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 to drink, relatively speaking. I unclipped my bag and filled the clear bottle I carried. Normally I’d hold 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