WALES

SNOWDONIA - THE MOUNTAINS

OCTOBER 2018

Early Days in the late 1940s and early 1950s

I mentioned before that my interest in Mountaineering developed in the late 1940s when I was quite young - 13 or 14 - and a boy scout.

That came about because I saw an advertisement in the "SCOUT" newspaper for a permanent camp in Llanberis run by the local Rector who had been a keen mountaineer himself and who gave lectures to the boys on mountaincraft, and organised expeditions guided by experienced Senior Scouts.

I had forgotten both his name and the name of the Scout Group he formed but found them again in this link to the Gwynedd Archives.

He was the Rev JH Williams and the Group he founded was called "The Snowdon Scout Group".        It was possible to have dual membership of this Group as well as the one at home.       I remember still the purple scarf I wore with pride.    In the centre it had a pictogram  of the Snowdon Summit with the Welsh title - Y Wyddfa - written beneath.   

I see from the link above that the Archives also hold registers of all boys who stayed at the camp and photos of many of them.      I guess I could find my former self there but haven't verified that by trying to do so.    

Upon returning home after this 2018 expedition I also found my small black notebook written at the time in an almost illegible scrawl starting at both ends of the book.       One end contains descriptions and diagrams of the passes and mountains climbed and the other has a record of lecture notes.    

A reader can tell it was from a different era because in the discussion of different materials from which climbing ropes could be made I duly recorded that Hemp was superior to Sisal because the latter could fail without warning.       

I also remember Hemp had disadvantages too - it was inelastic and kinked horribly when wet.       Nylon ropes didn't become available until a good bit later - either because they hadn't yet been invented or perhaps because of rationing and material shortages so soon after the war.

For footwear we had heavy leather boots fitted with "Clinker" nails on the sole and "Tricounis" fixed to the welt around the edges.     The Clinkers had a rounded face and were good for walking and the Tricounis a saw-toothed edge good for fitting onto narrow ledges and cracks when rock climbing.    "Commando" soles, also known as "Vibrams" didn't become available until a good bit later.

During this period expeditions always started in Llanberis and were very nearly all confined to the mountains on either side of the pass - we had no private transport and either had to walk from the rectory grounds in which we camped or catch a bus up the pass to start our day and walk or return by the same means at the end.

At College in the mid- 1950s and Later

When at college in the mid-1950s I carried forward my earlier enthusiasm by joining the UCL climbing club.

Most meets were organised in Snowdonia during "Welsh Weekends".       Those involved travelling by coach on Friday evenings after lectures, camping, or sleeping on the floor in Tyn-y-Shanty - a corrugated iron hut at the head of the Nant Francon Valley - climbing all day on Saturday and Sunday and then returning to London by coach overnight arriving in time for lectures on Monday morning.       Recollection of those lectures is rather faded.

The club also had a traditional New Year's meet in the Lake District based in a barn forming part of the pub complex at Wastdale Head. 

Some years a group of members organised an Alpine expedition during the summer vacation.    I went on only one of those myself - to the Oetz valley near Innsbruck and to the Sella Towers region in the Dolomites near Bolzano.   

Occasionally the Welsh Weekends focussed on climbing on the Three Cliffs in the Llanberis Pass - Carreg Wasted, Dinas Mot and Dinas Cromlech.      For those we mostly wild-camped near the Cromlech Boulders, sometimes in the same area as Joe Brown and Don Whillans who were putting up hard routes at the time including the first free ascent of Cenotaph Corner (J M Edwards had climbed it in the 1930s but used a top rope). 

But mostly the Weekends were based in the Nant Francon Pass and towards the end of my time in slightly greater comfort as I had secured from the NUS at UCL a small grant towards the cost of building a club hut near Williams Farm.

Mostly our climbing was done on the mountains between the two passes with occasional expeditions to the Snowdon group - the Horseshoe Ridge - and Lliwedd.     More rarely still we occasionally walked in the Carnedds.

