Peaks, pubs and rain: American adventures in Wales

Is there something about small countries that causes an obsession with details? When I planned a trip to north Wales last fall, a modest highlights tour of the Snowdonia mountain country, it seemed so simple that I almost felt guilty. Surely someone with a lifelong romantic attachment to Wales should put more into it than that.

Before long I was trying to get the hang of Cymric, the tongue- tangling, resurgent Welsh language (even though I knew I could get along perfectly well in English). In the process I somehow got diverted into a chart of cross-references after stumbling on the tidbit that linguists refer to Cymric as Celtic P, as opposed to the Celtic Q, or Gaelic, of Scotland and Ireland. I pass that along for what it's worth. Then, staring at books of Celtic art, I learned that the style called La Tene is named for the valley in Switzerland where the Celts came from in the first place, or some of them anyway; but don't get me started.

Blessedly, the time came when my wife, Katy, and I actually went to Wales, where life turned out to be simple after all, but for a reason I had overlooked: everything you really need to know about Snowdonia in October, you learn from the weather. In the course of a week we were soaked, buffeted and chilled, but we were also invigorated, charmed and well fed. On balance, the script that the elements handed us was more varied and interesting than my by-the-book expedition could have been. The exquisitely named Snowdonia, and especially its dominant feature, Mount Snowdon, had occupied a corner of my imagination since school days, when I first saw photographs of north Wales. With its black cliffs and mysterious lakes and jagged peaks, Snowdon looked massive, infinitely higher than its 3,600 feet and, to my Middle American eyes, exotic as the South Pole. More recently, at an age when people tend to think about such roots as they may have, some remnant of Welshness had drawn me to the legends of Yr Wyddfa -- Welsh for the burial place -- which is the same mountain as Snowdon but not the same thing. Of course it's also true that Snowdon, like other famous mountains from Fujiyama to Pike's Peak, is as much a phenomenon of tourism as of nature. Since 1896, there has even been a little railroad train that chugs its way to the top on the gradual incline of the northwest slope. Even so, I wasn't prepared for the intensity of the competition when we set out for a walk up Snowdon on our first full day in the country. We had driven in high spirits the few miles from Betws-y- Coed, the pivotal resort town of Snowdonia. The weather was warm and only slightly hazy. Then we reached the parking lot at the top of Pen-y-Pass, the starting point of some popular trails up the mountain, and hit gridlock. The lot was full. Latecomers were being waved away, and the mountain itself looked busy as an anthill. In retrospect, we should have tried some other way up Snowdon, perhaps from Beddgelert on the south face. Instead we took a driving tour of nearby towns, marveled at the scenery -- and blew our best chance to see the world from the top of Snowdon. The next day brought lashing rain. This made it very cozy to linger after breakfast at Tan-y-Foel, an old stone farmhouse on the high plateau above Betws-y-Coed that has been turned into one of the best small hotels in Wales, but it did nothing for my reputation as a master of logistics. It became clear that there would be no mountain climbing that day; and also that I had no idea what to do instead. Katy suggested an excursion for lunch at the Groes Inn, an ancient stopping place on the way to Conwy on the north coast. It was a better idea than I could have imagined, for after about 10 minutes on a road paralleling the Conwy River, we drove smack into fair weather. While the sky behind was still heavy as cement, the prospect ahead was like a child's drawing of a nice day. The Conwy flowed full and steady in its alley of trees, Crayola-green meadows filled the middle distance; we were even treated to a series of rainbows, three in quick succession. Instead of a damp afternoon in a quaint old room, our lunch at the Groes became a kind of picnic, chicken eaten in a sunny addition. From there, it made sense to drive the short remaining distance to the walled town of Conwy and its castle. We are not exactly crazy for castles, but it was worth clambering around this impressive pile of stone, built along the water -- and for a while lived in -- by Edward I during his campaign to subdue the Welsh in the 13th century. The view of Conwy Bay from atop the turrets is truly lovely. Going south again on the other side of the river, about seven miles along the A470 road, there's a different kind of monument, bound to intimidate anyone who has failed to keep a spider plant alive: the 80-acre Gardens at Bodnant, one of the great "touring" gardens where British horticulture evolved into a sublime form of madness. Though October isn't the most colorful month, it had its compensations. For example, in the lower part of the estate, the Dell, we regretted not seeing the azaleas in bloom, but perhaps this heightened the effect of finding ourselves in a stand of enormous, chunky-barked trees that looked both familar and oddly out of place. It was an assortment of healthy giants -- redwoods, sequoias, Douglas firs -- transplanted from the Pacific Northwest a century ago and still doing fine in the damp, temperate climate of coastal Wales. Of the many other tourist lures in