looked out into the darkness, and down at my thin, sweat-soaked woollen T-shirt – the only thing I had to keep me warm overnight on top of an 893-metre mountain in spring. I’d never previously forgotten anything really major on a trip like this. My eyes slid to the Thornton’s chocolate cakes I’d brought up with me. These were my little treats for later; now seemed like the time to have one. A bit of sugar, bit of pep. All fine.
The truth is, I was fine – but had this been a cold or rainy night, or a period of unstable weather, I could have been in quite a bit of trouble. The weather was good and set to continue as such, and the walk down off the mountain in the morning should, if the forecast held, be warmed by the sun. I was sweaty, but not irredeemably soaked. The problem was the wind – nothing chills you down more quickly, and if you’re wet, water will sponge the heat from your body with alarming speed. I’d a light summer sleeping bag with me rated to around 5°C, but seeing as it was the single warm thing I had, this I’d have to look after. Sleeping bags stuffed with down feathers don’t go well together with moisture. And I’d made enough rush-triggered mistakes for one day; my priority now was staying warm and dry. I looked again into the blackness to my left, into the hut. Then, resigned, I reached for my head torch. ‘Thank God I remembered you.’
Enclosed spaces on mountains have a distinctive atmosphere to them, man-made ones particularly so. Perhaps it’s the discrepancy between them and their surroundings that concentrates this. For instance, all journeys to the summit of Cadair Idris end here, and if shelter is what you seek, you and whatever emotion you bring with you will find it under this one, isolated roof. Whilst any spot on a mountain can hold a story, the mountain is still a mountain, full of spacious distractions – and you share the atmosphere of that spot with the view, the wind, the birds and the sky. But the curious intimacy of an enclosed space on a mountain – which by definition is a limitless, wide-open thing – is entirely different, and very potent. In that place, centuries of meetings, fears and moments of exhausted relief have gathered within the same few square feet, under the same roof. It’s a piece of our world. A comfort. A sink of concentrated humanity in a wild place.
But Cadair’s summit shelter didn’t comfort me. Certainly not at first, anyway. I turned on my head torch and – holding my breath – shone it into the black hole of the shelter, quickly bouncing the beam into every corner to ensure there were no nasty surprises lurking there. It was, to my relief, totally empty and surprisingly clean, mercifully free from litter or screwed-up reeds of toilet paper used for their intended purpose, but not in the intended place. The room beyond the porch was about the size of a suburban living room, with a bench running round the edge and a square, coffee-table-sized brick platform in the centre. On it sat the burnt-out remains of a candle on a saucer of melted wax. I could hear the erratic wind funnelling through gaps in the corrugated roof like tin whistles. Two small windows – just big enough to frame a face – hung lightless in the gloom.
I began to worry about the batteries in my torch. I didn’t like the thought of them running flat and there being no relief from the dark. It was thick and unyielding, and I found it unsettling. Some people can be as the animals and embrace nature in all its pragmatic barbarism without hesitation, but I’m not one of them. Don’t get me wrong; I love the atmosphere of places that carry the fears of childhood – the dark corridors of a forest, the brush of fog against an ancient window, the bleakness of a Hebridean moor. Like most I seek them out because they stimulate an immersive sensory reaction – invigoration to one degree, fear to a significant other. The emotional mechanics are very much like climbing a mountain. But it still spooked me.
Given the circumstances, I could tolerate a night alone in a 150-year-old hut on the summit of a lore-thick mountain, but I was damned if I was going to do it without a light. Turning the beam down to its lowest setting, I set the torch on the central platform and went about making up a bed, set back away from the draught of the doorway. This done, I had another chocolate cake, pulled a hat onto my head and my spare socks onto my hands and wandered out of the hut onto the summit plateau, leaving my torch shining dimly within.
The wind was cold. Frost was beginning to shimmer like a fine fur on the summit rocks. Above, stars were piercing through a sky grading to mauve in the west. This would be an unwise dwelling for a sleepwalker: in front of the hut, the rocky ground gave way to a thin wig of grass atop a convex slope that bulged forward then plunged nearly 900 metres down the northern scarp of the mountain. Far below, the valley held the mythically bottomless lake of Llyn y Gadair. Beyond that, the mist-muted lights of Dolgellau. Stretching north like embers in a smouldering carpet, patches of amber light – villages, towns, isolated homesteads. How this lightscape must have changed since the first villages arrived here and looked up to the mountain in awe and trepidation. And how little – aside from a few paths and a hut – the mountaintop upon which I was standing had evolved. The people and their perceptions of the mountain had changed a lot; the mountain itself, hardly at all.
I walked a little way along the ridge, enjoying the solitude before I began to chill down, my hairs bristling where the wind touched them. Beginning to shake, I turned back towards the hut’s boxy silhouette. As its front came into view, I noticed the yellow light of my torch shining dimly but warmly through the window. It almost looked cosy.
It’s reasonable to assume that those who would gather in mountain shelters like this would automatically have more in common with each other than people meeting in most buildings at sea level. Therefore, conversations in this ramshackle little building over the last couple of centuries would have had much more of a synergy, and the meetings in general potentially more fortuitous simply because of the incongruity of the meeting place.
In his book Visions of Snowdonia writer Jim Perrin describes arriving at Cadair’s summit shelter late one winter’s evening in the mid 1970s in cruel weather. He had to slide in through the door past snow that almost blocked it. Soon after he arrived, another man entered and perched himself on the benches at the far end of the shelter. Perrin noted: ‘He was quite short, a little arthritic in his movements, and his face was deeply lined with deep-set, intense eyes that dwelt on you in unnerving, long consideration.’ The man lit a pipe, and Perrin offered him coffee, which he accepted with the grumble both that quality coffee was impossible to obtain in civilised Britain these days, and that in the little shelter on top of Cadair, ‘of all places, he might have expected to enjoy a solitary pipe on a day like this’. The two traded good-natured swipes together awhile, principally about the human race – a man in his twenties finding common ground with another in his seventies, both in an ice-encased shelter at 893 metres above North Wales for ostensibly the same reason: solitude, escape, adventure, space.
Perrin knew more or less immediately who the older man was. He was famous: the explorer and mountaineer H. W. ‘Bill’ Tilman, one of the 20th century’s most prolifically adventurous figures. As a teenager he’d fought at the Somme and between the wars had climbed Nanda Devi in the Indian Himalaya, at 7,816 metres then the highest peak summited to date. Parachuted into the Balkans during the Second World War to incite resistance to the Nazis, between the conflicts he had met Eric Shipton whilst picking coffee in Africa, with whom he made some of mountaineering’s most important ascents, as well as significant attempts on Mount Everest during the 1930s. In later life he would shift his focus somewhat to the ocean, adopting and restoring old craft and casting off for bleak corners of the world such as Patagonia, Greenland, Baffin Island and Spitzbergen, where he would anchor up and close in on mountains inaccessible by land, exploring their shores and often climbing them.
Tilman and Perrin became acquaintances for a very brief period, the inquisitive younger man visiting the old explorer at his home in the Mawddach Estuary, where he was to be presented with ‘a parable of [Tilman’s] relationship with the world’. Perrin would become one of mountaineering’s leading authors and thinkers; in 1977, Tilman – aged 79, and just weeks after his meeting with Perrin on the summit of Cadair Idris – put his dogs into kennels and joined as a crew member a boat that left Rio de Janeiro bound for the Antarctic. The boat was lost in one of the many storms lacerating the South Atlantic and no trace of it
