ON CAMBRIAN AND
CUMBRIAN HILLS
_First Edition_ _1908_
_Revised Edition, July_ _1922_
[Illustration: _Frontispiece_] [_G. P. Abraham, Keswick._
THE GREAT GABLE.]
ON CAMBRIAN AND
CUMBRIAN HILLS
PILGRIMAGES TO SNOWDON
AND SCAFELL
By
HENRY S. SALT
(REVISED EDITION)
LONDON: C. W. DANIEL, LTD.
GRAHAM HOUSE, TUDOR STREET, E.C.4
To C. L. S.
_I send thee, love, this upland flower I found,
While wandering lonely with o’erclouded heart,
Hid in a grey recess of rocky ground
Among the misty mountains far apart;
And there I heard the wild wind’s luring sound,
Which whoso trusts, is healed of earthborn care,
And watched the lofty ridges loom around,
Yet yearned in vain their secret faith to share.
When lo! the sudden sunlight, sparkling keen,
Poured full upon the vales the glorious day,
And bared the abiding mountain-tops serene,
And swept the shifting vapour-wreaths away:--
Then with the hills’ true heart my heart beat true,
Heavens opened, cloud-thoughts vanished, and I knew._
1879.
Preface to First Edition
Books about British mountains are mostly of two kinds, the
popular, written for the tourist, and the technical, written by
the rock-climber. The author of this little study of the hills of
Carnarvonshire and Cumberland is aware that it cannot claim acceptance
under either of those heads, lacking as it does both the usefulness of
the general “guide,” and the thrill of the cragsman’s adventure: he
publishes it, nevertheless, as at least a true expression of the love
which our mountains can inspire, and he will be content if it meets,
here and there, with some friendly “pilgrims” whose sympathies are akin
to his own.
Nor is he without hope that his plea for the preservation of Snowdon
and other mountain “sanctuaries,” before they are utterly disfigured,
may give a much-needed warning while yet there is time.
Contents
PAGE
I PILGRIMS OF THE MOUNTAIN 11
II AT THE SHRINE OF SNOWDON 30
III AT THE SHRINE OF SCAFELL 49
IV PLEASURES OF THE HEIGHTS 67
V WILD LIFE 82
VI THE BARREN HILLSIDE 100
VII SLAG-HEAP OR SANCTUARY? 111
ON CAMBRIAN AND CUMBRIAN HILLS
I
Pilgrims of the Mountain
The pilgrimages of which I write are not made in Switzerland; my theme
is a homelier and more humble one. Yet it is a mistake to think that to
see great or at least real mountains it is necessary to go abroad; for
the effect of highland scenery is not a matter of mere height, but is
due far more to shapeliness than to size. There is no lack of British
Alps within our reach, if we know how to regard them; as, for instance,
the gloomily impressive Coolins of Skye, the granite peaks of Arran,
or, to come at once to the subject of this book, the mountains of
Carnarvonshire and Cumberland.
For small and simple as are these Cambrian and Cumbrian hills of ours,
when compared with the exceeding grandeur and vast complexities of
the Swiss Alps or the Pyrenees, they are nevertheless gifted with
the essential features of true mountains--with ridge and precipice,
cloud and mist, wind and storm, tarn and torrent; nor are snow and ice
wanting to complete the picture in winter-time. Why, then, with this
native wealth within our shores, must we all be carried oversea to
climb Alps with guides, when without guides, and at far less cost of
time and money, we may have the same mountain visions, and hear the
same mountain voices at home? A few of us, at least, will refuse to bow
the knee in this fetish-worship of “going abroad”; for the benefit of
going abroad depends mainly on person, temper, and circumstance; and to
some mountain lovers a lifelong intimacy with their own hills is more
fruitful than any foreign excursions can be.
For my part, I like to do my distant mountaineering by means of books.
If I wish, for example, to see the Sierra Nevada of the West, can I
not do so in Muir’s _Mountains of California_, a book scarcely less
real and life-giving than the heights by which it is inspired--far more
so than any superficial visit in the weary rôle of tourist? And then,
if the mood takes me, I know where to find and enjoy a Sierra Nevada
of our own; for is not Snowdon, is not Scafell, too, a Sierra Nevada
during half the months of the year?
My pilgrims, then, are pilgrims to the less lofty, but not less worthy
shrines of Lakeland and Wales; and nowhere do we see more clearly
than in these districts the startling change that has come over the
relations between Mountain and Man. When Gilpin visited Derwentwater in
1786, he quoted with approval the remark of an “ingenious person” who,
on seeing the lake, cried out, “Here is Beauty indeed, Beauty lying in
the lap of Horrour!” and in like spirit Thomas Pennant, in his _Tours
in North Wales_, described the shore of Llyn Idwal as “a fit place to
inspire murderous thoughts, environed with horrible precipices.” Then
gradually the sense of beauty displaced the sense of “horrour,” and
awe was melted into admiration; though still, to a quite recent time,
we see reflected in the literature of our British mountains the belief
that to ascend them was a perilous feat not to be lightly undertaken.
Thus we read of a traveller who, having inquired of his host at
Pen-y-Gwryd whether he might venture to ascend Snowdon without a guide,
was dissuaded from such a headstrong attempt, which “would necessarily
be attended with great risk”[1]; and another writer, in narrating his
ascent by the easy Beddgelert ridge, some fifty years ago, exclaims
with solemnity, “You _felt_ that a false step would be fatal.”
