civilisation the mountains have been the homes of gods and demons. Like the sea – that other great unconquerable – the mountains’ physical size and fickle moods meant that they were seen as both forbidding and forbidden. Although many people saw them as dark places of evil and the meddling of spirits, some optimistic cultures viewed them as protectors, even mothers. But neither saw them as places for people to tread.
Understandably, it’s the most striking, massive or isolated peaks that demand the most attention and stir the most potent awe, and it’s hardly surprising that such mountains across the world have become sacred.
Kailash, an enormous, free-standing peak in Tibet, is perhaps the most famous of these, amongst both mountaineers and students of religious philosophy alike. Unfeasibly dramatic, 6,638-metre Kailash rises sheer, a topographical exclamation mark ascending so drastically from the mud-brown of the Tibetan plateau the vision of it is surreal from all sides. Located near the source of several rivers, including the Indus and Brahmaputra – which collectively irrigate land supporting over a billion people – the mountain is sacrosanct to several religions. In Hinduism, Kailash is said to be the home of Shiva, destroyer of ignorance and illusion. Buddhists believe the mountain is the place where the Buddha Demchok sits on the summit in eternal meditation. Many believe the summit is the final step to heaven; yet all consider that stepping onto its slopes leads to death, damnation or the opening of Shiva’s third eye – a highly undesirable event said to trigger the end of the universe.
Pilgrims to Kailash brave altitude and often brutal sun to be in the mountain’s presence. A common form of worship is to circumnavigate it, some 33 miles of rough path and sharp rock. Many feel suitably moved to make this journey in penance, prostrating themselves at full length on the ground, indenting the dust with their fingers, resting their heads on the rock and saying a prayer, repeating this for the entire length of the walk. This can take several weeks, after which the successful pilgrims return home, often with enormous welts on their fingers, feet and foreheads, and one hopes enlightenment in their souls.
No mortal has climbed Kailash; to do so would insult those to whom the mountain is sacred. As for immortals, it’s written in legend that 1,000 years ago, the Tantric Buddhist Milarepa challenged Naro Bön-Chung of the Tibetan Bön religion to a contest decided by a race to the mountain’s summit, although their method of ascent cannot be strictly considered ‘mountaineering’ by today’s standards.* Several Western mountaineers have come close, but either declined their permits or found themselves pressured into doing so by others in the mountaineering community. One of these – the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner – stated of Kailash: ‘If we conquer this mountain, then we conquer something in people’s souls.’
In the Indian Himalaya above Sikkim, Kangchenjunga – the third-highest mountain in the world – is another such sacred summit. Again, the mountain’s physical presence is striking, and directly linked to the reverence it’s accorded by those of the Kirant faith. Its name means ‘Five Treasures of the Sacred Snows’, referring to the mountain’s five summits and the holy repositories they are said to harbour: gold, silver, gems, grain and holy books. As with Kailash, to step on its very summit is considered a desecration, and in 1955 – in a most admirable demonstration of self-restraint – the British climbers Joe Brown and George Band, having just made the first ascent of the mountain, stopped several feet short of the pristine snow cone on the very top in deference to this belief. This tradition continued on every ascent until 1980, when members of a large Japanese expedition reputedly trampled all over it.
Closer to home, mountains have been accorded similar – if somewhat more niche – respect. Above the southern Lake District, the Old Man of Coniston is a stately 803-metre mountain that draws many walkers to it for pleasurable day walks. Most don’t know it’s also considered the fifth most sacred mountain in the world by a religious sect called the Aetherius Society. To them, the mountain is a store of spiritual energy that, when unlocked by prayer vigils, is said to radiate out to those in need across the globe. The focus of this is said to be a table-shaped rock located just north of the summit, near which the group often congregates to pray. Basing their beliefs on the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence – or ‘gods from space’ – Aetherians see mother earth as a deity who sacrificed herself to provide a home for a flawed, brutal humankind. The religion was founded by Dr George King, who in 1958 was visited whilst climbing Holdstone Down in North Devon by a ‘great being of love’, who sent streams of energy through him deep into the mountain, making it forever a holy repository. King was then instructed to travel to eighteen other mountains and ‘charge’ them with spiritual potency. Nine of these lie in the British Isles, the others being iconic (or obscure) peaks abroad.* Aetherius pilgrimages are organised to these mountains to this day.
And so to Cadair Idris, which is perhaps the most concentrated meeting of myth and mountain, certainly in Britain. For that, we can thank the rich seam of Welsh legend that perfectly complements the mood of the landscape and its reflective, storytelling people. This is the land of the Mabinogion, the collection of eleven medieval folk tales that coalesces thousands of years of fable into one delicious mix. The Mabinogion takes the form of a book; if it took the form of a mountain, it would be this mountain.
The legends that haunt this place are strange and old. Many have become exaggerated over time; most were fantastic to begin with, although some have their roots in history and in truth. The name Cadair is the mountain’s correct spelling, despite frequently being given as Cader. There’s no deeper reason for this than the pronunciation of the longer word in the local dialect. The translation of this prefix is both ‘hill-fort’ and ‘chair’. The suffix, however, is a name.
Your first steps onto Cadair on the Minffordd Path take you through a forest of sessile oak, where the path ascends slopes veined with stepped waterfalls. It was mild enough to set off wearing a T-shirt, and soon I was beginning to sweat. The sun had long dropped below the point where it could pierce the canopy and light the ground, and the forest was darkening and thickening with clouds of biting midges, which made stopping unwise. My pack felt heavy – heavier than it should, somehow – and my breathing soon became laboured, and progress unsteadily erratic.
Climbing alone didn’t seem to be something I was yet particularly good at. Of all the mountains I’d walked up over the previous years, I pretty much always had someone with me – and that someone was usually in front, setting the pace, taking the worry out of route-finding and being, physically and psychologically, something to follow. Climbing a mountain is a very measurable commitment. You either get to the top, or you don’t. And like every commitment, whilst sharing it gives it much more retrospective cachet, on the hill the act often turns into a who-blinks-first matter of pride.
This gentle competitiveness helps you get through the physically hard moments. It pushes you on for just a few more metres of ascent when you feel like all you want to do is curl up, leak sweat and carbon dioxide for a few minutes, and then maybe die. Looking at a mountain on a map at home is easy. It’s just a squiggle, rarely bigger than the base of a wine glass and usually small enough to eclipse with your thumb. This – more so if the wine glass happens to have had something in it – has the effect of inflating your ambitions. But out in the real world the second you hit a steeply raked slope with a rucksack on your back, your pace slows, your breathing gets stiff and you’re staring up at something impossibly high above you. It’s at this point that those ambitions have the habit of playing dumb and mutinously slinking away – and you remember just how much harder climbing a gradient is to walking on level ground.
If you’re alone nobody will judge you for it. You can go as slowly as you like, and no one will see. I could babble to myself, have a wee without saying ‘I’m just having a wee’ to anyone, or sit down for ten minutes every five metres. On the occasions you pass another walker, of course, you puff your chest out, close your mouth so as not to appear out of breath, quicken your pace and do your
