Читать книгу Between the Sunset and the Sea: A View of 16 British Mountains - Simon Ingram - Страница 13

Somewhere between the Brecon Beacons and the country’s north coast, the mountains of Wales sharpen and slough off their grassy skins. Southern Snowdonia marks the changing point, and here there’s a belt of mountains evidently conflicted about which camp they belong in. The shapes of these ranges waver between the cutting ruggedness of the peaks in the northern part of Snowdonia and the queer emerald forms of their counterparts in South Wales. The names of the big groups of hills here tickle recognition for some, but only just: the Arans, the Tarrens, the Dovey Forest, the Rhinogs. Journey from the south into this region and steep diagonals, or the jag of a peak on the skyline ahead might symbolise your steady transition to the wild, hard north. But conversely, enter from the north and you might describe the landscape around you as softening, easing towards the sprawling south. It’s a fascinating, disjointed menagerie. Then you see Cadair Idris, and suddenly you’re not looking at anything else.

A month after being nearly drowned on the Black Mountain, I found myself in southern Snowdonia during a spring that had finally sprung. Colour had returned to the landscape. New life was exploding. Bluebells bobbed on embankments beside roads sweeping through richly-carpeted passes and tired-looking villages. Sunlight diffused through new leaves, lighting the world through miniature shades of green and giving the afternoon a feeling of intense optimism.

I’d spent an uncertain twenty minutes dividing my attention between the road and the skyline – punctuated occasionally with visits to the rumble strip – trying to establish whether my objective was sliding into view ahead in some distance-skewed fashion. When it finally did appear, it seemed preposterous to think I could miss it.

There’s evidence that the Elizabethans considered Cadair Idris to be the highest peak in the British Isles, and it’s an easy mistake to forgive. Approach it from the north and it smacks you in the face from a distance of ten miles. It’s massive: a wide, wrinkled battlement of brown, crag-hung rock sprawled across the southern horizon with intimidating abruptness. Showell Styles – author of The Mountains of North Wales, of which more later – described the vision of Cadair from the north as a ‘hunched eagle with a tremendous wingspan’, and it’s wonderfully apt. Cadair isn’t the highest peak in this part of Snowdonia – not quite – but its visual presence is enough to make it seem as if it is. Perhaps this apparent brawniness is because the mountain’s base is at sea level, thereby earning every millimetre of its 893-metre height over a relatively short distance. The town of Dolgellau, just to the north, sits on the zero contour and so completes the contrast on a human scale. But the reflex assessment upon sighting Dolgellau isn’t that it nestles up against Cadair Idris; it’s more like the town cowers beneath it.

I chose the climb from Talyllyn, a way known as the Minffordd Path. Some say the path from the north – the Fox’s Path, which climbs the cliffier aspect of the mountain directly – is the best. From the north Cadair appears as a massif of three summits, split into upturned prows in several places by aggressive staircases of ridge. It appears impossibly impregnable, and impressively immense. The Fox’s Path offers superb views of the Irish Sea, Dolgellau below, and the bristly Cyfrwy Arête, probably the most blisteringly dramatic ridge climb south of Scotland. But this route doesn’t take you into the mountain’s inner keep; it climbs this northern wall and, once atop, walks the ramparts to the highest point, missing one of the main arenas of the mountain. Plus, instead of one hard ascent, the climb from Minffordd is a languid, gentle rise, followed by one mercifully swift but screeching pull. To me, it seemed to be the best choice to appreciate the many levels on which Cadair engages the senses. Plus, with memories still raw from the Black Mountain, it clearly seemed the preferable option – especially since, having not learned my lesson in the Brecon Beacons, I had a summit sleepover planned.

Rounding the corner at the Gwesty Minffordd Hotel, I swung immediately right into the smooth, wooded car park. I was late. Dinner in the seductive surroundings of a fast-food restaurant – and many stops along the road to admire the views amidst the day’s deepening shadows – meant that my plan for getting to the summit by sunset was now on a perilously tight schedule. In my pocket was a mobile phone newly loaded with GPS mapping software, which I’d decided to bring as a backup to my map following the collapse of my planning on the Black Mountain. It was not only prudent, but genuinely useful; although keen to find my way by my nose as much as possible, with traditional navigation as a failsafe, I had no qualms about using reliable gadgetry to ease my way. If anything, it would help me keep my eyes on the landscape rather than buried in a map. Pulling my overnight rucksack from the boot, I hastily chucked in a few provisions already bagged up in waterproof bags – some of which I’d labelled with helpful words like ‘food’, some of which I hadn’t – doubled-back to check the car was locked and set off into the mild evening air in something of a fluster, giving a quick look around the car park as I went. It was deserted but for one other car. With a plunging feeling I realised its owner might have similar designs on inhabiting the summit for a night, but just as I approached the gate onto the path I saw two walkers emerging into the car park, looking pink and happy. One, a greying man with a map case around his neck, smiled as he held the gate for me. ‘All yours,’ he said. And with that, I had one of Britain’s most atmospheric and intricately legendary mountains all to myself.

The mythology associated with mountains is prolific, and pervades cultures regardless of time or place. The reason for this isn’t really a mystery: they are the land’s most obvious, most dramatic physical feature. But those early peoples who settled beside mountains didn’t see them as objectives, or assets; they feared them.