But there were some pioneers, long before climbing became a fine
art, who knew and loved the mountains too well to fear them. Take,
for instance, the story--one of the most interesting in these early
records--of the unknown clergyman who, about the middle of the last
century, used to haunt the Welsh hills, and was “possessed with a most
extraordinary mania for climbing.” It is delightful to read of the
enthusiasm with which he engaged in his pursuit.
His object was, to use his own expression, “to follow the
sky-line” of every mountain he visited. For example, he would
ascend Snowdon from Llanberis, but instead of following the
beaten track he would take the edge of the mountain along the
verge of the highest precipices, following what he called the
“sky-line,” until he reached the summit; he would then descend
the other side of the mountain toward Beddgelert, in a similar
manner. He appeared to have no other object in climbing to the
wild mountain-tops, than merely, as he said, to behold the
wonderful works of the Almighty. In following the “sky-line,”
no rocks, however rough, no precipices, unless perfectly
inaccessible, ever daunted him. This singular mania, or hobby
horse, he appears to have followed up for years, and continued
with unabated ardour.[2]
That enthusiast, I am sure, was a true pilgrim, and it is to be
regretted that his name is unrecorded.
People sometimes write as if these mountains were “discovered,” and
first ascended, by English travellers, and as if the native dalesmen
had known nothing of their own country before. Such statements can
hardly be taken with seriousness, for it is evident that, as sheep
were pastured on these hills from the earliest times, the shepherd must
have long preceded the tourist as mountaineer. Thus we find Pennant, in
his description of the “stupendous” ridges that surround Nant Ffrancon,
remarking: “I have, from the depth beneath, seen the shepherds skipping
from peak to peak; but the point of contact was so small that from this
distance they seemed to my uplifted eyes like beings of another order,
floating in the air.” To the shepherds, of course, mountain climbing
was not a sport but a business, and it would not have occurred to them
to climb higher than was necessary; but who can doubt that, in the
course of their daily rounds, the summits as well as the sides of the
hills must have become known to them?
And if the tourist thinks the native cold and unimpressionable, what
does the man who has been born and bred on the hills think of the man
who comes on purpose to scramble there? It is difficult to say, so
friendly yet inscrutable is his attitude; but I remember hearing from a
shepherd in Wastdale, who had tended sheep on the Gable till every crag
was familiar to him, a story which seemed to throw some light on his
sentiments. He had been asked by a rock-climbing visitor, in the dearth
of companions at the hotel, to join him in the ascent of a ridge where
it would have been rash for one to go alone, and he did so; but, as he
said to me, though he was always ready to go on the rocks to rescue
a sheep, it did a bit puzzle him that the gentleman should wish to go
there “for no reason.” That, I suspect, is the underlying problem in
the mind of the hillsman with respect to the amateur; but, of course,
both interest and politeness prevent the free expression of it.[3]
There are cases, however, where the mountain dwellers become themselves
inspired with the love of climbing for climbing’s sake. I was told
of an inhabitant of Snowdonia who had been away in a lowland county
for several years, and when at last he returned, and saw his beloved
hill-tops again, could not satisfy his feelings until he had traversed,
in one walk, the whole circuit of Snowdon, the Glyders, and the
Carnedds, a distance of some thirty miles. Even when there is no such
visible enthusiasm, we may feel assured that the mountains wield a real
though subconscious influence upon their children.
It was not till the early ’eighties that the Alpinists discovered
that there are fine gymnastic “problems” among the rocks of Wales and
Cumberland, and the word went forth that every buttress and gully,
every pinnacle and arête, were to be mastered; from which time onward
the cry of the ambitious climber has been (like the cry of the
religious devotee) _scando quia impossibile est_, with the result that
the “impossible” has mostly become the accomplished. So that whereas,
some twenty-five years ago, an ascent of the more precipitous ridges
and rock-faces was a rare achievement, we now see the very hotel walls
covered with pictures of “pillars” and “needles,” with adventurous
cragsmen perched in alarming postures on the verge, and the frivolities
of visitors’-books interspersed with the grim seriousness of the
climbers’ records, telling in technical language how Messrs. So and So,
“led” by Mr. Dash, surmounted some particular “pitch” (ominous term!)
in Mr. Blank’s gully--for every gully must now be named after its
conqueror.[4]
Let me not be misunderstood as wishing to depreciate in any way the
craft of the climber, which, even apart from its great scientific and
geographical value in the pioneering of Alps, Andes or Himalayas,
and regarded merely as an athletic exercise, is one of the finest of
sports; for which reason those who have long been familiar with the
mountain life, though themselves not rock-climbers, will be the first
to admire, and to envy, the marvellous skill which has carried men
into places where, a quarter-century back, no one dreamed of venturing.
