Welsh Journals

Edward Lhuyd and Snowdonia This is the text of the third Edward Lhuyd Memorial Lecture, delivered at Oriel Eryri (National Museum of Wales), Llanberis on March 3, 1985. For an opening impression of Lhuyd's contribution to knowledge of this region we have only to refer to the index of W. M. Condry's book on The Snowdonia National Park, published in 1966. There are no fewer than 23 references to Lhuyd. The first of them is full of praise for the man who 'was one of the outstanding minds of his age a tower of common sense and original observation'. Mr. Condry substantiates his praise with proofs drawn from Lhuyd's work. Two may be given here. 'Like Johnson and Ray', he says, 'Lhuyd sought plants in Snowdonia, but unlike them he came summer after summer and so was the first botanist or traveller to get an intimate knowledge of the mountains. In fact very few even since Lhuyd can have known the high ground from Snowdon to Pumlumon as well as he. In the 1680s and 1690s Lhuyd made many first British records of flowering plants and ferns'. Again, it was the accepted view down to his time, stated by William Camden and other authorities, that there was perpetual snow on Snowdon. Lhuyd, from his own experience and by tapping local evidence, denied this with the voice of authority in his contribution to the new edition of Camden's Britannia, published in 1695. 'Generally speaking', says Lhuyd, 'there's no snow here from the end of April to the midst of September It often snows on the tops of these mountains in May and June, but such snow, or rather sleet, melts as fast as it falls'. How did Lhuyd become involved and interested in such problems? One may go so far as to say that John Ray executed the major formative influence on Lhuyd as a young man. There is plenty of evidence for this in the letters they exchanged in the early 1690s, but another item takes their connection farther back in time. It is in the shape of one of John Ray's books in the Bodleian Library: published in 1674, he called it A Collection of English Words, not Generally used With Catalogues of English Birds and Fishes. On the first page is written 'Edward Lloyd, Jesus College, Oxford, 1684', so the book belonged to Lhuyd within a year of his going to university. On the title page, in addition, is written Frank V. Emery 'Gabriel Lloyd his Book': we know his nickname in the circle of Welsh friends with whom he worked and relaxed was 'Honest Gabriel'. Other jottings include their names and nicknames, too-Cronick Lloyd, Thomas Edwards, Mr. David Parry. The contents of Ray's book outline an introduction to many of the subjects that were to occupy Lhuyd in his scholarly career. Indeed, this copy is full of his manuscript notes; he adds to Ray in the lists of North Country Words, e.g. 'A Char is the name of a fish of the trout-kind found in Windermere in Westmorland, and in a lake in Carnarvonshire by the back of Snowdon', to which Lhuyd adds 'call'd Lhyn Llan Berrys'. He also brings fresh words to Ray's selection, especially from Cornwall, when he must have had the book with him in his travels there in 1700; yet again he inserts Welsh versions of words, illustrating his commitment to philology. With such influences in mind, how and where do we find Lhuyd making his knowledge of Snowdonia available to the scientific world? The first field of his research lay fairly and squarely in the identification of the mountain flora in all its richness, and Lhuyd played a vital role in making it known to the scientific intellectualism of his period. This happened after his searching of the highest slopes even before he went to Oxford: it is recorded in letters he wrote in 1682, and takes us to Cwm Idwal, in our own time the first National Nature Reserve to be declared in Wales. It is unquestionably the supreme site for studying the mountain flora of Wales, pioneered by Lhuyd, with its lake, boulders, hanging gardens, or the chasm of the Devil's Kitchen: so too on the higher slopes reaching to Y Garn and Glyder Fawr, with the crags of Clogwyn Ddu and the Gribin. A mixture of acid and basic rocks yields a rich assortment of plants, especially on Trigyfylchau. Here Lhuyd discovered the tiny lily later called Lloydia serotina in his honour, which still grows there in company with a wide range of arctic-alpines, and those lowland species that do so well on the mountain ledges; hairy rock-cress, ox-eye daisy, burnet saxifrage, meadowsweet, globe flower, golden-rod, and the brilliant colour of the red campion.