Since the earliest ages of civilisation the mountains have been the homes of gods and demons. Like the sea – that other great unconquerable – the mountains’ physical size and fickle moods meant that they were seen as both forbidding and forbidden. Although many people saw them as dark places of evil and the meddling of spirits, some optimistic cultures viewed them as protectors, even mothers. But neither saw them as places for people to tread.

Understandably, it’s the most striking, massive or isolated peaks that demand the most attention and stir the most potent awe, and it’s hardly surprising that such mountains across the world have become sacred.

Kailash, an enormous, free-standing peak in Tibet, is perhaps the most famous of these, amongst both mountaineers and students of religious philosophy alike. Unfeasibly dramatic, 6,638-metre Kailash rises sheer, a topographical exclamation mark ascending so drastically from the mud-brown of the Tibetan plateau the vision of it is surreal from all sides. Located near the source of several rivers, including the Indus and Brahmaputra – which collectively irrigate land supporting over a billion people – the mountain is sacrosanct to several religions. In Hinduism, Kailash is said to be the home of Shiva, destroyer of ignorance and illusion. Buddhists believe the mountain is the place where the Buddha Demchok sits on the summit in eternal meditation. Many believe the summit is the final step to heaven; yet all consider that stepping onto its slopes leads to death, damnation or the opening of Shiva’s third eye – a highly undesirable event said to trigger the end of the universe.

Pilgrims to Kailash brave altitude and often brutal sun to be in the mountain’s presence. A common form of worship is to circumnavigate it, some 33 miles of rough path and sharp rock. Many feel suitably moved to make this journey in penance, prostrating themselves at full length on the ground, indenting the dust with their fingers, resting their heads on the rock and saying a prayer, repeating this for the entire length of the walk. This can take several weeks, after which the successful pilgrims return home, often with enormous welts on their fingers, feet and foreheads, and one hopes enlightenment in their souls.

No mortal has climbed Kailash; to do so would insult those to whom the mountain is sacred. As for immortals, it’s written in legend that 1,000 years ago, the Tantric Buddhist Milarepa challenged Naro Bön-Chung of the Tibetan Bön religion to a contest decided by a race to the mountain’s summit, although their method of ascent cannot be strictly considered ‘mountaineering’ by today’s standards.* Several Western mountaineers have come close, but either declined their permits or found themselves pressured into doing so by others in the mountaineering community. One of these – the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner – stated of Kailash: ‘If we conquer this mountain, then we conquer something in people’s souls.’

In the Indian Himalaya above Sikkim, Kangchenjunga – the third-highest mountain in the world – is another such sacred summit. Again, the mountain’s physical presence is striking, and directly linked to the reverence it’s accorded by those of the Kirant faith. Its name means ‘Five Treasures of the Sacred Snows’, referring to the mountain’s five summits and the holy repositories they are said to harbour: gold, silver, gems, grain and holy books. As with Kailash, to step on its very summit is considered a desecration, and in 1955 – in a most admirable demonstration of self-restraint – the British climbers Joe Brown and George Band, having just made the first ascent of the mountain, stopped several feet short of the pristine snow cone on the very top in deference to this belief. This tradition continued on every ascent until 1980, when members of a large Japanese expedition reputedly trampled all over it.

Closer to home, mountains have been accorded similar – if somewhat more niche – respect. Above the southern Lake District, the Old Man of Coniston is a stately 803-metre mountain that draws many walkers to it for pleasurable day walks. Most don’t know it’s also considered the fifth most sacred mountain in the world by a religious sect called the Aetherius Society. To them, the mountain is a store of spiritual energy that, when unlocked by prayer vigils, is said to radiate out to those in need across the globe. The focus of this is said to be a table-shaped rock located just north of the summit, near which the group often congregates to pray. Basing their beliefs on the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence – or ‘gods from space’ – Aetherians see mother earth as a deity who sacrificed herself to provide a home for a flawed, brutal humankind. The religion was founded by Dr George King, who in 1958 was visited whilst climbing Holdstone Down in North Devon by a ‘great being of love’, who sent streams of energy through him deep into the mountain, making it forever a holy repository. King was then instructed to travel to eighteen other mountains and ‘charge’ them with spiritual potency. Nine of these lie in the British Isles, the others being iconic (or obscure) peaks abroad.* Aetherius pilgrimages are organised to these mountains to this day.

And so to Cadair Idris, which is perhaps the most concentrated meeting of myth and mountain, certainly in Britain. For that, we can thank the rich seam of Welsh legend that perfectly complements the mood of the landscape and its reflective, storytelling people. This is the land of the Mabinogion, the collection of eleven medieval folk tales that coalesces thousands of years of fable into one delicious mix. The Mabinogion takes the form of a book; if it took the form of a mountain, it would be this mountain.

The legends that haunt this place are strange and old. Many have become exaggerated over time; most were fantastic to begin with, although some have their roots in history and in truth. The name Cadair is the mountain’s correct spelling, despite frequently being given as Cader. There’s no deeper reason for this than the pronunciation of the longer word in the local dialect. The translation of this prefix is both ‘hill-fort’ and ‘chair’. The suffix, however, is a name.

Your first steps onto Cadair on the Minffordd Path take you through a forest of sessile oak, where the path ascends slopes veined with stepped waterfalls. It was mild enough to set off wearing a T-shirt, and soon I was beginning to sweat. The sun had long dropped below the point where it could pierce the canopy and light the ground, and the forest was darkening and thickening with clouds of biting midges, which made stopping unwise. My pack felt heavy – heavier than it should, somehow – and my breathing soon became laboured, and progress unsteadily erratic.