But I would point out that there is another and still more important
function of great mountains--the culture not of the athletic faculty
alone, but of that intellectual sympathy with untamed and primitive
Nature which our civilization threatens to destroy. A mountain is
something more than a thing to climb. To the many who, on a fine summer
day, swarm up Skiddaw or Snowdon by the well-worn pony-paths, it is
pure holiday-making: to the few who (in another sense) swarm up Scafell
Pinnacle or the Napes Needle, it is pure gymnastics; but between or
beyond these two classes there are those--pilgrims I call them--who
find in mountain climbing what only mountains can give, the contact
with unsophisticated Nature, the opportunity to be alone, to be out of
and above the world of ordinary life, to pass from the familiar sights
and surroundings into a cloud-land of new shapes and sounds, where one
feels the fascination of that undiscoverable secret (I do not know how
else to name it) by which every true nature-lover is allured.
Now, judging from the current literature of mountain climbing, one
might suppose that mountains had no such secret at all--that they were
mere fortuitous masses of rock-structure, formidable indeed to those
unskilled in the cragsman’s pastime, but supplying a ready playground
for the expert. In the popular and less ambitious class of guide-book,
written for the “tripper” who is deemed incapable of attaining an easy
summit without instruction, and who is warned of the foolhardiness of
deviating a yard from the appointed track, we do not of course look for
any real appreciation of mountain character; but it is to be regretted
that the same defect is scarcely less observable in the records of the
new school of British rock-climbers, if we except the writings of its
men of genius, such as the late Mr. Owen Glynne Jones, and a few others
who might be mentioned. There are many fine cragsmen, it would seem, to
whom the fells are little more than a gymnasium, and who cannot see the
mountains for the rocks.
A story told me by an artist who is a true lover of the mountains will
illustrate what I mean. Returning to Wastdale Head one evening along
the side of the lake in company with some climbers, while the seamed
front of the Screes across the water was glorified by the setting sun,
he pointed out to one of the party the splendour of the sight. “Yes,”
replied the gymnast, with a glance at the gullies, “you get a good look
at number one and number two, don’t you?” To _him_ the illuminated
mountain-side was just a line of numbered chimneys to scramble in; he
had as much feeling for them as for the numbered bathing-machines on a
seashore.
Still less is there any real understanding of the mountains among the
bulk of the tourists who rush through the districts and throng the
hotels in the “season”: of the motorists, of course, I need not speak.
They will ask, no doubt, the usual well-worn questions--“Which is
Snowdon?” and “Where is Helvellyn?” and “Is that the top of Scafell?”
but you quickly perceive that they are but jesting Pilates who do not
wait for the answer; they may take coach-trips over the passes, and
admire a show waterfall or two, but they see no more in the mountains
than the panorama of the moment, an incident in the day’s amusements of
less import than their lunch.
Who, then, it may be asked, are the “pilgrims” of whom I speak? They
are the small handful of enthusiasts whose concern with the mountains,
as compared with that of the rock-climbers, is of a less venturesome
but not less personal kind--devotees who have made it their pleasure
to become intimately versed in the mountain lore, and to whom the
numberless moods and phases of the hills are more familiarly known than
to many expert cragsmen. To such solitary nature-lovers what name is
more applicable than that of “pilgrims,” a pilgrim, we are told, being
one “who visits with religious intent, some place reputed to possess
especial holiness”; and have we not the authority of a great poet for
so using it?[5]
It is gratifying to me to be able to claim episcopal sanction for my
own share, such as it is, in these mountain pilgrimages; for it was
by a Bishop,[6] as renowned for his physical prowess as for his piety
and learning, that I was first inducted to this work, and ordained
(so to speak) in the high calling which I have followed, more or less
faithfully, for over fifty years. It so chanced that, as a sixth-form
boy in a great public school, I was sent in the summer holidays to act
as tutor to a nephew of the Bishop, and the scene of our studies was
a village on the Carnarvonshire coast, under the great northern spurs
of Carnedd Llewelyn. With shame I must confess that both pupil and
tutor preferred the allurements of the shore to the austerities of the
heights; but the Bishop, muscular Christian and walker that he was,
proud of traversing the length and breadth of his diocese on foot, was
bent on finding his way--and what more troubled us, _our_ way--to the
little tarn, Llyn an Afon, which lies under the steep front of Y Foel
Fras, itself a mountain of 3,000 feet; and in search of this lakelet
we were “commandeered,” much against our wishes, to march with the
Bishop across the hills. Even now I see him, as he waved his stick
encouragingly to us from some far headland, while we two boys lagged
wearily behind, and wondered at the strange climbing propensities of
bishops; and I remember that when an irreverent groan of “Oh, what
a fool the Bishop is!” escaped from my pupil’s lips, I inexcusably
failed to reprove him. Little did I foresee that, though the task was
so unwelcome to me at the moment, I was soon myself to be bitten with
the same mountain madness, and that the image of Llyn an Afon, nestling
under a semicircle of rocks at the head of its long pastoral valley,
was to draw me back many and many a time, in later years, to revisit
that lonely region. The Bishop himself would be flattered, perhaps,
could he know that, as a result of that walk, one of his two laggards
became a confirmed pilgrim, and has since made more ascents than he
cares to confess of those Carnarvonshire mountains, and at all kinds of
seasons.
