Unesco considers Harlech to be one of “the finest examples of late 13th century and early 14th century military architecture in Europe”, and it is another world heritage site.

From there, we drove to Portmerion, three kilometres south of Porthmadog.

This Italianate tourist village is open all year and, set beside the beautiful Dwyryd estuary, is a must for every visitor.

You do have to pay to go into the village but worth every penny to enter this wonderland, created by architect Clough Williams-Ellis between 1926 and 1972, and its magnificent, botanical-style gardens.

The village provided the setting for the cult television series The Prisoner and the grounds contain an important collection of rhododendrons and other exotic plants in a wild-garden setting.

After several hours of walking, we then continued from Porthmadog to Bedgellert towards the Sygun copper mine, passing the RSPB’s Glaslyn Osprey Project, home of the only pair of ospreys breeding in Wales since 2004.

A few kilometres further, we arrived at Beddgelert, a picturesque mountain village ablaze with flowers in the summer. It wins Britain in Bloom competitions year on year.

It is steeped in Welsh mythology, particularly the grave of the legendary greyhound Gelert.

A kilometre outside the village is the Sygun Victorian Copper Mine, closed in 1903 but renovated and reopened as a educational tourist attraction in 1986, focusing on audio-visual tours by foot of underground workings.

It is described as one of the wonders of Wales – a remarkable and impressive example of the reclamation of its industrial heritage, restored and transformed into an outstanding attraction.

There are winding tunnels and large, colourful chambers, magnificent stalactite and stalagmite formations and copper ore veins which contain traces of gold, silver and other precious metals.

Activities also include panning for gold and metal detecting for old coins. Viorica spent some time underground to capture the stalactite and stalagmite formations.

We continued our journey along very narrow country roads towards Bangor, across Thomas Telford’s Suspension Bridge over the Menai Straits on to the Isle of Anglesey, to visit Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the small village with the longest name in Wales.

On our last day, we only had two more sights to see. First, the historic South Stack lighthouse located northwest of Holyhead, built on Ynys Lawd, a small rocky island just off the edge of Holy Island, itself is an island just barely separate from the main part of Anglesey.

It is reached via a switchback stairway running down the cliff face, more than 400 steps down and 400 back up.

It is a wonderful place to watch and photograph thousands of breeding seabirds, including guillemots, razorbills and puffins.

Our last visit was to photograph and travel on the The Great Orme Tramway in Llandudno, Britain's only remaining cable-operated street tramway, one of only three surviving in the world.

It is a street funicular where the cars are permanently fixed to the cable and stop and start by stopping and starting the cable.

The tramway uses the original restored tramcars, each named after a saint, climbing 1,500m to the Great Orme Country Park and Nature Reserve.

Your journey begins at Victoria Station then the tram climbs to the Halfway Station exhibition, where you can discover the history of the fascinating funicular and view the Victoria engineering.

If you change trams at the Halfway Station and continue to the summit, the views from the top are breathtaking!

On a clear day, it’s possible to see as far as the Isle of Man, Blackpool and the Lake District.

• Photographs by Viorica Naudi, who is studying advanced photography at West Cheshire College.