and around Snowdonia, I will say only that for us, anyway, nothing equaled simply seeing the country on foot. A favorite area was the high pasture country around Capel Garmon, a village within easy walking distance of the Tan-y-Foel inn. Sometimes when it was stormy in the mountains there would be only a light rain at Capel Garmon, and if the sweet-smelling fields got too wet it was almost as good to hike along the road. The proprietors of the local pub, the White Horse Inn, didn't seem to mind people leaving cars in their parking lot, a convenient starting place for walks ranging from a mile and a half. Many Welsh trails go through private property, and we soon learned to pay attention to the complicated instructions this sometimes involves. I quote at random from a handy green booklet, Walks Around Betws-y-Coed, by Hillary Kendell and Hillary Bradnam: "Pass through a kissing gate and follow the right hand boundary of the field for 50m to a white farmhouse. Turn right up a muddy track. Cross a stile to the left of a gate and bear left following a well marked path which gradually climbs the slope for c. 150m to a second stile. Keep left at the base of a gorse-covered slope to a kissing gate. The path continues through a larch grove and you will already be able to enjoy a view of the mountains." It made a nice routine as far as it went: the undemanding company of the ubiquitous sheep by day, followed by good dinners with wine and local country cheeses, followed by conversation with other guests, English couples for the most part, over coffee or glasses of ale. In spite of these pleasures, we grew frustrated as time passed without much chance to get up into in the mountains, those starkly beautiful ranges so characteristic of Wales, and somehow all the more haunting for being the product of long-ago ecological disaster -- "a derelict landscape with its natural condition destroyed," as the historian John Davies has described them. The land was worn out by over-use centuries ago, and a modest but lasting cooling of the uplands prevented much of anything from growing again. Mount Snowdon aside, I had hoped for some serious hiking out of the little outpost of Idwal Cottage, a missable spot on the A5 highway between Betws-y-Coed and Bethesda. It has a youth hostel, a rescue station, a snack bar -- and a wonderful location in the crease between two distinctly different mountain ranges, the gentle Carneddau and the jagged Glyder. One day it looked fair enough for a long hike along the tops of the Carneddau range where, according to the guidebooks, you can walk above 3,000 feet for many miles, all the way to the coast. But once again we were turned back. A howling, ear-achingly cold wind blew up from nowhere. Unwilling to risk hypothermia, we retreated to a relatively sheltered walk of a few miles around Cwm Idwal. This was no bad consolation: the cwm is a magnificent depression hollowed out of the crags by ice, with a dark lake at the bottom and a boulder- strewn cliff at one end that provided not only a terrific vantage point, but also enough of a scramble to make the muscles ache. Ultimately, unfavorable weather forced us into the luckiest gamble of our trip. Late in the week it was raining so steadily and widely that we left Betws-y-Coed a day ahead of schedule and drove by way of Harlech and the Cardigan coast to the area around Dolgellau, hoping to outdistance the storm and perhaps gain a couple of good hiking days. This is the southern edge of 840-square-mile Snowdonia National Park, and although it isn't really part of Snowdonia proper, its beauty has been famous at least since a 19th-century outbreak of purple prose among English travelers. After walking a path along the Mawddach Estuary, which cuts inland for about 10 miles between low mountains, Ruskin proclaimed it the most beautiful in the world. Even today, some travel books would lead you to expect something like a Norwegian fjord. While it's none of that, the Mawddach seemed to us something just as good: the kind of harmonious landscape that inspires thoughts of big dogs, small boats and a year's worth of reading by a peat fire. More to the point just then, the weather was clear, still and cool; and we were lucky enough to get a room on short notice at the King George III, one of several well-regarded hotels around the estuary. We took a long stroll along the water as the tide was going out that evening, following the flat path of an abandoned railbed, then had a dinner of fish and chips in the hotel's pub, as merry a place as I've ever sat down in. We slept with the windows open and curtains blowing in a soft breeze off the estuary. And the next day, at last, we walked all the way to the top of a mountain without a hitch. Cadair Idris is a solitary, blunt-topped thing that rises from sea level to 2,800 feet. I have no way to judge the opinion of some climbers that its views are superior to Snowdon's, as we never got more than halfway to the top of that great rock. But at least on the Cadair trail we took, the scenery was ever-expanding, varied and spectacular, a greatest-hits album of the Welsh landscape. Sheep pastures with high stone fences, the sober, pretty town of Dolgellau among green fields, the estuary flowing out to Cardigan Bay and a slice of the bay itself all came into view. And in the blue distance, Cadair's cousins to the north -- including Mount Snowdon itself, clear at last. A pretty good mountain to admire from afar.

Copyright 1996
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