For the notion, at one time widespread, and still by no means extinct,
that these districts can be properly visited only in July and August is
wholly erroneous. There is no doubt that in May and June the climate is
usually at its best, and then most often occur those halcyon spells of
sunshine which the drenched August holiday-maker is apt to regard as a
myth; for the tourist waits till the wet weather has set in, and then
has some hard things to say of the mountains’ rudeness. The autumn,
too, is often a goodly season for the climber, when the last torrential
rains of August or September have sent the last disillusioned visitors
to their homes; and even the winter-time, or early spring, as Southey,
with other authorities, has pointed out, is far more fruitful than the
late summer in those “goings on in heaven” which give an ever-shifting
glory to the hills.
Eastertide is now a popular week among the mountains, but fifty years
ago the hotels were practically empty at that season. I well remember
how, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I planned my first Easter
visit to Cumberland, and was gravely warned by a learned Fellow of my
College, the librarian, Henry Bradshaw, that it would be a very rash
undertaking to go at that time, for “the passes,” he said, “would not
be open.” He had in mind, possibly, a sentence in Gray’s account of
his trip to the Lake District in 1769, where it is stated of the gates
of the Styhead Pass, at Seathwaite, that “all farther access is here
barred to prying mortals, only there is a little path winding over the
fells, and for some weeks in the year passable to the dalesmen; but
the mountains know well that these innocent people will not reveal the
mysteries of their ancient kingdom.” If my monitor could now stand on
the Styhead on a fine Easter Monday, he would see a sight to surprise
him!
Nor is it strange that the mountains should attract their worshippers
at all seasons of the year, for the passion, once acquired, is
insatiable; you may tire of the hills for awhile, but if you have once
felt their power you will assuredly return to them; and that perhaps is
why we think of them as holding some inner secret of their own. Who
that has sympathetically studied them will deny it? There are moments
when, as we stand in the presence of a great mountain group, we are
almost overwhelmingly conscious of the brooding watchfulness, the
sphinx-like reserve and expectancy, with which these silent sentinels
confront us. What is the source of the strong yet mysterious attraction
that draws us again and again to these wildernesses of rock and cloud,
this “builded desolation” which might seem so antagonistic to human
sympathies? Why is it that we find even a humanizing influence in
wastes where our grandfathers could see nothing but what repelled them
as “savage” and “ferocious”? The charm that binds us is as inexplicable
as it is real. If human love is “of the valley” and calls us down,
there is another and wilder love that is of the mountain and calls us
upward.
There are unfrequented ranges, such as the Eskdale side of Scafell,
or the Aber side of Carnedd Llewelyn, where one may walk for twelve
hours together without meeting a human being; indeed, the loneliness
of the Welsh hills is now even greater than it used to be, since the
“hafodtai,” or upland farmsteads, where the herdsmen camped out during
the summer months, have been abandoned; and the present concentration
of both tourists and climbers on certain favoured spots makes the
silence all the deeper elsewhere. Thus it is that the pilgrim who
is neither tyro nor expert, and therefore not dependent on the
companionship of others, on account either of his own incapacity or of
the arduous nature of his task, is able on the mountains to profit by
a rare form of intercourse which, in the hurry and bustle of modern
life, has become increasingly difficult; he can exchange ideas (if
he has any) with _himself_. His surroundings are such as to quicken
and foster such self-converse, not by the morbid introspection of the
solitary--for, rightly regarded, there is no such thing as solitude
among the hills--but by the liberating influence which these scenes
exert both on the body and on the mind.
Nor must it be supposed that there is any taint of moroseness or
misanthropy in this mountain seclusion; the contrary, rather, is the
case, and the human sympathies are perhaps all the stronger because
they are not expressed but implied. Tender relationships need space to
grow in, and the self-withdrawal which allows a fuller, because a freer
view of them, does not lessen but rather fosters their tenderness,
even as we may understand the hills themselves the better if we
sometimes watch them from afar; and it is just this gift of space and
freedom that we find in mountains as nowhere else. Therefore it is
true, in Muir’s words, that “the darkest scriptures of the mountains
are illumined with bright passages of love that never fail to make
themselves felt when one is alone.”
Again, if the mountains can teach us to feel more deeply, they can
also help us more effectively to think. I have heard mountaineering
deprecated by a learned scholar as having too much of the “animal” in
it. The mountains certainly are not a thinking-shop; we do not go to
them to follow a train of thought, or to solve a mathematical problem,
but when we return from them we should be able to think the better, for
in their company we have stood face to face with those great natural
forces which are the best and most elemental educators of heart and
mind alike. As Wordsworth’s “Solitary” said of the “two huge peaks,”
that overlooked his hermitage:
Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man
Than the mute agents stirring there.
For, rightly spent, what we call “a day upon the mountains” is in
truth an eight or ten hours’ enfranchisement from a mortal obsession.
Our chains fall from us--the small cramping chains of lifelong
habit--and we go free. We awake out of the deadly torpor of our
everyday “occupations,” and we live. And excellent as is the physical
exaltation of climbing--the toil and triumph of the ascent--there is
also an intellectual and spiritual element in the mountain-passion,
which can lift us out of ourselves, and show us, from a higher plane
of feeling, as no mere book-knowledge can do, the true proportions and
relations of things. One cannot walk in such regions, consciously,
without enlargement of thought. There are heights and valleys which,
to those who seek them in a sympathetic spirit, are better “seats of
learning” than any school or university in the land; there are days
when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual
atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices
of commonplace life.[7]
In this sense the humanities of thought do not wither, but rather
are fostered and strengthened, in the loneliness of the hills, and
the hills themselves, when approached in a fit spirit, become a
living inspiration, which enables us the better to know and value our
fellow-beings of flesh and blood. “Would that I could give the world
some clue to apprehend these strange weird companions of my life, in
their higher teachings and ideals. Painters give them up in despair, as
impossible, unrenderable; and they have yet to be described in their
subtle powers of thought-giving and helpful teaching.” So wrote to
me a friend who had dwelt for many years under the shadow of a mighty
mountain range.[8]
Here, then, is the function of mountains in relation to human life.
