it up to the light to see if I’d caught anything interesting in there, but there was no light. Of course, if there was anything really sinister in there I wouldn’t see it; viruses, protozoa, the gunge from the mulching body of a dead sheep unseen upslope. High, mossy streams like this are pretty good at breaking down contaminants, given a clear run of flow, but wild water is always a gamble. A measured gamble, but a gamble all the same.
Nearby, a rough footway began to ascend. I took it, feeling the cold of the rock bristling against my bare arms as it steepened, closer to my body than before. Next to me, the crags of Craig Cau ceased to be a wall of cracked rock, more a side of broken ribs descending from above, separated by gullies scraped into the mountain.
It was hard going. Breathless, I began to set targets. A stop at the sheep. A drink of water at the white rock, whenever it appeared. To get me there, a few sweets. Finally, I reached the white rock I’d spotted from the Cwm. It was quartz – a massive cataract of it, bent and fractured where it broke the surface. I stopped, looking down at the darkening water below, and back up at the slope stretching above me. Maybe a hundred metres left.
The next section was tougher, both in terms of the terrain and my dimming evening energy to tackle it. The path was starting to lose its mud-and-stones constitution, and more and more stretches of bare rock had to be crossed and climbed. Soon I was amongst sharply raked cracks of stone that required both hands; several times as I hoisted myself into these I caught sight of the increasing drop through my legs below. As I began to draw level with the skyline, a sniff of breeze began to drift downwards from above, suddenly becoming a gust as the sky grew wider. There was the white nape of the coast and its necklace of amber lights. The horizon was gone, smudged by gloomy mist. And to my right, a mercifully gentle-angled path began to lead upwards through jumbled boulders to the summit of Penygadair – the top of Cadair Idris.
After a few moments’ rest I slowly but robustly began a slumping gait upwards along the path. It was getting cold, but I’d soon be on the top, and soon able to layer up and get warm. The world was now deepening blue tones, with no trace of the colour of sunset left except for a messy smear of orange across the western sky.
My ears were becoming nervy. A sheep’s cough sounds disturbingly like a human choke – at least it does when you’re high and alone on a mountain in increasing darkness, and the silence seemed to have bulk, a kind of sonic hiss like distant traffic, as I continued along the ridge. The views on each side began to widen and I started to feel like I was reaching the top of something. At last, barely perceptible, the white Ordnance Survey trig pillar – perched atop a tall pile of rocks evidently comprising the summit – appeared ahead. I clambered up, pausing for the briefest moment to enjoy being at the apex of that massive ridge I’d seen earlier from the road, then quickly began a visual search for Cadair’s second most distinctive summit feature. Glancing around from the trig point, beneath me to the right I spotted a uniform row of stones, and then a patch of corrugated tin they edged. In the blurred contrast of the gloaming, so well does it mimic the native stone of the summit you could easily mistake it for a weathered sheet of metal lying on the ground, perhaps covering some sort of hazard. But it isn’t. It’s a roof.
The hut was built in the 1830s by a guide named Robert Pugh. He had a vested interest in constructing a building in this rather auspicious place – if not for a financial gain then certainly a practical one, as Cadair Idris was big business for local guides in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Its status as one of the most southerly big chunks of proper mountain in Britain, and its dramatic qualities – which mirrored many of those of Snowdon, twenty miles to the north – drew visitors from afar. The guides they hired were often colourful local characters typically acquired at inns in Talyllyn and Dolgellau who could make their sole living escorting artistic travellers and science buffs – to whom Pugh applied the neat collective ‘curiosity men’ – to the summit of the mountain.
Geology was a major preoccupation for these early travellers. Before glaciation and erosion reduced its height by thousands of feet and carved it into its present form, the Ordovician volcanic rocks and Precambrian sedimentaries that form the bedrock of the mountain once extended northwards in a huge arch of layered rock beds. This arch reached its apex high above the central region between Cadair Idris and Snowdon, and is known as the Harlech Dome. This is an ancient sea floor, folded like a rucked carpet and considered one of the oldest geological formations in Britain. It’s also the reason fossilised seashells have been found on Snowdon’s summit. The rocks in the face of Craig Cau can be seen to tilt southwards, showing the slope of this arch, like the abutments of some collapsed Roman fortification. We know all of this now, but in the 19th century it was all still a fascinating puzzle waiting to be solved. Cadair’s botany, too, was and is of particular interest; today the mountain’s status as a nature reserve comes from the delicate and unusual alpine plants that can be found at their most southern extent on its slopes, including purple saxifrage, the prehistoric-looking green spleenwort and pretty little white-flowered spignel.* The summit ridge is a bouldery grassland, where can be found the evocatively named hare’s tail cotton, and wavy hair grass.
A telling early description in literature of Cadair comes from Daniel Defoe, who visited the area in the 1720s. He was not a man to delight in wilderness; he describes the area as being home to mountains ‘impassable … which even the people themselves call them so; we looked at them with astonishment, for their rugged tops and the immense heights of them.’ He goes on to mention the ‘famous Cader-Idricks, which some are of the opinion is the highest mountain in Britain’. Alfred Lord Tennyson was another visitor to the mountain – in a storm in 1856 – and was sufficiently moved by it to say he had ‘never seen anything more awful than the great veil of rain drawn straight over Cader Idris’. The diarist Francis Kilvert was escorted to the summit by Pugh’s son in 1871, and his account was similarly bleak: ‘This is the dreariest, stoniest, most desolate mountain I have ever been on.’
Pugh’s shelter was constructed so that travellers could take rest and enjoy refreshments until such time that the clouds parted. It was, as he put it, ‘to be had for those wishing to see the rising sun, or in case of a shower or likewise.’ The original shelter was probably built of wood, and during summer months housed a lady of maturing years who climbed the mountain at dawn and dispensed tea. Later on it was fortified, and now stands of squat native stone.
However welcome it may be in a winter blizzard or summer rainstorm, it isn’t inviting in the dark. It’s amazing how open to suggestion your senses become out of your normal surroundings, especially when combined with the crepuscular aesthetic of the old stone and the myths that circle Cadair like a stubborn smell.
Happily, though lacking a door, the hut has a kind of porch with a bench where one can sit and look out of the open entrance into the northern view without venturing into the main room. Slinging down my pack, that’s what I did now, glancing briefly into the wall of darkness to my right as I did so. It might as well have been a black curtain; I couldn’t see a thing in there. I’d my head torch with me, but I wanted to avoid switching it on if I could, partly to protect my now-established night vision from bright light, but also because of a silly youthful fear I still harboured of shining a beam of light into a dark room and coming nose to nose with something unpleasant.
Entering the hut’s little porch, the wind died as if a switch had been flicked. The chill I was beginning to feel on my sweaty back subsided. Stone buildings like this usually cool the air, but this one didn’t. It was almost warm. Heated by the afternoon sun? The roof was metal, after all. This relief at the change of conditions wouldn’t last; I needed to get a warm jacket and my bivouac equipment out of my backpack. Once I was warm and the sweat had dried off my back, I could move around the summit and explore a little, snatching some sleep in between. I found my bivvy bag, some food, my sleeping bag and mat, and pulled out the bag containing two snug jackets and a waterproof.
Only it didn’t contain two snug jackets, or a waterproof. I’d brought up the
