sliced flat, as if by plane and spirit level. Their characteristic form is best demonstrated by the highest massif – the ‘Brecon Beacons’ themselves, the central trio of Pen y Fan, Cribyn and Corn Du – but all of these startling mountains display the same touch. The other visible hallmark is their cladding: these are not cragged and hard-skinned like the mountains of Glen Coe or Torridon, or even Snowdonia. All have coats of horizontally ridged green corduroy, the edges of which catch the first winter snows and hold the last, striping the mountains white. Where paths have worn through, the mountains beneath bleed sandstone a vivid, Martian red. The flat ‘billiard’ tops exhibited by the most distinctive of these mountains are the remnants of ‘plateau beds’ – a much grittier, harder sedimentary layer that has been chewed into the air by weathering, then resisted further attack. If the mountains look as if they’ve been cut flat it’s because, in a manner of speaking, they have.
These central mountains are the most frequently climbed of the Brecon Beacons, and are rewarding and accessible to all. The drops are huge, the views immense, the sense of achievement fulfilling and the aesthetic tremendous. But it wasn’t Pen y Fan I was here to climb. At each of the park’s extremes lie two ranges that confusingly share the promising (promising if you’re in search of a lovely dark night sky, anyway) name of Black Mountain. Well, they almost share it: the Welsh names for each reveal the subtlety lost in their English translation. One lies close to the English border in the east, and is a high but inauspicious collection of moorland summits bearing the collective name the Black Mountains (Y Mynyddoedd Duon). The other, on the park’s spacious western fringes, bears the singular denotation the Black Mountain (Mynydd Du), and this one most definitely earns its chops in the spectacle stakes. Burly and remote, its summits are in fact the hoisted edges of an enormous, wedge-shaped escarpment, tilted into the ocean of moorland like a sinking liner.
The more specific names associated with this mountain and its features are rather bewildering, and you may have to bear with me here. Mountain toponymy – as we will continue to see anon – is not an exact science, and is often inconsistent across a relatively short distance. A summit in South Wales (Fan, Ban, Bannau, Pen) isn’t necessarily a summit in North Wales (Carnedd, Moel), although in both places a llyn does tend to be a lake, cwm a valley, craig a crag, bwlch a pass, and fach and fawr little and large, respectively. The Black Mountain as a massif is Mynydd Du; the long escarpment of the eastern flank is given the name Fan Hir, fan meaning crest. But fan can also mean peak – and there are two of these on the Black Mountain, three if you count Bannau Sir Gaer, which uses the term bannau, which is probably derived from ban, which is in turn the plural of fan. Bannau Sir Gaer means the ‘Carmarthenshire Beacon’, and this is often still known by its mixed translation Carmarthen Van, van being yet another variant of fan. Fan Foel is one summit, probably meaning ‘bald peak’; Fan Brycheiniog is the other, named after the small kingdom to which the mountain belonged in the Middle Ages. Like I said, bewildering. But if you take anything from this, make it simply the following: mountain names can be complicated. And it was remote Fan Brycheiniog – at 802 metres the highest point of the Black Mountain – that was to be my mountain of space.
The weather was, it has to be said, not good at all. The rain held off long enough for me to enjoy the sinuous roads over the border and the tentatively awakening villages and pubs as I approached Brecon. It even stayed clear enough to appreciate the tall, distinctively clipped top of Pen y Fan as I passed Brecon and headed for the empty western part of the national park. A few miles outside a little place called Trecastle, a left turn led into a long valley of arched hillsides and naked, wintered trees. The road dwindled to such a degree that I began to suspect it led nowhere, and indeed it proved more or less to do just this. It first climbed, then dropped into a scraped landscape of wide-open moorland. This was one of the barest landscapes south of Scotland. And to the west, far away across it, there it was.
The Black Mountain filled the horizon like a wall. Though it was smudged by cloud, I could just about see the top reaches, for the moment at least. I certainly wasn’t going to be reclining under an umbrella of stars tonight, that was for sure; although I’d brought a tent, my optimism of a clear night out atop the mountain had faded with every squeak of the windscreen wiper. More concerning was the wind; I could feel it whumping into the car as I sat gazing out at the grey landscape, and by the rate the weather was moving across it, things would only get rougher higher up. Trouble was, whilst camping probably wasn’t an option, it would inevitably be night in a few hours. Whether I liked it or not – and regardless of whether the weather improved – I’d definitely be coming down in the dark.
The eastern approach to the Black Mountain involves crossing over a mile of rough, stream-ridden heathland, more moor than mountain. The map says there’s a path here, and there might well be, somewhere – but it’s so indistinct amongst the soggy brown, lumpy grassland that following it would require constant concentration. It certainly didn’t register beneath my boots as I set off into the wind towards the dark cliff ahead.
The place to ascend from this direction is a gentle chink – the Bwlch Giedd – which from this direction dips the escarpment into a shallow ‘M’ shape. This passage is not easy to miss: at its bottom lies the large lake of Llyn y Fan Fawr – ‘Lake of the Big Peak’ – so named for its position directly beneath the highest point of the massif.
Walking into a strong wind filled with rain has little to recommend it other than giving a renewed appreciation for how desperately insignificant and fragile you are versus the elements. Within half an hour of staggering into the south-westerly, the left side of my body was beginning to feel the tendrils of cold moisture pushing through my clothing. The volatile time of year meant the usually insubstantial streams that required crossing on the journey west towards the mountain were thick and fast. The only ways across were by balancing on moss-slicked rocks over which water raced with unbalancing strength. One mis-step, and a lively second or so of spasmic body penduluming almost resulted in a dunking – after which I made a mental note to ensure to pack both a pole and a dry set of clothes were I to do anything this foolish again.
After an hour I very nearly gave up. The wind had grown stronger as I climbed above the sheltering hummocks, and it wasn’t long before it was pretty intolerable. Just walking was becoming hard, and more and more I took to stopping, mouth gaping, with my back against the wind for respite. Cloud was tearing across the vanishing mountainside ahead like billowing smoke, and with the gloom, thickening cloud and my rapidly chilling legs – plus the fact I hadn’t actually set foot on the mountain yet – the outing this was unfolding into bore little resemblance to the evocative plan I’d left home with. Just as I was considering abandoning it for another day and squelching back to the car the mist briefly moved, and I saw the shore and grey water of Llyn y Fan Fawr close by. I was practically at the base of the escarpment; it would be rude not to go and have a look at it. As I climbed towards the grey bulk of the mountain, a frayed path joined from the left. This was the Beacons Way, which climbed the escarpment of Fan Hir at precisely the point I was aiming for. Soon the red soil of the path was joined by a more established, slabby path, and as I followed it into the curl of the cliff, the wind – blocked by the fold into which the path was beginning to climb – fell away.
Suddenly it was quiet. I could hear my own whistly breathing, and my clothing – having spent the last hour energetically flapping – settled heavily against my skin. I was soaked.
The escarpment of Fan Hir isn’t a huge climb. In fact, given the relative tallness of the Black Mountain’s highest point, Fan Brycheiniog – at 802 metres the fourth-highest point in Britain south of Snowdonia – it isn’t much of a climb at all; from the shore of the lake to the top of Bwlch Giedd requires less than 150 metres of vertical ascent – vertical ascent being the typical measure hillwalkers use to anticipate the likely exhaustion of an objective. I’d parked the car at close to 400 metres above sea level; most of the rest had been gathered gently on the blustery walk in.
I stopped for a few minutes in the lee of the cliff, enjoying the calm and considering
