Greetings from kind-of-sunny Bath! We made it back down to southern England yesterday, travelling through some seriously flooded areas on the way and being delayed on the M6 and M5 motorways on frequent occasions. Steve dropped me off here at my friend Sue’s place and headed home to Great Bedwyn on the other side of Wiltshire, about an hour’s drive further on.
After that easy day on Wednesday visiting Caernarfon then Beaumaris, we camped back near Beddgelert and over dinner decided to attempt the Nantlle ridge the following day, which is the walk we'd originally planned for the Wednesday but which I vetoed due to the heaviness of my pack and the unwillingness of my legs! As a day-walk, though, without a heavy pack including tent, camping equipment etc., it'd seemed a much more attractive prospect. So we set off early and drove to the hamlet of Rhyd-Ddu to start the walk.
The Nantlle ridge consists of six peaks: Y Garn (the Cairn), Mynydd Drws-y-Coed (Door to the Wood Mountain), Trum y Ddysgl (Ridge of the Dish), Mynydd Tal-y-Mignedd (Mountain at the End of the Bog), Craig Cwm Silyn (Silyn Valley Crag) and Garnedd-Goch (Red Cairn). What evocative names! I've heard that Tolkien, as a boy living in the West Midlands, used to watch in fascination as the coal trains from Wales would pass by, with their long and seemingly impronouncable names written on the sides of the cars: inspiration for the world he created. The three peaks we climbed on Tuesday, Moel Hebog, Moel-yr Ogaf and Moel Lefn mean, respectively, Bare Hill of the Falcon, Bare Hill of the Cave and Smooth Bare Hill. The first peak, from Monday, Yr Aran, takes the prize for least inventive name: it simply means The Mountain!
Anyway, Thursday was an excellent day in the hills - plenty of sunshine, interspersed with white clouds, blown about by a light wind. The views from the ridge were simply spectacular - on one side back into the valley with the village of Beddgelert, surrounded by forests, and on the other, a wide vista sweeping down to the sea, and across to Ynys Menai, the isle of Anglesey, former sacred centre of druidic culture and learning until Seutonius Paulinus, under orders from Emporer Claudius, led a military expedition there in 61 CE and wiped them all out. Those Romans! Caernarfon and its castle were also clearly visible on the mainland shore across from Anglesey. It ended up being a mammoth walk - almost 12 hours in total by the time we made it back to the car. After completing the sixth peak, we descended into the picturesque Pennant valley at around 6pm. The evening bathed the gnarled trees, green fields and clear streams in gentle gold, warming the old stone walls and ruined cottages. Unfortunately, at this stage, Steve and I realised that we'd omitted to read the walk description in its entirety and that we had some more ascending to do at the end of the valley in order to cross over the pass into the valley in which we had started. Groan! We plodded on, both rather weary and with only rather unappetising oat cakes and flapjacks to keep us going. Speaking of which, eating baked beans and porridge for breakfast, then oat cakes, flapjacks and Mars bars for most of the day had a rather predictable effect on both of us and I think we may have significantly increased the total global output of greenhouse gases this past week – we’ll need to do some serious tree-planting as penance sometime in the future :)
The pass into the Beddgelert valley turned out to be fascinating – straddled by the remains of an old mining settlement, the Prince of Wales Quarry, which had once been home to 200 men working the adjacent slate mines. It was abandoned in 1882 after a rock fall caused a number of deaths. These stone remains gave the whole landscape an early medieval feel (for me anyway!), reminiscent of the Old English phrase eald enta geweorc, the ancient work of giants, which is the way the Anglo-Saxons described the imposing remains of the Roman civilisation which had preceded them. The pass is called Bwlch-y-Ddwy-elor,“Pass of the Two Biers”, because coffins from the Pennant valley would be carried to the top of the pass on one bier then handed to another, with another group of men carrying it, for the journey down into the Beddgelert valley for burial. The final push over the pass and through the forest back to the car turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated – due to planting of new trees and the making of new tracks, woods really do move! Steve did a sterling job with Ordnance Survey map, compass, altimeter and GPS to finally get us onto a trail that led out the other side and into open country within site of the car. We camped the night on the shores of a lake near where we’d started the walk.
Friday was abysmal and it rained incessantly – we visited the town of Conwy with its well-preserved medieval town walls and castle (built by that charmer, Edward I Longshanks, in his attempts to subdue the revolting Welsh). We stayed the night in Llandudno on the coast and in a delightful guesthouse which felt like absolute luxury after six nights in the tent. The rain ended up being so incessant that it caused severe flooding around Worcester and Gloucester, further south, and necessitated a large evacuation of many residents of that area by RAF helicopters.
Today has so far been spent enjoying a very leisurely brunch with Sue, her son Sam and his girlfriend Nathalie, all of whose company I’ve enjoyed on previous visits back to this part of the world.
