On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell

by Henry S. Salt

It is nearly fifty years since I saw that sight, but we do not forget what we see among mountains as what we read in books.

There dwell in the memory too (for I must not give the impression that the mountains are always scourged with storm) the days and sometimes weeks in succession when the weather is without a flaw—trance-like spells when the hills stand calm and pensive in every vicissitude of loveliness, now clear and imminent, with ridges sharply outlined against the sky, now dim and ghostly, half shrouded in a mild and breathless haze. But even the loveliest day is seldom perfected without the ministry of cloud, for clouds are the Genii of the mountains, concealing much, but revealing more, by their presence, and bringing to view the manifold depths and distances that would otherwise be unobserved. You cannot learn the moods and character of a mountain until you have studied its attendant clouds.

Nor must the pleasures of winter be overlooked, for, as Southey wrote of the mountains:

Who sees them only in their summer hour,

Sees but their beauties half, and knows not half their power.

It was pointed out by the same writer that snow, instead of making the view of the fells monotonous, has a contrary effect, “it brings out all their recesses, and differentiates all their inequalities.” Even clouds are scarcely more efficacious in revealing the hitherto unnoticed distances; for the snow, when not too deep, is a mask which does not conceal, but takes a delicate impression of the hillside, so that every crack and crinkle, every unsuspected groove, ravine, terrace, or even sheep-path, is made to stand out in clear relief. To rocks, in particular, a thin powdering of snow will give a strange, chequered, almost ethereal look, reminding one of Scott’s lines about Melrose Abbey seen under moonlight:

When buttress and buttress, alternately,

Seem framed of ebon and ivory.

In the joy felt by the experienced climber on arriving at his mountain-top the view, perhaps, plays but a subordinate part, though there is always a fascination in a very distant prospect across sea or plain, such as one may get in the early morning, or when the air is clear after a rain shower or a snow squall, as when, from Wales or Cumberland, as the case may be, one sees the Isle of Man resting like a dream on the water, with a pillow of fleecy cloud around it. In this respect the views from the two districts are very similar, for on every side except the east their horizons extend to the sea, and both possess the same great charm, lacking in the Alps and other continental ranges, of overlooking a coast-line broken by shallow estuaries, where at low tide there is an expanse of gleaming red sands, with the plain of dim blue water in the rear. To have seen Snowdon from Scafell, or Scafell from Snowdon, across the hundred miles that lie between them, is a rare privilege which few climbers have enjoyed, and of which, in spite of many visits to either mountain, I cannot personally speak; far more often it is the great northern headland of Carnedd Llewelyn which is discerned from the Cumbrian hills and bars the further view. Apart from such remarkable sights as these, the pleasure of the summit, I think, arises chiefly from that sense of power to which a wide outlook contributes—you feel how vast a territory you “command” from your airy fortress; you are for the moment an overseer of men, a super-man, with all the kingdoms of the world stretched at your feet.