Climbing alone didn’t seem to be something I was yet particularly good at. Of all the mountains I’d walked up over the previous years, I pretty much always had someone with me – and that someone was usually in front, setting the pace, taking the worry out of route-finding and being, physically and psychologically, something to follow. Climbing a mountain is a very measurable commitment. You either get to the top, or you don’t. And like every commitment, whilst sharing it gives it much more retrospective cachet, on the hill the act often turns into a who-blinks-first matter of pride.

This gentle competitiveness helps you get through the physically hard moments. It pushes you on for just a few more metres of ascent when you feel like all you want to do is curl up, leak sweat and carbon dioxide for a few minutes, and then maybe die. Looking at a mountain on a map at home is easy. It’s just a squiggle, rarely bigger than the base of a wine glass and usually small enough to eclipse with your thumb. This – more so if the wine glass happens to have had something in it – has the effect of inflating your ambitions. But out in the real world the second you hit a steeply raked slope with a rucksack on your back, your pace slows, your breathing gets stiff and you’re staring up at something impossibly high above you. It’s at this point that those ambitions have the habit of playing dumb and mutinously slinking away – and you remember just how much harder climbing a gradient is to walking on level ground.

If you’re alone nobody will judge you for it. You can go as slowly as you like, and no one will see. I could babble to myself, have a wee without saying ‘I’m just having a wee’ to anyone, or sit down for ten minutes every five metres. On the occasions you pass another walker, of course, you puff your chest out, close your mouth so as not to appear out of breath, quicken your pace and do your best to look like a strident mountain person before deflating and re-reddening as soon as they’re out of sight. But by and large, when alone you’re your own motivation – and there’s nobody to silently scold you for being slow or unfit but yourself. You can turn round if you want. Go home. Nobody’s stopping you. And that takes some getting used to.

Tonight, at least, I had the sunset to race – though after twenty minutes this wasn’t going so well. It was approaching 9 p.m. when I entered Cwm Cau to see the last blush of sunlight colouring the very tops of its crags. Half an hour later, and it would be sinking into the Irish Sea. If I wanted to get to the top to see it do so, I didn’t have long.

A cwm is the Welsh word for a valley, usually a glacial cirque, and Cwm Cau is perhaps the most perfect glacial cirque in Snowdonia. A sculpture fashioned by massive glacial forces, the beautiful black-blue lake at its centre has inspired much of the mountain’s legend, and some of the more questionable deductions of scientists who have studied it. The lake is almost fifty metres deep in places. Resembling the broken neck of a glass bottle, the dramatic ring of peaks surrounding it once led many to think Cadair Idris a long-dead volcano – and the image still appeals. But it’s wrong. The rock is volcanic, like that of much of Snowdonia. But this rock erupted onto the floor of a great sea, was thrust upwards in a period of mountain building, then worn down and defined in form by aggressive glaciers over hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of years. Smothered by the Pleistocene glaciation, the ice lay so steeply against the mountainside that it slid in hard rotation, grinding against the dolerite rock and slowly scooping out the basin we see today. The headwall against which the glacier terminated – the pyramid of Craig Cau – was frost-split, clawed at and dragged against by the glacier, leaving the mountain’s impressively scored appearance as a legacy and adding to the raw allure of the cwm. Why anyone would want to miss this part of the mountain is a mystery all of its own.

The crags rise vertically several hundred metres from the lake to a big-dipper skyline, which, seen from the entrance to the cwm, climbs from the left to the dominating peak of Craig Cau – often, due to its pyramidal shape, mistaken for the massif’s topmost summit – before dropping to a nick in the ridge then climbing again to the right, up to the highest point of the mountain itself, known as Penygadair.

Away from the shifting of the leaves of the lower path, the cwm was noiseless. In the same way your eyes become tuned to the dark, so your ears respond to silence. As I entered the huge basin and began to edge around the lake, my senses were numbed. I stopped to take a breather, and slowly sonic details began to peep through. The delicate sound of water tickling the shore, the hard ‘chack’ of a wheatear ground-nesting nearby somewhere; faint, audible traces of nature emerging from a landscape so quiet you had to listen hard to hear it. As I moved I noticed white crampon scratches like tapeworms doodled up the rocks at the water’s edge. Walkers had been here when all of this was white. In winter the lake would be frozen, perhaps snow-covered. You wouldn’t know where the edge was.

My route lay in the north-west crook of the basin, and looked steep. It climbed the slope via a shallow, rocky groove to the ‘v’ in the ridgeline between the pyramid of Craig Cau and the summit, still invisible above and to the right. In the gloom I could see a patch of white that looked about mid-way up – probably a quartz vein – which I made a mental note to look out for. Gauging the progress of your ascent from a slope can be tricky; everything above you looks closer than it is, and everything below further away.

I looked up, and then down at my watch. Darkness was chasing the light east to west across the sky. Invisible, beyond the bulk of the mountain over the sea, the sun would be setting. Night was coming.

Cadair’s ‘Idris’ was most probably Idris Gawr, a king of Meirionnydd – a region of medieval Wales. Today most of Meirionnydd is part of the county of Gwynedd. But at the time of Idris, around AD 600, it was a kingdom of mountains and coast occupying the area of southern Snowdonia in which Cadair Idris sits.