To every one there is opened (if he knows it) his own doorway for
stepping out into space--for detaching himself for a time from the
heavy environment of customary thought. To many it is music that
furnishes this passport; to others poetry; to some few the philosophic
reverie, or deliberate practice of the _yoga_. I have ventured to speak
of mountain climbing in a similar relation, and to suggest that, in
certain aspects, it is indeed a form of _ecstasy_, a standing above,
and out of, oneself. The mind, no less than the body, has its Snowdons
and its Helvellyns--its Crib Gochs and its Striding Edges--and when we
climb them we may rise superior, not only to the visible landscape but
to ourselves, and survey from a new vantage-point the low-lying flats
and pastures, or shall we say the tablelands (too often literally so),
of our own tastes and habits. How many astronomers are busily intent on
surveying the Mountains of the Moon! And shall we not devote at least
equal attention to these Mountains of the Mind, which are far nearer,
clearer, and more real to us? Their secret, maybe, we shall never fully
read; it is at least our privilege to have guessed at it.
Thus it is that these our British highlands are sacred ground to some
of us. We have gone on pilgrimage to them again and again, until the
association has become, in a manner, a personal one; for there are
instinctive sympathies with places as with people, and to many, as
to myself, the connexion with certain mountains has been a deep and
lasting influence. How many days, amounting to months and years of my
life, have I spent in their company; and how often have I been keenly
conscious of their presence, even when living far away from them in the
din and dust of towns! Going back to these mountain shrines, after long
and unwilling absence, we find that in heart we have never left them at
all.
II
At the Shrine of Snowdon
It is commonly said that the approach to Snowdon begins at Capel Curig;
but this is a very shortsighted and unimaginative way of regarding
so rich an experience as a pilgrimage to the heart of Wales. To the
true mountain lover, the approach begins at Euston Square. Yes, there,
in the great busy station, when you have uttered the magic word,
“Bettws-y-Coed,” and have received what looks like a mere railway
ticket, but is, in fact, a passport to the enchanted fastnesses of the
hills--from that moment, and all the day, as you glide swiftly through
the broad fields of the Midlands, you see before you (if you are fitted
to be a pilgrim at all) the distant ridges and cloud-capped peaks of
Snowdonia, and hear the music of the streams.
For let it not be supposed that Capel Curig is, as other mountain
hamlets are, a mere halting-place in the “circular tour” of North
Wales. An old writer has called the place “an excellent inn in a
desert,” but it is much more than that; it is an excellent desert
round an inn. It is the special glory of the Capel that it lies, not
in a sunken hollow, but on an open upland, some 700 feet above the sea,
where the air, even at the hottest noontide, breathes crisp and bracing
from the hills. The distance from Bettws-y-Coed is only five or six
miles by road; in climate the difference is one that no mileage can
express. From the low, moist woodlands you mount gradually up till you
reach the point where the Llugwy river winds in a series of rocky falls
round the base of Moel Siabod; then there is a bend, and yet another
bend, in the valley, and you find yourself at St. Curig’s shrine.
Great mountains are all around you, but there is a sense of space and
freedom, with wild slopes of grass and rock stretching up and back to
the higher ridges that lie behind. One is not oppressed, as so often in
mountain districts, by the nearness of the overhanging heights.
By climbing one of the low hills that border the junction of the
streams, you may learn the general features of the place at a glance.
Facing westward, with your back to Bettws-y-Coed, you look into two
bare, bleak, converging valleys, of which the southern is topped by the
clear-cut peaks of Snowdon, the northern by the bulky range of Carnedd
Llewelyn, while between them is the great mass of the Glyders. You are
face to face with the wildest region of North Wales--a foreground of
broad, marshy moorland, where you see little life but an occasional
herd of black cattle, and a background of mountains that rise above
3,000 feet; yet the dreariness of the scene, so striking in its first
impression, is relieved and varied, on fuller acquaintance, by the
unsuspected tenderness that it enfolds. Simple and severe as the
outlines are, there lies beneath them a wealth of loveliness that no
intimacy can exhaust--lakes and mountain streams, unsurpassed for
purity and freshness; secret nooks and lawns, and green terraces of
turf, interspersed with grey crags and buttresses; and, crowning all,
the great circle of mountains which for ever attracts and holds the eye
without laying a burden on the mind.
Capel Curig, as a glance at the map will show, is the ideal centre
for the exploration of Snowdonia, lying as it does at the junction of
the two chief valleys, from which any of the mountain ranges may be
approached; and there is in Capel Curig (for those who know it) the
ideal cottage in which to spend a memorable fortnight among the hills.
