Welsh Journals

WILD WALES! "W7ILD Wales There is no Wild Wales." one is tempted to retort, in these days of railways and tourist-hotels and motors: railways through every valley with their crowded observation- cars, hotels civilizing the tops of our proudest mountains, rattling char-a-bancs streaming in a steady current through the high passes even that crowning triumph of vandalism, the mountain railway, is with us. But Wild Wales still exists for him who will seek for it, but a few paces off the beaten track: the lonely tarns under the sheer precipices, the grand, lofty summits of iron, age-old rock, the high moors Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding," the brown peatlands and the boulder-strewn burns. It was on a palpitating, starlit night in June that I had a vision of virgin mountain grandeur that will ever remain a memorable scene to me. We were in the neighbourhood of Bala, two of us, and strolling homewards through the Dee valley to the little farm- house on the slope of Aran Benllyn, where we were staying. All around us the towering mountains rose above the warm air of the valley. There was some- thing awe-compelling about the chill, austere detach- ment of their black, jagged profiles. It was an ideal night for a climb, and on the impulse of the moment we decided on one. Midnight found us both leaving the little farm that nestled under its chestnut tree on the slope of the mountain which loomed above us, two thousand nine hundred odd feet above sea-level. A burn rushed down through a hazel-clad ravine on its way to join the new-born Dee in the valley below. Following this for a bit, we came out on to the bare grey-green moor and worked steadily upwards to- wards a summit that never seemed to get any nearer. It was cold here, and appallingly lovely. By the burn there was a little ruined cottage, and a deserted sheep- fold-just a circular wall of rugged gray stones piled up without a trace of mortar; somewhere a corncrake monotonously and cheerlessly uttered its twin note with endless and exasperating persistence; and nowhere a light except for the great solemn stars above. The tinkle of the stream grew fainter behind us as we left it and climbed steadily up the slope past the great boulders that the glaciers of an ancient world had left behind them. Brought down by the glaciers, were they, forsooth Why, does not every little peasant lad know that that huge smooth boulder all by itself on the slope yonder is one of the identical three pebbles which the giant found in his shoe long, long ago as he sat on the crest of the Aran and wondered why he had found it so uncomfortable to walk ? There it lies still, where he cast it from him in anger, and a mile below in that field lies the second, and the third lies still further in the middle of the rushing Dee; in days gone by, runs the legend, a man was drowned and drawn beneath this third boulder his body is still there and whosoever shall turn over the boulder to get at it will get the gold watch that is in his pocket. Further up the slope lay our next landmark. Carreg-y-Ceiliog — the Cock's Stone a very wonderful stone this, it seems, for every time it hears the cock crow it leaps high into the air-only (as the shepherd who told me about it afterwards added drily) it has never yet heard the cock crow; being a boulder, how could it ? Thus are mythology and tradition and folk-lore born of the grey boulders on the mountain side. We had now to climb in earnest, scrambling over rough quartz and granite towards a summit that tantalized us by seeming quite near all the time, yet we never seemed to approach any closer to it. At last, an hour before sunrise, we found ourselves actually on the top in the dingy dawn-light. It was like living in some past geologic age in a world as dead as the moon. A stagnant pool filled what had once been the crater of the old volcano, and a wilder- ness of cheerless, barren igneous rocks and rubble hemmed us in. It was bitterly cold too, and a fresh gale of wind was blowing, eddying through the vast spaces of air around us and whistling in the rude boundary wall, built by merely piling up fragments of rock and boulder, that ran across the saddle and up to the other peak of our mountain, Aran Mawddwy. A disturbed kite, with dull red-brown plumage and reddish tail, started up from somewhere and dis- appeared a bold mountain sheep found its way up to us and coughed and stamped angrily at our intru- sion as we huddled under the shelter of a cairn and gazed on the wonderful scene below and around. And wonderful it was, and again wonderful, beyond all whooping. The western slope by which we had ascended had been steep enough, but the eastern side, on whose brink we now stood dropped down in a sheer perpendicular wall to the valley far, far below. A plumb-line drop of over a thousand feet below us, we stared down into the black deep water of a large tarn; it was not comfortable to gaze down thus into that inky water in the shade of the black precipices, nor to hear the deep-sounding plomp that sent