On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell

by Henry S. Salt

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.