A more welcome resting-place, for one who loves a wild country, than
this little home among the mountains, with the plash of streams and the
cry of curlews all around, it would be difficult to imagine; but it is
less as a resting-place than a starting-place that it is here referred
to. Let it be supposed, therefore, that we have once more spent a
night in the cottage, with the moon looking down on us from over the
ridge of Siabod; that we have paid yet another morning visit to our
bathing-place in the Llugwy, with the dipper and the grey wagtail
flying up and down the stream, and that we are now starting out to make
renewed acquaintance with the grim giants couched around.
The sense of severity and aloofness which haunts these mountains as
compared with the Cumberland “fells,” is due chiefly no doubt to their
sterner physical features, and to the greater depth and bleakness of
the bare valleys which intersect them, each group of peaks rising
apart, like a mountain system of its own; but we Saxon visitors are
also moved, perhaps, by a feeling of racial strangeness in a land
which has no interpreter for us--no literary associations such as
those by which the English lakes are endeared--nothing but a dim
record of earlier inhabitants, with wild tales of battles and feuds,
soldiers and banditti, insurrections and invasions, now alike buried
in the past. We seem to be looking on savage mountains in a foreign
land. For me at least the first impression of “angry grandeur” in the
Welsh mountains[9] has never been wholly obliterated by the intimacy
of years, and has lent an unfailing zest to my walks. I can still
recall the youthful eagerness with which, after my first ascent of
Snowdon with a College friend, we set off, then and there, to toil
from Pen-y-Gwryd up the long ridge of Moel Siabod; and how on a later
occasion, after crossing Snowdon to Beddgelert, I was not satisfied
until I had stood on the opposite crest of Moel Hebog in the afternoon.
There must assuredly be some strong attraction about the mountains that
can draw one, even in the fervour of boyhood, to pay them double homage
such as this.
Next to the fact that they fall into the three great groups of
Snowdon, the Glyders and the Carnedds--with Moel Siabod, and the
heathery moorlands that link it to Cynicht and Moelwyn, forming a
boundary on the south-east--the first point that strikes the watcher
of these stimulating heights is that they offer, for the most part,
a precipitous face on their northern or eastern fronts, while to the
south and west they sink less formidably, though often with great
steepness, to their dividing “bwlchs.” This structure is very marked in
the central range of the Glyders,[10] where for four miles around the
head of Nant Ffrancon the great escarpment looks down on the waters of
Llyn Ogwen; on the south there is but a formless steep of intermingled
heather and rock, so that it would be surprising that strangers should
be instructed to ascend the mountain from that quarter, if the art of
climbing--that is, of selecting the routes that yield the greatest
satisfaction to the climber--were not so entirely overlooked.
To understand the Glyders, therefore, it is from Ogwen that we must
start, that beautiful dark lake which lies, a thousand feet above
sea-level, in the great mountain basin from which Nant Ffrancon
descends--
Where all is rocks at random thrown,
Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone.
There is much truth in the remark made sixty years ago by Mr. C. F.
Cliffe that “there are few parts of these isles in which elemental
effects may be seen, or heard, to such advantage as in this enormous
valley, enclosed on nearly three sides; Aeolus sports here to his
heart’s content”; for owing to the sharp northward bend which the glen
takes at the foot of Llyn Ogwen, the play of wind and cloud in this
boisterous amphitheatre is often a wonderful sight. Looking southward
from this point, we have above us the beetling front of the Glyders,
and by striking up the spur known locally as the Gribin, with Llyn
Idwal on its right and Llyn Bochlwyd on its left, we gain a natural
causeway, at first broad and bulky, then narrowing to a knife-edge,
which leads us through the heart of the mountain, with intoxicating
sights on either side, to the high plateau between the Glyder Fawr and
the Glyder Fach. Across Cwm Bochlwyd, as we ascend, rises the great
mountain tower of Tryfan, which, since the outrage done to the majesty
of Snowdon, is rivalled only by Crib Goch for the supreme honours of
Welsh summits; on the other hand we see, above Llyn Idwal, the famous
black rift in the mural precipice, known as the Devil’s Kitchen, with
its cataract of disgorged boulders streaking the slope below. Having
reached the top of the Gribin, we pass at a step from our narrow
staircase into an upper storey between the two summits of the Glyders,
described in early guide-books as “the chilly mountainous flat”; nor
to this day is there a spot that more often merits the name, though
there are times, too, when it may serve rather as a basking-place in
summer heat. From this pivot we have the whole mountain, with its wide
prospects, at our command, and can either turn to the right toward the
Glyder Fawr, and thence follow the sky-line over Y Garn to the Great
Elidyr, the western buttress of the range, or walk leftward (which is
by far the better course) to the Glyder Fach, from which we can cross
the gap to Tryfan and descend by its precipitous northern ridge to our
starting-place at Llyn Ogwen.