It’s at this early juncture that things get a little muddled. The direct translation of Cadair Idris is literally ‘chair’ or ‘stronghold of Idris’. Some versions of the legend state that Idris was a giant so large he could sit using the entire mountain as a throne from which to survey his kingdom. Other versions state that the mountain received its association because Idris the king would climb to the summit and stargaze. Yet more state that the king retired to a hermitage – or fort – on the mountain in his later years. Further ambiguous threads of the tale indicate that the ‘chair’ referred to was an actual rock-hewn object on the summit, natural or otherwise, upon which Idris would sit and do whatever it was that he did.

However delicious all of this is, whoever Idris was, it would seem that in this region, at some point he did exist – and for whatever reason he became inexorably associated with the mountain.

It was written as far back as around 1600 by Siôn Dafydd Rhys in The Giants of Wales and Their Dwellings that ‘in this high mountain formerly lived a big giant, and he was called Idris Gawr.’ He goes on to describe some other myths about the mountain, including one that seems to suggest an early version of subterranean Poohsticks: ‘If a stick or other piece of wood be thrown into any you may choose of those waters, you will get that wood in the other lake on the opposite side of this mountain.’ There are many references to Cadair’s numerous lakes being bottomless, or home to the afanc – a kind of water serpent that had been cast into Llyn Cau by King Arthur, no less.* Gwyn ap Nudd, the Celtic Lord of the Underworld, was also said to dwell here, and his scarlet-eared cwn annwn – loosely, hounds of hell – are said to glide across the summit, seeking souls to steal and no doubt ghostly walls to pee against. It’s said in mythology that the howling of these dogs (loudest further away, and quietest close to you) was a premonition of death to anyone who heard them. Many associated the bark-like honking of migrating geese by night with the legend. But the story that really stuck – the one most enigmatically associated with the mountain – is also contained within The Giants of Wales and Their Dwellings. ‘On the highest crown of this mountain is a bed-shaped form, great in length and width, built of slabs or stones fixed around it,’ it states. ‘And it is said that whoever lies and sleeps on that bed, one of two things will happen to him: either he will be a poet of the best kind, or go entirely demented.’

Long before the 17th century, Celtic lore speaks of pilgrims who journeyed to Cadair Idris with the express intention of climbing to the top at sunset and spending the night there. The experience, if successful, was said to lift the traveller to a higher spiritual plane, becoming a filidh – which means both ‘seer’ and ‘poet’. The filidhean filled a void that druidism was rapidly vacating, and were seen as conduits between the spirit world and humankind who could see beyond the world of convention and impart imbas – the knowledge of enlightenment – to the people. It was said the process of becoming a filidh required the traveller to shed all identity and return to the world with a new narrative – hence ‘poetry’ – for life. This process could, of course, go wrong. If unsuccessful, the result would be too much for the pilgrim to bear, and he would descend into madness or die on the spot.

It’s a common motif. Mount Zion, Mount Horeb and Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, and Mount Olympus in Greek mythology, are summits dense with religious symbolism or host places where dramatic enlightenment has taken place. But it’s striking that this comparatively modest mountain in North Wales appears with such potency in so many legends. And, because spending the night on the mountain seemed such a recurring feature of these legends – whether to gaze at the stars from a giant chair, look over an ancient kingdom, be eaten by a ghost dog, dragged to hell by the god of the underworld, ascend to a higher plane of wisdom, become a poet, go insane or simply die – well, it seemed like the thing to do.

Cwm Cau was deep in shadow, and chilling quickly. Finding the outlet to the stream that fell from somewhere near the top of the mountain, I filled my water bottle from the place where it flowed the fastest. This would be the last of the water I’d find now, and the safest to drink, relatively speaking. I unclipped my bag and filled the clear bottle I carried. Normally I’d hold it up to the light to see if I’d caught anything interesting in there, but there was no light. Of course, if there was anything really sinister in there I wouldn’t see it; viruses, protozoa, the gunge from the mulching body of a dead sheep unseen upslope. High, mossy streams like this are pretty good at breaking down contaminants, given a clear run of flow, but wild water is always a gamble. A measured gamble, but a gamble all the same.

Nearby, a rough footway began to ascend. I took it, feeling the cold of the rock bristling against my bare arms as it steepened, closer to my body than before. Next to me, the crags of Craig Cau ceased to be a wall of cracked rock, more a side of broken ribs descending from above, separated by gullies scraped into the mountain.

It was hard going. Breathless, I began to set targets. A stop at the sheep. A drink of water at the white rock, whenever it appeared. To get me there, a few sweets. Finally, I reached the white rock I’d spotted from the Cwm. It was quartz – a massive cataract of it, bent and fractured where it broke the surface. I stopped, looking down at the darkening water below, and back up at the slope stretching above me. Maybe a hundred metres left.

The next section was tougher, both in terms of the terrain and my dimming evening energy to tackle it. The path was starting to lose its mud-and-stones constitution, and more and more stretches of bare rock had to be crossed and climbed. Soon I was amongst sharply raked cracks of stone that required both hands; several times as I hoisted myself into these I caught sight of the increasing drop through my legs below. As I began to draw level with the skyline, a sniff of breeze began to drift downwards from above, suddenly becoming a gust as the sky grew wider. There was the white nape of the coast and its necklace of amber lights. The horizon was gone, smudged by gloomy mist. And to my right, a mercifully gentle-angled path began to lead upwards through jumbled boulders to the summit of Penygadair – the top of Cadair Idris.

