At least I'm not carrying my duffle bag

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He turned left and rode towards the side of the valley where, above the low gentle green fields, the first dark slope of Cader Idris climbed like a wall roofed by the sky.”
-The Grey King

There is a legend that if you spend the night on top of Cader Idris, one of the highest mountains in Wales, you’ll wake up either a poet or mad.

It’s also known for intense climbs, dramatic landscapes and spectacular 360 degree views.

And if you’ve read the aforementioned book, you’ll know that it’s the stronghold of a powerful force of evil and darkness, called the Brenin Llwyd, or the Grey King. Though if you’re familiar with celtic mythology, from which the “Dark is Rising” books pulled a lot of their material, you might have heard of him as well.

But anyway.



Cader Idris is actually a series of high peaks all connected. The three highest form a curve that sort of looks like an easy chair (apparently the Celts thought this as well: “Cader Idris” means “the seat of Idris”, referring to a mythical giant). Tucked in between these three peaks is a lake called Llyn Cau, which you can’t see unless you are actually up in the mountain or standing on one of the peaks looking down.

There are a bunch of different trails up to the top. I took the “Miniffordd Path” (pronounced “miniforth” because dd = th in Welsh), which is shortest, steepest and the only trail that takes you right to Llyn Cau. From the lake you climb a really steep path onto the ridge and go to each of the three peaks in turn, before coming back down the other side of the lake and meeting up with the original path.

No, Peacock, that doesn’t make sense. I need a visual.

On the way up and into the mountain, I met an older Welsh man, also hiking solo. I’ve mentioned before that people in Wales are extremely friendly, and the older generation in the UK tends to be very talkative (in a good way), especially when they hear my accent. So it stands to reason that this gentleman was more than willing to give me a geological, mythical and personal history of the area.

Apparently as teenagers he and his friends used to come up to Llyn Cau at midnight and go skinny dipping. Among this group of teenagers was his current wife, who now writes and publishes poetry.

“I think I got the worse end of the deal,” he told me, “I’m slightly mad.”



The weather above and around Cader was beautiful, especially later in the day, but there were some clouds to the south. It was a really beautiful sight, seeing the valley below me shrouded in mist.

Question: in how many countries do hikers and mountain climbers need to take care to avoid sheep droppings? Ridiculous.

It amazed me, especially after I cleared the timberline, how many sheep I saw grazing on one of the highest mountains in the country. The air got noticeably thinner, and still I’d look above me to see one of these guys happily nibbling on some mountain grass between rocks.



This is, as you can probably guess, Llyn Cau. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, and really cool to be climbing and all of a sudden come across this dark lake in the middle of nothing and nowhere. But something about it felt eerie. It’s possibly just because of the books, and I associate the peak and the heart of Cader Idris with mythical evil, but being here alone was sort of creepy. The area is much more open than it appears to be, especially behind me, and it gave the impression of a chamber that was just ominous.

It didn’t help that the UK is one of the few places in the world that allows different air forces to practice low flying, so planes were going through the valley periodically. They were really loud (duh) and the sound echoed off the mountains for about a minute after each went by. Standing there completely isolated while the mountains rumble on all sides will make any person start to wonder if something’s about to crawl out of the lake and attack.

Or, you know, an avalanche or something logical like that.



The water was absolutely FRIGID. I’m wondering if the Welsh guy and his friends hadn’t already spent a night or two on the mountain before they decided it would be a fun idea to swim in this lake with no clothes on.

Anyway.







Some views from atop the ridge. Up here the trail was pretty easy to follow, partially because straying too far from it would involve wandering off a cliff, and I’ve never spent a night on Cader Idris so that is not my idea of a fun afternoon.





The view from the first of three peaks, the one that forms the back support of Idris’s E-Z Boy. It’s the most prominent one in the picture of Llyn Cau; the summit is more off to the side.



So it took me a few hours to get to this point, and I’m STILL dodging poop. How did they even get up here?

This one was cute though, because it was just walking by, and when I held up my camera, it stopped and looked at me. It didn’t keep walking until I put my camera down. Practice with the tourists maybe?



The summit! Of course the view was incredible, so here are 9,000 pictures to supplement the video you’ve probably already seen.









The lake at the base of the mountain is Tal y Llyn, known once upon a time as Llyn Mwyngil or the Pleasant Lake. It’s supposed to be the most beautiful lake in the country, and actually it features in “The Grey King” quite a bit. The climax scene takes place on the slopes directly above/next to it. It’s so cool to see these places I’ve pictured in my head for so many years.

After I got to the bottom of the mountain, I had time to kill before my bus came (they are pretty infrequent in provincial Wales, shocking as that may be), so I went to visit Tal y Llyn. Unfortunately this was as close as I could get.

Then the mist closed over Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant retreat, and there was a cold silence through all the valley save for the distant bleat, sometimes, of a mountain sheep, like the echo of a man's voice calling a girl's name, far away.

So this was handwritten on a beach in Aberystwyth on my last day, but it feels more like a penultimate entry thing than a last one so here you are:

Two weeks have felt like forever. Remembering my first day in London feels like looking back years; work and Cambridge feel like someone else’s life. Now, thinking about going back, I realize how quickly and unconsciously I slipped back into the feeling of belonging here.

Sure, that first night I was saying “dollars” instead of “pounds” and looking the wrong way down streets, but it’s amazing, in retrospect, how quickly that all faded. Sometime around Canterbury or Norwich, English accents started to sound so commonplace that I didn’t notice them, while words like “quid” “knackered” and “trainers” slipped back into my vocabulary without my even noticing.

It’s like a piece of clothing you used to love but forgot you had, or that old cliché about riding a bicycle. I’m still that awkward American (probably always will be, no matter where I am), but I’m an awkward American who feels comfortable here. It took me two or three days to feel like I live here, an email from American Airlines to remind me I don’t, and probably much longer to actually believe it.

Between people I’ve stayed with and people I’ve met, I’ve already heard of a bunch of places I need to visit: Cornwall, Cardiff, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Stoke-on-Trent (although that last one was more of an argument between two people about whether or not I SHOULD visit Stoke-on-Trent, with the final verdict being yes if only for the oatcakes). Which is fine by me because the way I can best come to grips with going back is to assure myself that it’s temporary.

Sigh.

Enough of that. Aberdyfi next, followed by Aberystwyth (“aber” means the mouth of a river in Welsh; both of these places are on the coast), combined into one probably-not-so-grand finale of an entry.

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Comments

[Wendy]

wow
It looks like being up in the tundra around Alaska - spectacular! We love reading all of your wonderful insights.