The character of the Glyder itself is that of a wild stony desert,
upbreaking here and there, as notably at its summit, into bristling
“horns” and “pikes”--stacks and shafts of rock piled together in
fantastic disarray--wonderful in all weathers, but most when the spell
of cloud is upon them. Of many journeys across this mountain, I best
remember those which were fought step by step against the storm, when
the wind was so strong that one had to clutch at the crags to avoid
being blown away, and the mist so thick that even the unforgotten rock
figures--grotesque shapes of beasts and fowls and reptiles without
name--were blurred and transformed, so that in the compass alone was
there certainty;[11] but the fair days also are not less treasured in
the mind when one could sit and watch the Ogwen stream, like the river
in Mrs. Browning’s poem, “flowing ever in a shadow greenly onward
to the sea,” or southward the glitter of Portmadoc Bay, hung like a
picture in the sky, or far to the south-east the Berwyn Hills, and
other distant and more distant ranges, covered with snow (I recall the
wonders of one long-past winter afternoon) and gleaming like fire in
the sunset.
But it is to Tryfan, even more than to the Glyder Fach, that the
heart of the pilgrim is drawn--that huge rocky bastion which juts
out from the battlements of the main ridge, and has been the marvel
of generations of travellers on the coach-road which it overhangs.
Well might Pennant, looking across to it from the verge of the Glyder
a hundred years before rock-climbing was thought of, feel dismayed
at its frown! “In the midst of a vale far below,” he wrote, “rises
the singular mountain Trevaen, assuming on this side a pyramidal
form, naked and very rugged. A precipice, from the summit of which I
surveyed the strange scene, forbade my approach to examine the nature
of its composition.” There is no difficulty in approaching Tryfan from
this side, indeed the very precipice of which Pennant spoke is now
recommended by rock-climbers as a good training-place for beginners;
but so formidable is the look of the mountain that until about forty
years ago it was ascended by only one route, nor even now, when it has
lost its former terrors, has it lost one jot of its impressiveness.
After visiting Tryfan some scores of times, I still feel its attraction
as strongly as when I first discovered it (for it comes to every
mountain-lover as a discovery of his own), and I have sometimes thought
that a summer might be well spent in making a thorough study of the
peak, until one became familiar with the many unexplored recesses which
the climber passes by, that labyrinth of cyclopean masonry--terraces
and galleries, slabs and spires, turrets and gargoyles--with which
it uprears itself, like the great cathedral that it is, to the two
standing stones which form its crest.
No hermitage certainly could be more sublime, for him who would dwell
above the pomps and vanities of the world, than a nook in one of the
rocky pent-houses or caverns that yawn along the sides of Tryfan; and
such anchorite would at least enjoy the best natural observatory, and
the finest mountain berries, that Carnarvonshire can produce. Plain
living and high thinking might there be practised _in excelsis_.
When we turn from the Glyders and Tryfan, still in their primitive
state of utter wildness, to their great neighbour, Snowdon, scarred
and maimed by copper-mine and steam-engine, the change is a striking
one; it is like passing from a perfectly preserved work of art to
some broken monument, the torso of a giant form, in which we have
to reconstruct from the beauty of what remains, the once exceeding
splendour of the whole. Capel Curig, as I have said, is the point from
which “Snowdon and all his sons” (to use Pennant’s quaint expression)
are best seen; to ascend from Llanberis and Beddgelert is to go up by
a back staircase in neglect of the front one, a mistaken course at
any time, and doubly so now that the summit has been spoiled, and the
interest of the mountain in great part shifted to its attendant peaks,
which rise on the Capel Curig side.
But crippled as Snowdon is, we may still find on it one incomparable
excursion, the circuit of the great hollow of Cwm Dyli by the ridges
of Lliwedd and Crib Goch, which, if we can shut our eyes to the
abominations of slag-heap and railroad that must be passed on the way,
will hold its own, even against the Glyder and Tryfan, as the grandest
mountain walk in Wales. Lliwedd itself, which rises so finely from the
shores of Llyn Llydaw, is a beautiful object from every side but the
south, and may be described as a sort of glorified Skiddaw--as if the
Cumbrian hill, while losing none of the graceful lines and curves that
distinguish it, had been cut down, on its front, from a mere steep
of shale and heather into a mighty precipice. Along the edge of this
rock-face, the haunt once of the wild goat, now of the cragsman, and
over the twin peaks, with their bird’s-eye views of Cwm Dyli and its
two lakes on one side, and the lakeless Cwm Llan on the other, we have
an ideal route to Snowdon.
Arrived _there_, what a scene awaits us, especially if the train has
just steamed in with its latest freight of trippers! For consider on
what ground it is that we stand--the very summit of the sacred hill,
the shrine of Snowdon, once the pride and stronghold of the Cymry. Thus
wrote the historian Camden, more than three centuries ago:
We may very properly call these mountains the British Alps, for
besides that they are the highest in all the island, they are
also no less inaccessible by reason of the steepness of their
rocks than the Alps themselves; and they all encompass one hill
which, far exceeding the rest in height, does so tower its head
aloft that it seems not merely to threaten the sky, but to
thrust its summit into it. It harbours snow continually, being
throughout the year covered with it, or rather with an aged
crust of snow; hence the British name of ‘Craig Eryri,’ and
the English “Snowdon.”
We smile at the hyperbole of these ancient writers, but even now, in
these days of its utmost wrong, the natural sovereignty of Snowdon
stands confessed; so truly imperial is its form, and so symmetrically
do its superb ridges radiate from the parent peak. Its everlasting
snow was a fable; but deep drifts may be seen as late as midsummer in
its northern gullies, and in the winter months, when the zigzag tracks
are deeply covered, it is often no easy matter, for any but trained
climbers, to make the ascent from Capel Curig; there are times when the
high cornice of snow, overlapping the brow of the ridge at the head of
Cwm Dyli, offers a formidable barrier.
