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 was ever found. There went a man who loved solitude, and travelled to the far corners of the planet to tackle its most 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