So, I became familiar with most of the cliffs in the area including the East Face of Tryfan, the Milestone Buttress, the Gribin Facet of Glyder Fach, the Idwal Slabs and so on.

These Welsh Weekends were great social as well as physical occasions.       The outgoing coach journey from London was always a lively affair with several people playing musical instruments and all joining in the singing of climbing songs or listening to a recitation.     

The "Ballad of Idwal Slabs" by Showell Styles was always popular.     

It recounts in verse a competition for the hand of the President's daughter between the hero - "John Christopher Brown was his name" - and - "A villain named Reginald Hake".      The competition required the rivals to "Climb headfirst down Hope without rubbers or rope" ("Hope" along with "Faith" and "Charity" are three climbs on the Idwal Slabs, and "rubbers" refers to the use of tennis shoes instead of nailed boots - this was long before the introduction of stiff-soled specialised climbing shoes or even the continental "Kletterschue").       

I always liked particularly the lines describing the spectators and their mode of transport - 

      "The mobs came from Bangor in buses, 

       And the Nobs came from Capel in cabs" 

The full story can be read here

Visit in 2018

I had mixed feelings about returning to an area where I had spent such happy and formative times 60 - 69 years ago.      As Housman wrote:

        That is the land of lost content
        I see it shining plain
       The happy highways where I went
       And cannot come again

But it didn't turn out quite like that.

Several man-made things had changed but several remained the same, including Tyn-y-Shanty resplendent in a new coat of paint.

And as we always used to say when sailing with out-of-date charts - "The rocks don't change".      But after a lifetime of travelling the world and seeing new places perhaps even these rocks looked a little smaller than they had done.

People were still climbing on the Three Cliffs in the Llanberis Pass, with others watching from the laybys.     But I didn't see many tents and none where we used to camp by the Cromlech boulders.   

There were new buildings on the Dinas Mot side of the pass that looked as though they might be climbers huts.     More prosperity and more intrusive regulation have probably reduced the simplicity of earlier years but improved equipment and technology have raised standards with modern climbers skimming up routes we wouldn't even have attempted.

More regulation was also evident in the Nant Ffrancon Pass (it used to be spelt with a single "f" - is the change an improvement?).      This time it manifested itself in the name of conservation with the open hillside path from the Youth Hostel to Llyn Idwal now replaced with a wide boulder-lain track.        I suppose this is necessary but it does diminish the sense of wilderness that used to be felt.

That didn't seem to bother the several groups of teachers and schoolchildren I encountered as I slowly plodded up and down to the lake, taking about five times as long as I used to require even when carrying a tent and full camping gear.

Nevertheless I was hugely pleased to see again the places I'd been in earlier years - even if only from a distance - the "Tennis Shoe"  climb ((V Diff) on the slabs up which my wife-to-be had elegantly glided, the vertical "Ash Tree Wall" (Severe) on the East Face of the slabs whose last pitch ends in the same place as "Tennis Shoe" and up which I had followed Bill's lead, and so on.

A ridge descends from the summit of Glyder Fach towards the open bowl in which Llyn Idwal lies and ends in another cliff - the Gribin Facet on which there are a number of routes.      I had fine views as I returned down the track.

Facet of the Gribin

The clouds were high that day so I also had a good view of the Western side of Tryfan though it was hard to photograph as I had to tilt the camera to get the summit in the picture - so the photo foreshortens the view and the mountain looks less impressive than it is when seen with the human eye.

Of course, the East Face is much steeper, rockier and has most of the rock climbs - Gashed Crag, Munich, Belle-Vue Bastion and so on.       But the approaches are over rough and sometimes boggy ground so I didn't attempt to get any photos on this trip.

Nor did I attempt to climb to the summit and sit on Adam or Eve - the two huge boulders at the very top.     

Alas, I am no longer capable of such scrambles as the North Ridge of Tryfan, Bristly Ridge to the summit of Glyder Fach or the Snowdon Horseshoe.

Nevertheless I felt some sort of sense of accomplishment in managing the walk up and down to Llyn Idwal and was thoroughly pleased I had revisited these mountains of my youth.