you’re your own motivation – and there’s nobody to silently scold you for being slow or unfit but yourself. You can turn round if you want. Go home. Nobody’s stopping you. And that takes some getting used to.
Tonight, at least, I had the sunset to race – though after twenty minutes this wasn’t going so well. It was approaching 9 p.m. when I entered Cwm Cau to see the last blush of sunlight colouring the very tops of its crags. Half an hour later, and it would be sinking into the Irish Sea. If I wanted to get to the top to see it do so, I didn’t have long.
A cwm is the Welsh word for a valley, usually a glacial cirque, and Cwm Cau is perhaps the most perfect glacial cirque in Snowdonia. A sculpture fashioned by massive glacial forces, the beautiful black-blue lake at its centre has inspired much of the mountain’s legend, and some of the more questionable deductions of scientists who have studied it. The lake is almost fifty metres deep in places. Resembling the broken neck of a glass bottle, the dramatic ring of peaks surrounding it once led many to think Cadair Idris a long-dead volcano – and the image still appeals. But it’s wrong. The rock is volcanic, like that of much of Snowdonia. But this rock erupted onto the floor of a great sea, was thrust upwards in a period of mountain building, then worn down and defined in form by aggressive glaciers over hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of years. Smothered by the Pleistocene glaciation, the ice lay so steeply against the mountainside that it slid in hard rotation, grinding against the dolerite rock and slowly scooping out the basin we see today. The headwall against which the glacier terminated – the pyramid of Craig Cau – was frost-split, clawed at and dragged against by the glacier, leaving the mountain’s impressively scored appearance as a legacy and adding to the raw allure of the cwm. Why anyone would want to miss this part of the mountain is a mystery all of its own.
The crags rise vertically several hundred metres from the lake to a big-dipper skyline, which, seen from the entrance to the cwm, climbs from the left to the dominating peak of Craig Cau – often, due to its pyramidal shape, mistaken for the massif’s topmost summit – before dropping to a nick in the ridge then climbing again to the right, up to the highest point of the mountain itself, known as Penygadair.
Away from the shifting of the leaves of the lower path, the cwm was noiseless. In the same way your eyes become tuned to the dark, so your ears respond to silence. As I entered the huge basin and began to edge around the lake, my senses were numbed. I stopped to take a breather, and slowly sonic details began to peep through. The delicate sound of water tickling the shore, the hard ‘chack’ of a wheatear ground-nesting nearby somewhere; faint, audible traces of nature emerging from a landscape so quiet you had to listen hard to hear it. As I moved I noticed white crampon scratches like tapeworms doodled up the rocks at the water’s edge. Walkers had been here when all of this was white. In winter the lake would be frozen, perhaps snow-covered. You wouldn’t know where the edge was.
My route lay in the north-west crook of the basin, and looked steep. It climbed the slope via a shallow, rocky groove to the ‘v’ in the ridgeline between the pyramid of Craig Cau and the summit, still invisible above and to the right. In the gloom I could see a patch of white that looked about mid-way up – probably a quartz vein – which I made a mental note to look out for. Gauging the progress of your ascent from a slope can be tricky; everything above you looks closer than it is, and everything below further away.
I looked up, and then down at my watch. Darkness was chasing the light east to west across the sky. Invisible, beyond the bulk of the mountain over the sea, the sun would be setting. Night was coming.
Cadair’s ‘Idris’ was most probably Idris Gawr, a king of Meirionnydd – a region of medieval Wales. Today most of Meirionnydd is part of the county of Gwynedd. But at the time of Idris, around AD 600, it was a kingdom of mountains and coast occupying the area of southern Snowdonia in which Cadair Idris sits.
It’s at this early juncture that things get a little muddled. The direct translation of Cadair Idris is literally ‘chair’ or ‘stronghold of Idris’. Some versions of the legend state that Idris was a giant so large he could sit using the entire mountain as a throne from which to survey his kingdom. Other versions state that the mountain received its association because Idris the king would climb to the summit and stargaze. Yet more state that the king retired to a hermitage – or fort – on the mountain in his later years. Further ambiguous threads of the tale indicate that the ‘chair’ referred to was an actual rock-hewn object on the summit, natural or otherwise, upon which Idris would sit and do whatever it was that he did.
However delicious all of this is, whoever Idris was, it would seem that in this region, at some point he did exist – and for whatever reason he became inexorably associated with the mountain.
It was written as far back as around 1600 by Siôn Dafydd Rhys in The Giants of Wales and Their Dwellings that ‘in this high mountain formerly lived a big giant, and he was called Idris Gawr.’ He goes on to describe some other myths about the mountain, including one that seems to suggest an early version of subterranean Poohsticks: ‘If a stick or other piece of wood be thrown into any you may choose of those waters, you will get that wood in the other lake on the opposite side of this mountain.’ There are many references to Cadair’s numerous lakes being bottomless, or home to the afanc – a kind of water serpent that had been cast into Llyn Cau by King Arthur, no less.* Gwyn ap Nudd, the Celtic Lord of the Underworld, was also said to dwell here, and his scarlet-eared cwn annwn – loosely, hounds of hell – are said to glide across the summit, seeking souls to steal and no doubt ghostly walls to pee against. It’s said in mythology that the howling of these dogs (loudest further away, and quietest close to you) was a premonition of death to anyone who heard them. Many associated the bark-like honking of migrating geese by night with the legend. But the story that really stuck – the one most enigmatically associated with the mountain – is also contained within The Giants of Wales and Their Dwellings. ‘On the highest crown of this mountain is a bed-shaped form, great in length and width, built of slabs or stones fixed around it,’ it states. ‘And it is said that whoever lies and sleeps on that bed, one of two things will happen to him: either he will be a poet of the best kind, or go entirely demented.’
Long before the 17th century, Celtic lore speaks of pilgrims who journeyed to Cadair Idris with the express intention of climbing to the top at sunset and spending the night there. The experience, if successful, was said to lift the traveller to a higher spiritual plane, becoming a filidh – which means both ‘seer’ and ‘poet’. The filidhean filled a void that druidism was rapidly vacating, and were seen as conduits between the spirit world and humankind who could see beyond the world of convention and impart imbas – the knowledge of enlightenment – to the people. It was said the process of becoming a filidh required the traveller to shed all identity and return to the world with a new narrative – hence ‘poetry’ – for life. This process could, of course, go wrong. If unsuccessful, the result would be too much for the pilgrim to bear, and he would descend into madness or die on the spot.
It’s a common motif. Mount Zion, Mount Horeb and Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, and Mount Olympus in Greek mythology, are summits dense with religious symbolism or host places where dramatic enlightenment has taken place. But it’s striking that this comparatively modest mountain in North Wales appears with such potency in so many legends. And, because spending the night on the mountain seemed such a recurring feature of these legends – whether to gaze at the stars from a giant chair, look over an ancient kingdom, be eaten by a ghost dog, dragged to hell by the god of the underworld, ascend to a higher plane of wisdom, become a poet, go insane or simply die – well, it seemed like the thing to do.
Cwm Cau was deep in shadow, and chilling quickly. Finding the outlet to the stream that fell from somewhere near the top of the mountain, I filled my water bottle from the place where it flowed the fastest. This would be the last of the water I’d find now, and the safest
