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 bag with my tent in – and nothing warm at all. Well, this was annoying. I slumped down on the bench and 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