After a few moments’ rest I slowly but robustly began a slumping gait upwards along the path. It was getting cold, but I’d soon be on the top, and soon able to layer up and get warm. The world was now deepening blue tones, with no trace of the colour of sunset left except for a messy smear of orange across the western sky.

My ears were becoming nervy. A sheep’s cough sounds disturbingly like a human choke – at least it does when you’re high and alone on a mountain in increasing darkness, and the silence seemed to have bulk, a kind of sonic hiss like distant traffic, as I continued along the ridge. The views on each side began to widen and I started to feel like I was reaching the top of something. At last, barely perceptible, the white Ordnance Survey trig pillar – perched atop a tall pile of rocks evidently comprising the summit – appeared ahead. I clambered up, pausing for the briefest moment to enjoy being at the apex of that massive ridge I’d seen earlier from the road, then quickly began a visual search for Cadair’s second most distinctive summit feature. Glancing around from the trig point, beneath me to the right I spotted a uniform row of stones, and then a patch of corrugated tin they edged. In the blurred contrast of the gloaming, so well does it mimic the native stone of the summit you could easily mistake it for a weathered sheet of metal lying on the ground, perhaps covering some sort of hazard. But it isn’t. It’s a roof.

The hut was built in the 1830s by a guide named Robert Pugh. He had a vested interest in constructing a building in this rather auspicious place – if not for a financial gain then certainly a practical one, as Cadair Idris was big business for local guides in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Its status as one of the most southerly big chunks of proper mountain in Britain, and its dramatic qualities – which mirrored many of those of Snowdon, twenty miles to the north – drew visitors from afar. The guides they hired were often colourful local characters typically acquired at inns in Talyllyn and Dolgellau who could make their sole living escorting artistic travellers and science buffs – to whom Pugh applied the neat collective ‘curiosity men’ – to the summit of the mountain.

Geology was a major preoccupation for these early travellers. Before glaciation and erosion reduced its height by thousands of feet and carved it into its present form, the Ordovician volcanic rocks and Precambrian sedimentaries that form the bedrock of the mountain once extended northwards in a huge arch of layered rock beds. This arch reached its apex high above the central region between Cadair Idris and Snowdon, and is known as the Harlech Dome. This is an ancient sea floor, folded like a rucked carpet and considered one of the oldest geological formations in Britain. It’s also the reason fossilised seashells have been found on Snowdon’s summit. The rocks in the face of Craig Cau can be seen to tilt southwards, showing the slope of this arch, like the abutments of some collapsed Roman fortification. We know all of this now, but in the 19th century it was all still a fascinating puzzle waiting to be solved. Cadair’s botany, too, was and is of particular interest; today the mountain’s status as a nature reserve comes from the delicate and unusual alpine plants that can be found at their most southern extent on its slopes, including purple saxifrage, the prehistoric-looking green spleenwort and pretty little white-flowered spignel.* The summit ridge is a bouldery grassland, where can be found the evocatively named hare’s tail cotton, and wavy hair grass.

A telling early description in literature of Cadair comes from Daniel Defoe, who visited the area in the 1720s. He was not a man to delight in wilderness; he describes the area as being home to mountains ‘impassable … which even the people themselves call them so; we looked at them with astonishment, for their rugged tops and the immense heights of them.’ He goes on to mention the ‘famous Cader-Idricks, which some are of the opinion is the highest mountain in Britain’. Alfred Lord Tennyson was another visitor to the mountain – in a storm in 1856 – and was sufficiently moved by it to say he had ‘never seen anything more awful than the great veil of rain drawn straight over Cader Idris’. The diarist Francis Kilvert was escorted to the summit by Pugh’s son in 1871, and his account was similarly bleak: ‘This is the dreariest, stoniest, most desolate mountain I have ever been on.’

Pugh’s shelter was constructed so that travellers could take rest and enjoy refreshments until such time that the clouds parted. It was, as he put it, ‘to be had for those wishing to see the rising sun, or in case of a shower or likewise.’ The original shelter was probably built of wood, and during summer months housed a lady of maturing years who climbed the mountain at dawn and dispensed tea. Later on it was fortified, and now stands of squat native stone.

However welcome it may be in a winter blizzard or summer rainstorm, it isn’t inviting in the dark. It’s amazing how open to suggestion your senses become out of your normal surroundings, especially when combined with the crepuscular aesthetic of the old stone and the myths that circle Cadair like a stubborn smell.

Happily, though lacking a door, the hut has a kind of porch with a bench where one can sit and look out of the open entrance into the northern view without venturing into the main room. Slinging down my pack, that’s what I did now, glancing briefly into the wall of darkness to my right as I did so. It might as well have been a black curtain; I couldn’t see a thing in there. I’d my head torch with me, but I wanted to avoid switching it on if I could, partly to protect my now-established night vision from bright light, but also because of a silly youthful fear I still harboured of shining a beam of light into a dark room and coming nose to nose with something unpleasant.

Entering the hut’s little porch, the wind died as if a switch had been flicked. The chill I was beginning to feel on my sweaty back subsided. Stone buildings like this usually cool the air, but this one didn’t. It was almost warm. Heated by the afternoon sun? The roof was metal, after all. This relief at the change of conditions wouldn’t last; I needed to get a warm jacket and my bivouac equipment out of my backpack. Once I was warm and the sweat had dried off my back, I could move around the summit and explore a little, snatching some sleep in between. I found my bivvy bag, some food, my sleeping bag and mat, and pulled out the bag containing two snug jackets and a waterproof.

