austere and extreme places; it would appear Tilman met his end without ever breaking his intrepid swagger.
It’s quite possible that Cadair Idris was the last mountain Tilman climbed. His last moments atop a summit were spent with Perrin, here, within sight of his own house. Perrin described his meeting with Tilman as ‘completely remarkable … one of the most singular gifts to me’. And that gift was kindled just feet away in the strange, entirely out-of-the-ordinary little room in which I was now lying on the summit of Cadair Idris.
The hopes I’d had earlier in the evening of being alone on the top of this mountain had switched to a desire for company. I could hear scimperings on the tin roof above. Mice, maybe. The fidgets of wind, perhaps. Turned down to its lowest setting, the trade-off for saving my batteries was the particularly eerie, candle-yellow light my torch produced. Every time I moved, a wild curl of shadow was thrown across the wall. Out on the mountain, the silence would have been a natural part of its sonic ’scape. But the shelter muddled the dynamic, and in here silence wasn’t welcome. I thought about using my phone to play some music, an audiobook, anything, but I resisted, and eventually turned off the torch and tried to sleep.
I managed a few hours, waking briefly in the night coughing violently and feeling an obstruction in my throat. I thought for a grim moment something cobwebby and ancient had dislodged itself from the ceiling and plummeted into my gaping mouth, or a curious insect had wandered in. A few slugs of water and whatever it was became nutrition. Now wide awake, I leaned forward and peered towards the door, seeing beyond it a scrape of orange brightening on the horizon opposite where I’d watched it fade just a few hours earlier. It was 5.15 a.m., and already brighter than it had been when I arrived the previous night.
Struggling up, I unzipped the sleeping bag to its base, then put the footbox on my head and wrapped the rest of it around me like a blanket. Pushing my feet into unlaced boots I wandered out onto the summit, the grass crunching under a soft frost, found a rock and sat for a while.
The mountain was awakening in total silence. No birds, no sheep, no distant static of road or airplane. As I watched, red exploded from the horizon, bleeding through the thin ribbon of cloud and lighting the crisp grass of Cadair Idris’s summit ridge, upon one of many boulders, where I sat. The grass started to shimmer, then glisten and bead as the frost upon it began to melt. It seemed ridiculous that such an awesome event as a sunrise could unfold without an accompanying sound; a sizzle, a hiss, a roar, operatic music. Nothing, alas, but pure quiet, as nature began to light the mountain. I sat and watched, as many had here for hundreds and hundreds of years – possibly expecting rather more to happen than a sunrise. Enlightenment, the ascent to a higher spiritual realm. And, of course, insanity or death.
A specific reference to Cadair’s most emblematic legend came in the form of an 1822 poem by English writer Felicia Hemans, titled ‘The Rock of Cader Idris’. A poet of the late Romantic period, Hemans was born in Liverpool in 1793. Romantics had a profound affinity with mountains – as we shall see – and Hemans was no exception.* ‘The Rock of Cader Idris’ is rather dark; Hemans describes waiting alone on the bed-shaped boulder on the summit of Cadair, ‘that rock where the storms have their dwelling,/The birthplace of phantoms’, viewing the ‘dread beings’ that hover around the mountain:
I saw them – the mighty of ages departed –
The dead were around me that night on the hill:
From their eyes, as they pass’d, a cold radiance they darted,
There was light on my soul, but my heart’s blood was chill.
Needless to say, the poem’s protagonist lives through the horrors of the night, and – upon watching the sunrise on Cadair, as I was now – feels suitably illuminated.
I saw what man looks on, and dies – but my spirit
Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour;
And, as from the grave, I awoke to inherit
A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power!
Showell Styles, aforementioned author of The Mountains of North Wales, thought the whole legend a displaced mistake, and that Hemans had transferred the legend of a rock on the slopes of Snowdon – the Maen du’r Arddu, or ‘black stone’ – to Cadair, adding to a long list of folkloric confusions that exist between the two mountains through written history, probably due to their both being high, craggy peaks overlooking small, deep lakes. Styles, incidentally, was something of a poet himself – penning the bouncy ‘Ballad of Idwal Slabs’, named after a well-known climbers’ crag in the Ogwen valley, 25 miles north of Cadair.
English-born and a prolific fiction writer, his non-fiction (and many of his stories) centred around the mountains. Humorous poems and novels aside, too few know Styles for his mountain writing. It’s a travesty that most of his books are now out of print, as in this he ranks as one of the very best – particularly in Snowdonia, his adopted home, where he died in 2005. The Mountains of North Wales was his masterpiece.
Styles was great because the mountains clearly got to him. His interpretations are suffused with intermittent outpourings of emotion and feeling that came from his being amongst them. Far from being screeds of dry practicality, his descriptions of routes up the peaks of Snowdonia were imaginative, curious and peerlessly articulated, fortified by the mythology of the region and its mountains. After describing being chased off Cadair by a storm in 1971, Styles remarks that ‘the only country you can feel nostalgic for whilst you are still in it is mountain country, and only the Welsh have a word for that feeling – hiraeth.’ Of the highest peak he says this: ‘Snowdon has everything … from any angle, distantly or close at hand, Snowdon is the noblest and most shapely peak in sight, and obviously the queen of the lot … five main ridges converge at the summit, each with its own special characteristics.’ And it was one of Snowdon’s ridges’ ‘special characteristics’ I’d be exploring next.
I sat outside in the infant warmth of the sun until it sat four fingers’ height above the horizon, then shambled back to the hut and began to gather up my possessions. Eating another chocolate cake and slugging back some of my remaining water, I stayed wrapped in my sleeping bag and gently dozing, giving the air long enough to warm a little, until outside the door the sky had turned from deep blue to bright white. Pulling down the broom lodged in the rafters, I gave the floor a quick sweep, picked up a dead candle to dispose of later and gave a last glance around the hut. With daylight streaming in through the window, it was a quite different place.
I walked out into a veil of white cloud. The morning sun was warming the grass and steam was rising like bushfire smoke into the air. It was beautiful. Following the shape of the ridge, which I could just see, I walked the brief distance to Mynydd Moel, the furthest east of Cadair’s triple summits. To the north, the heads of northern Snowdonia’s mountains rose from the morning mists, hard and bare; of rock, not grass. Where I was now standing was a sort of bridge – the link between the verdant south and the austere, brutal north. Reminiscent of both, but resembling neither entirely.
At the rock buttresses of the northern flank, I took a look over the edge before turning south. The slope began to tilt downwards, and at my feet hoverflies dozily awoke and rose where I stepped.
* Milarepa rode the rays of the sun, while Bön-Chung sat cross-legged on a magic drum that ascended the mountain while he meditated. Milarepa won, but as he arrived at the summit he threw a handful of snow onto a nearby peak in honour of Bön-Chung. I once interviewed Reinhold Messner – a mountaineer deeply respectful of Tibetan beliefs but deeply pragmatic about his own climbing – about Kailash.
