Memories and mountains - I – arriving

It was only on the third day of my trip to Wales that I realized that I have been going and coming back (t)here for twenty-five years. I’d been trekking in the Himalayas the year before the first time I discovered Wales (the last great adventure in my gap five years) but had never realised that there was so much wild countryside on my own doorstep. The first college I went to after my gap period wasn’t particularly academically prestigious but was very conveniently located for Snowdonia (although this wasn’t a conscious selection criteria). Some friends there had access to a mountain hut by Llyn Gwynant – in the shadow of, and in with easy access to - the Snowdon massif. When the clouds were down on the mountains there was lovely walking and opportunities for rock climbing along the cliffs that skirt the lake. After my first visit I was hooked and went back five times or so that year: sometimes by car (the easy option), sometimes taking the train to Betws y Coed and hitchhiking in the last ten miles (which meant carrying in all my supplies). I must have done Snowdon from four or five different routes – the Gladstone Path from (so named because Gladstone made a speech to the slate miners from a rock above Bethania), the miners’ track, the pig track, the full horseshoe. I was impressed when I learnt that the first team to climb Everest trained the winter before on Snowdon and stayed at the Pen-y-Gwryd hotel at the top of Llanberis Pass. I was bemused when we found the hotel closed on Sundays (chapel was still highly influential and the ban on Sunday licensing was still in force). And I was frightened when the ground shook under my feet with the strongest earthquake tremor felt in the UK in decades. The night before the sheep in the field had ran around the pen surrounding the hut like crazy - as if the end of the world was nigh – and knowing that there was a nuclear power station twenty miles down the road I was also worried when I felt the tremors.

Many summers have passed since then, many mountains have been climbed, many lakes swum in, many abandoned quarries - once the site of hard physical labour and exploitation – discovered because of an impromptu, and often illegal, rave. As I turn off the M6 to avoid the traffic jams north of Keele and wend my way cross-country across Cheshire towards the A55, I have this feeling that I’m going home. Circling south of Chester the Clwydian range (the first mountain range and effective border between England and Wales) comes into view and beyond there’s sunshine. Leaving behind the clouds and torrential downpours that have dogged my journey up the M40, M42, M5 and M6 I head into a beautiful sunset. If I knew the words I would burst into a rendition of “Land of my fathers.”