Only it didn’t contain two snug jackets, or a waterproof. I’d brought up the bag with my tent in – and nothing warm at all. Well, this was annoying. I slumped down on the bench and looked out into the darkness, and down at my thin, sweat-soaked woollen T-shirt – the only thing I had to keep me warm overnight on top of an 893-metre mountain in spring. I’d never previously forgotten anything really major on a trip like this. My eyes slid to the Thornton’s chocolate cakes I’d brought up with me. These were my little treats for later; now seemed like the time to have one. A bit of sugar, bit of pep. All fine.

The truth is, I was fine – but had this been a cold or rainy night, or a period of unstable weather, I could have been in quite a bit of trouble. The weather was good and set to continue as such, and the walk down off the mountain in the morning should, if the forecast held, be warmed by the sun. I was sweaty, but not irredeemably soaked. The problem was the wind – nothing chills you down more quickly, and if you’re wet, water will sponge the heat from your body with alarming speed. I’d a light summer sleeping bag with me rated to around 5°C, but seeing as it was the single warm thing I had, this I’d have to look after. Sleeping bags stuffed with down feathers don’t go well together with moisture. And I’d made enough rush-triggered mistakes for one day; my priority now was staying warm and dry. I looked again into the blackness to my left, into the hut. Then, resigned, I reached for my head torch. ‘Thank God I remembered you.’

Enclosed spaces on mountains have a distinctive atmosphere to them, man-made ones particularly so. Perhaps it’s the discrepancy between them and their surroundings that concentrates this. For instance, all journeys to the summit of Cadair Idris end here, and if shelter is what you seek, you and whatever emotion you bring with you will find it under this one, isolated roof. Whilst any spot on a mountain can hold a story, the mountain is still a mountain, full of spacious distractions – and you share the atmosphere of that spot with the view, the wind, the birds and the sky. But the curious intimacy of an enclosed space on a mountain – which by definition is a limitless, wide-open thing – is entirely different, and very potent. In that place, centuries of meetings, fears and moments of exhausted relief have gathered within the same few square feet, under the same roof. It’s a piece of our world. A comfort. A sink of concentrated humanity in a wild place.

But Cadair’s summit shelter didn’t comfort me. Certainly not at first, anyway. I turned on my head torch and – holding my breath – shone it into the black hole of the shelter, quickly bouncing the beam into every corner to ensure there were no nasty surprises lurking there. It was, to my relief, totally empty and surprisingly clean, mercifully free from litter or screwed-up reeds of toilet paper used for their intended purpose, but not in the intended place. The room beyond the porch was about the size of a suburban living room, with a bench running round the edge and a square, coffee-table-sized brick platform in the centre. On it sat the burnt-out remains of a candle on a saucer of melted wax. I could hear the erratic wind funnelling through gaps in the corrugated roof like tin whistles. Two small windows – just big enough to frame a face – hung lightless in the gloom.

I began to worry about the batteries in my torch. I didn’t like the thought of them running flat and there being no relief from the dark. It was thick and unyielding, and I found it unsettling. Some people can be as the animals and embrace nature in all its pragmatic barbarism without hesitation, but I’m not one of them. Don’t get me wrong; I love the atmosphere of places that carry the fears of childhood – the dark corridors of a forest, the brush of fog against an ancient window, the bleakness of a Hebridean moor. Like most I seek them out because they stimulate an immersive sensory reaction – invigoration to one degree, fear to a significant other. The emotional mechanics are very much like climbing a mountain. But it still spooked me.

Given the circumstances, I could tolerate a night alone in a 150-year-old hut on the summit of a lore-thick mountain, but I was damned if I was going to do it without a light. Turning the beam down to its lowest setting, I set the torch on the central platform and went about making up a bed, set back away from the draught of the doorway. This done, I had another chocolate cake, pulled a hat onto my head and my spare socks onto my hands and wandered out of the hut onto the summit plateau, leaving my torch shining dimly within.

The wind was cold. Frost was beginning to shimmer like a fine fur on the summit rocks. Above, stars were piercing through a sky grading to mauve in the west. This would be an unwise dwelling for a sleepwalker: in front of the hut, the rocky ground gave way to a thin wig of grass atop a convex slope that bulged forward then plunged nearly 900 metres down the northern scarp of the mountain. Far below, the valley held the mythically bottomless lake of Llyn y Gadair. Beyond that, the mist-muted lights of Dolgellau. Stretching north like embers in a smouldering carpet, patches of amber light – villages, towns, isolated homesteads. How this lightscape must have changed since the first villages arrived here and looked up to the mountain in awe and trepidation. And how little – aside from a few paths and a hut – the mountaintop upon which I was standing had evolved. The people and their perceptions of the mountain had changed a lot; the mountain itself, hardly at all.

I walked a little way along the ridge, enjoying the solitude before I began to chill down, my hairs bristling where the wind touched them. Beginning to shake, I turned back towards the hut’s boxy silhouette. As its front came into view, I noticed the yellow light of my torch shining dimly but warmly through the window. It almost looked cosy.

It’s reasonable to assume that those who would gather in mountain shelters like this would automatically have more in common with each other than people meeting in most buildings at sea level. Therefore, conversations in this ramshackle little building over the last couple of centuries would have had much more of a synergy, and the meetings in general potentially more fortuitous simply because of the incongruity of the meeting place.

