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.