It was well that so noble a mountain, rich in legend and tradition,
should continue to stir public sympathies[12] and draw pilgrims to
its shrine; the pity is that the shrine itself should have been
despoiled--not, be it noted, by the _number_ of its votaries, which
was great even before the middle of the last century, when the mischief
was still undone, but by the hideous “accommodation” provided for them.
It would not have been difficult, with a little care and forethought,
to build a mountain hut in a sheltered place a few feet below the
top of the ridge, where it would have been practically unseen;
unfortunately what was done, about seventy years ago, was to erect
some unsightly buildings on the very summit, and these have lately
been enlarged into the present Summit Hotel, of which it need only be
said, as was said of the nose of a certain philosopher, that “language
is not vituperatious enough to describe it.” I never see the place
without thinking longingly of the last scene in Poe’s story, _The Fall
of the House of Usher_, where a certain accursed mansion obligingly
topples over and disappears in a neighbouring tarn; might it not be
hoped, then, that on some wild winter night, when these buildings are
untenanted, they would be blown by a south-west hurricane over the
edge of Clogwyn Garnedd into the waters of Glaslyn below? But such
wishes, however pious, are unavailing; to take a cup of tea in the
refreshment-room, in preparation for the advance to Crib Goch, is the
wiser course.
It is pleasant to exchange the crowded mart on Snowdon for the space
and solitude of Carnedd Ugain, its high northern shoulder which
overlooks the Llanberis side; but though solitude will now be ours,
space must soon begin to fail us, as the broad expanse dwindles and
contracts to a mere rocky curtain. A glorious ridge it is that we enter
on, which under the two names of Crib-y-Ddysgl and Crib Goch, but in
reality one and indivisible, runs with hardly a break for a full mile
eastward, with Cwm Dyli on the right, and the still greater depths of
Cwm Glas and the Pass of Llanberis on the left, until, after dipping
to the grassy saddle known as Bwlch Goch, it rises again to the famous
Pinnacles, and then narrows in once again, and more acutely, to the two
summits, at a height of 3,000 feet. Though the whole “Red Ridge” from
end to end is narrow, and a passage along it is apt to bring to mind
the Gendin Edge in _Peer Gynt_--
Nigh on four miles long it stretches
Sharp before you like a scythe--
it is to the eastern section of it, between and adjoining the two
cairns, that the main interest belongs, and hither for years past all
lovers of the Welsh hills have aspired. Yet owing doubtless to the fact
that every one who has written of Crib Goch has written of it in the
terms of his own powers as climber, and these powers vary immensely,
it is by no means easy to obtain a clear and trustworthy idea of it
from the published descriptions. The old writers, for the most part,
spoke of it as a place of terror, where it was foolhardy to venture,
and where the least slip would be fatal; in the literature of the new
school of rock-climbing, on the other hand it is treated like Striding
Edge on Helvellyn, or Sharp Edge on Saddleback, as just a pleasant
scramble, and it is said to be a moot point among cragsmen whether
they could pass along it with their hands tied. So differently does a
mountain present itself, according to the capacity and confidence of
the mountaineer!
I have heard the story of an ardent pilgrim, by no means a cragsman,
who had once braced himself, with some misgivings, to the crossing
of Crib Goch, and was just entering on the most awkward bit of the
journey, when he was met by another traveller coming from the opposite
end. Pleased to think that he was about to receive, in his straitened
circumstances, a word of encouragement from a fellow-climber, he
was startled by the stranger breaking out into an almost passionate
reprobation of the perils of mountain edges in general and in
particular of Crib Goch. “I am now a married man,” he cried, “and it is
not right, it is not proper, for me to be here.” My friend felt that
there was a lack of reason in addressing these remonstrances to _him_;
but his own position, astride of a knife-edge, was not favourable
for argument, and he was indeed so taken aback by the inauspicious
character of the meeting that he sorrowfully renounced Crib Goch and
retired the way he came.
In reality, though this “crib” offers no obstacle whatever to an active
person who is quite free from giddiness, it is much narrower and more
precipitous than any of the Cumberland “edges,” and for the ordinary
climber, as distinct from the expert, needs to be taken with more
care. Imagine yourself, reader, perched on the roof, so to speak, of a
mountain--a colossal roof, some fifteen hundred feet above the valleys
below, where for sparrow on housetop you have raven or buzzard--and,
further, imagine the angle of this roof to be a ridge of spiky and
crumbling rock, averaging a foot in width at the top, and dropping
almost sheer on the north side into the hollow of Cwm Glas, while on
the south it falls away in an extremely steep slope, which the timid
would call a precipice, but which offers an abundance of friendly
ledges and notches as foothold. Such is Crib Goch, and along this ridge
you must travel to reach the higher cairn, whether you approach it,
as I have described, in a descent from Snowdon, or more directly by a
stiff climb up its eastern gable from Pen-y-Pas. In any case it has
the distinction, among Snowdonian summits, of being accessible only to
those pilgrims who are prepared to “climb.”