In his book Visions of Snowdonia writer Jim Perrin describes arriving at Cadair’s summit shelter late one winter’s evening in the mid 1970s in cruel weather. He had to slide in through the door past snow that almost blocked it. Soon after he arrived, another man entered and perched himself on the benches at the far end of the shelter. Perrin noted: ‘He was quite short, a little arthritic in his movements, and his face was deeply lined with deep-set, intense eyes that dwelt on you in unnerving, long consideration.’ The man lit a pipe, and Perrin offered him coffee, which he accepted with the grumble both that quality coffee was impossible to obtain in civilised Britain these days, and that in the little shelter on top of Cadair, ‘of all places, he might have expected to enjoy a solitary pipe on a day like this’. The two traded good-natured swipes together awhile, principally about the human race – a man in his twenties finding common ground with another in his seventies, both in an ice-encased shelter at 893 metres above North Wales for ostensibly the same reason: solitude, escape, adventure, space.

Perrin knew more or less immediately who the older man was. He was famous: the explorer and mountaineer H. W. ‘Bill’ Tilman, one of the 20th century’s most prolifically adventurous figures. As a teenager he’d fought at the Somme and between the wars had climbed Nanda Devi in the Indian Himalaya, at 7,816 metres then the highest peak summited to date. Parachuted into the Balkans during the Second World War to incite resistance to the Nazis, between the conflicts he had met Eric Shipton whilst picking coffee in Africa, with whom he made some of mountaineering’s most important ascents, as well as significant attempts on Mount Everest during the 1930s. In later life he would shift his focus somewhat to the ocean, adopting and restoring old craft and casting off for bleak corners of the world such as Patagonia, Greenland, Baffin Island and Spitzbergen, where he would anchor up and close in on mountains inaccessible by land, exploring their shores and often climbing them.

Tilman and Perrin became acquaintances for a very brief period, the inquisitive younger man visiting the old explorer at his home in the Mawddach Estuary, where he was to be presented with ‘a parable of [Tilman’s] relationship with the world’. Perrin would become one of mountaineering’s leading authors and thinkers; in 1977, Tilman – aged 79, and just weeks after his meeting with Perrin on the summit of Cadair Idris – put his dogs into kennels and joined as a crew member a boat that left Rio de Janeiro bound for the Antarctic. The boat was lost in one of the many storms lacerating the South Atlantic and no trace of it was ever found. There went a man who loved solitude, and travelled to the far corners of the planet to tackle its most austere and extreme places; it would appear Tilman met his end without ever breaking his intrepid swagger.

It’s quite possible that Cadair Idris was the last mountain Tilman climbed. His last moments atop a summit were spent with Perrin, here, within sight of his own house. Perrin described his meeting with Tilman as ‘completely remarkable … one of the most singular gifts to me’. And that gift was kindled just feet away in the strange, entirely out-of-the-ordinary little room in which I was now lying on the summit of Cadair Idris.

The hopes I’d had earlier in the evening of being alone on the top of this mountain had switched to a desire for company. I could hear scimperings on the tin roof above. Mice, maybe. The fidgets of wind, perhaps. Turned down to its lowest setting, the trade-off for saving my batteries was the particularly eerie, candle-yellow light my torch produced. Every time I moved, a wild curl of shadow was thrown across the wall. Out on the mountain, the silence would have been a natural part of its sonic ’scape. But the shelter muddled the dynamic, and in here silence wasn’t welcome. I thought about using my phone to play some music, an audiobook, anything, but I resisted, and eventually turned off the torch and tried to sleep.

I managed a few hours, waking briefly in the night coughing violently and feeling an obstruction in my throat. I thought for a grim moment something cobwebby and ancient had dislodged itself from the ceiling and plummeted into my gaping mouth, or a curious insect had wandered in. A few slugs of water and whatever it was became nutrition. Now wide awake, I leaned forward and peered towards the door, seeing beyond it a scrape of orange brightening on the horizon opposite where I’d watched it fade just a few hours earlier. It was 5.15 a.m., and already brighter than it had been when I arrived the previous night.

Struggling up, I unzipped the sleeping bag to its base, then put the footbox on my head and wrapped the rest of it around me like a blanket. Pushing my feet into unlaced boots I wandered out onto the summit, the grass crunching under a soft frost, found a rock and sat for a while.

The mountain was awakening in total silence. No birds, no sheep, no distant static of road or airplane. As I watched, red exploded from the horizon, bleeding through the thin ribbon of cloud and lighting the crisp grass of Cadair Idris’s summit ridge, upon one of many boulders, where I sat. The grass started to shimmer, then glisten and bead as the frost upon it began to melt. It seemed ridiculous that such an awesome event as a sunrise could unfold without an accompanying sound; a sizzle, a hiss, a roar, operatic music. Nothing, alas, but pure quiet, as nature began to light the mountain. I sat and watched, as many had here for hundreds and hundreds of years – possibly expecting rather more to happen than a sunrise. Enlightenment, the ascent to a higher spiritual realm. And, of course, insanity or death.

A specific reference to Cadair’s most emblematic legend came in the form of an 1822 poem by English writer Felicia Hemans, titled ‘The Rock of Cader Idris’. A poet of the late Romantic period, Hemans was born in Liverpool in 1793. Romantics had a profound affinity with mountains – as we shall see – and Hemans was no exception.* ‘The Rock of Cader Idris’ is rather dark; Hemans describes waiting alone on the bed-shaped boulder on the summit of Cadair, ‘that rock where the storms have their dwelling,/The birthplace of phantoms’, viewing the ‘dread beings’ that hover around the mountain:

I saw them – the mighty of ages departed –

The dead were around me that night on the hill:

From their eyes, as they pass’d, a cold radiance they darted,

There was light on my soul, but my heart’s blood was chill.

