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 best to look like a strident mountain person before deflating and re-reddening as soon as they’re out of sight. But by and large, when alone 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