About us and The Slate Workshop

Designers/makers of fine lettering and designs in Welsh slate since 1985.

Who we are

We are Richard and Fran Boultbee and we moved to Pont Hywel Mill in Pembrokeshire in 1984 from a holding 3 miles away, with our 2 daughters and dogs, cats, cow and calf, a pig and some chickens and ducks. The mill and cottage are next to the Eastern Cleddau River in a beautiful valley. Just over the bridge there was a small working slate quarry .

We are now just the two of us plus one elderly cat, and the quarry is no longer working.

We, however, are still going strong and all our slate is still Welsh. It now comes from quarries in North Wales.

Click on each picture to enlarge

What we do

When we first started here, Richard hand cut all the lettering, using a traditional ‘dummy’ and chisel. Since 1990 we have also offered the alternative of computer generated and sand- blasted lettering. Richard also sculpts the slate into wonderful curving abstract shapes and usually there are one or two examples of his sculpture in the showroom.

Richard shapes and prepares the slate.

Fran usually does the computer layouts on paper and we both check for letter spacing and positioning etc before engraving the slate.

Artwork is hand drawn onto the slate, then engraved.

After engraving, the lettering and any designs are often painted or hand gilded with gold leaf, to highlight them.

Sand blasting is much quicker than hand cutting, so we have been able to extend our range of Welsh slate items to include not just slate names and numbers, business and commemorative plaques and sundials, but also slate clocks and barometers, vases and lampbases, tealights and cheese boards, bookends and bowls, tableware and benches, Celtic plaques and bird baths.

We like to work closely with our clients- each piece is a personal item - so we don’t have standardised order forms.

Please contact us to discuss your requirements and we can then give you a price and delivery date for your order.