Needless to say, the poem’s protagonist lives through the horrors of the night, and – upon watching the sunrise on Cadair, as I was now – feels suitably illuminated.

I saw what man looks on, and dies – but my spirit

Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour;

And, as from the grave, I awoke to inherit

A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power!

Showell Styles, aforementioned author of The Mountains of North Wales, thought the whole legend a displaced mistake, and that Hemans had transferred the legend of a rock on the slopes of Snowdon – the Maen du’r Arddu, or ‘black stone’ – to Cadair, adding to a long list of folkloric confusions that exist between the two mountains through written history, probably due to their both being high, craggy peaks overlooking small, deep lakes. Styles, incidentally, was something of a poet himself – penning the bouncy ‘Ballad of Idwal Slabs’, named after a well-known climbers’ crag in the Ogwen valley, 25 miles north of Cadair.

English-born and a prolific fiction writer, his non-fiction (and many of his stories) centred around the mountains. Humorous poems and novels aside, too few know Styles for his mountain writing. It’s a travesty that most of his books are now out of print, as in this he ranks as one of the very best – particularly in Snowdonia, his adopted home, where he died in 2005. The Mountains of North Wales was his masterpiece.

Styles was great because the mountains clearly got to him. His interpretations are suffused with intermittent outpourings of emotion and feeling that came from his being amongst them. Far from being screeds of dry practicality, his descriptions of routes up the peaks of Snowdonia were imaginative, curious and peerlessly articulated, fortified by the mythology of the region and its mountains. After describing being chased off Cadair by a storm in 1971, Styles remarks that ‘the only country you can feel nostalgic for whilst you are still in it is mountain country, and only the Welsh have a word for that feeling – hiraeth.’ Of the highest peak he says this: ‘Snowdon has everything … from any angle, distantly or close at hand, Snowdon is the noblest and most shapely peak in sight, and obviously the queen of the lot … five main ridges converge at the summit, each with its own special characteristics.’ And it was one of Snowdon’s ridges’ ‘special characteristics’ I’d be exploring next.

I sat outside in the infant warmth of the sun until it sat four fingers’ height above the horizon, then shambled back to the hut and began to gather up my possessions. Eating another chocolate cake and slugging back some of my remaining water, I stayed wrapped in my sleeping bag and gently dozing, giving the air long enough to warm a little, until outside the door the sky had turned from deep blue to bright white. Pulling down the broom lodged in the rafters, I gave the floor a quick sweep, picked up a dead candle to dispose of later and gave a last glance around the hut. With daylight streaming in through the window, it was a quite different place.

I walked out into a veil of white cloud. The morning sun was warming the grass and steam was rising like bushfire smoke into the air. It was beautiful. Following the shape of the ridge, which I could just see, I walked the brief distance to Mynydd Moel, the furthest east of Cadair’s triple summits. To the north, the heads of northern Snowdonia’s mountains rose from the morning mists, hard and bare; of rock, not grass. Where I was now standing was a sort of bridge – the link between the verdant south and the austere, brutal north. Reminiscent of both, but resembling neither entirely.

At the rock buttresses of the northern flank, I took a look over the edge before turning south. The slope began to tilt downwards, and at my feet hoverflies dozily awoke and rose where I stepped.

* Milarepa rode the rays of the sun, while Bön-Chung sat cross-legged on a magic drum that ascended the mountain while he meditated. Milarepa won, but as he arrived at the summit he threw a handful of snow onto a nearby peak in honour of Bön-Chung. I once interviewed Reinhold Messner – a mountaineer deeply respectful of Tibetan beliefs but deeply pragmatic about his own climbing – about Kailash. When I commented it had never been climbed, he vehemently corrected me to the effect of the above, before deadpanning: ‘Though, this sun-ray climbing technique – I don’t know how it functions.’

* The mountains in Britain are Ben Hope and Creag an Leth-Choin in Scotland, Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia, Pen y Fan in the Brecon Beacons, Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, the Old Man of Coniston, Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor, Holdstone Down on Exmoor and Yes Tor on Dartmoor. Notable mountains abroad include Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia, Mount Adams in the eastern United States and Madrigerfluh in Switzerland. These kept King busy – ‘charging’ the mountains took him three years in a journey he dubbed ‘Operation Starlight’.

* Snowdonia is thick with Arthurian connotations, although these are mostly concentrated on Snowdon itself.

* Plantlife, a charity for wild flora in Britain, pulls no technical punches in its description of Cadair’s botanical interest: ‘[Cadair Idris] is noted for vascular, habitat and bryophyte interest. Euphrasia hotspot. Calcareous rocky slopes with chasmophytic vegetation; Oligotrophic to mesotrophic standing waters with vegetation of the Littorelletea uniflorae and/or of the Isoëto-Nanojuncetea; Siliceous rocky slopes with chasmophytic vegetation; Siliceous scree of the montane to snow levels (Androsacetalia alpinae and Galeopsietalia ladani).’ I couldn’t have put it better.

* Hemans also has the distinction of coining the term ‘stately home’ in the first line of her 1827 poem ‘The Homes of England’. The first line reads: ‘The stately Homes of England,/How beautiful they stand!’