Ten days ago we walked to the top of Yr Wyddfa! The trip was so full of experiences I wasn’t sure what I could say about it. Until a couple of nights ago sitting quietly in the garden…
A bat flickered by a few meters above my head. The sun was going down and there wasn’t enough light to read by. I was grateful. I had put my book to one side and just sat quietly watching the darkening view.
I had been reading about animism, and in that moment I could believe the whole world was alive. It was easy. I noticed the deep reds of the geraniums against the worn bricks of our garden wall, the long grasses along the edges of the messy flower beds, and Angie’s tomato plant completely filling the little lightweight pop-up green house. Behind me water from the Malvern Hills was seeping out of a crack in the ground1 and running into a drain.
Even the bricks and rocks seemed alive. Even the plastic of the green-house, and all of the human-made buildings and cars I could see scattered across the valley.
It was the end of the day. My mind was quiet. I had no expectations of this moment. It was easy to appreciate everything around me. I should do this more often, I thought, but it isn’t always easy. A week earlier Mikey and Ludo and I had climbed Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon). On that walk, sometimes I was able to look around an sense the aliveness of the place, and sometimes I was too pre-occupied with where to put my feet.
We remembered to begin the walk with a small ritual. A moment to thank the land and each other. I reminded myself of the Buddhist teachings on interconnectedness and wholeness. Although we are all separate, we are also all one. Mikey spoke first, and as soon as they said their first word I was moved to tears. Here we were, doing what we had set out to do, in this ancient landscape.
As a child and young adult I used to have dreams of these mountains. Sometimes I would be walking through them, and sometimes I would be flying through them. The dreams always bought a great sense of peace and solace.
Arriving in the National Park the night before walking I was surprised by the strong emotions I felt. A sense of coming home, and of loss. We had lots of family holidays in North Wales when I was a child, but I had not been back for many, many years. I had forgotten my connection to this place.
On the morning of the walk, before setting off, I was preoccupied with what I should be wearing (I swapped my new socks for old ones at the YHA breakfast table), and with my energy levels (I was still recovering from COVID).
The walk began in the car-park opposite the youth hostel. We were completely surrounded by mist. As we walked, the mist changed to rain and within half-an hour my water-resistant trousers had stopped resisting the water. The lakes we passed were still, quiet and full of dark water. There were a few seagulls around, keeping an eye out for dropped sandwiches.
The life of the mountain has been intertwined with the lives of humans for generations. There are sheep here, and feral goats. There is evidence of the mining that happened here and now half a million people visit each year to walk on its slopes.
That history of mining and farming has changed the landscape and yet there is still a wildness: in the weather, in the sharpness of the ridges and peaks, in the difficulty of the climb, in the miles of grasslands covering the hills, and in the forestry commission plantations.
It was hard to drop into an animist way of seeing the world when I was paying close attention to where to put my feet, or having difficulty getting the cap off my drinking water bladder, or judging when to take off a layer, or to put another one on. But sometimes, when the mists cleared and the landscape stretched before me, or in a moment of stillness at the side of the quiet, deep lakes, it was easy to see that everything was alive and that these were holy places.
It didn’t take much imagination to picture ancient humans here making offerings at the lakes, or to the mountains. And equally easy enough to imagine a hand reaching up from the lake and offering a sword to a young King Arthur2.
We don’t know what ancient Britons would have made of this landscape. The lineage of indigenous wisdom in Wales is a broken one. I could guess their reactions, based on my own, and I don’t think my guesses would be too far off. We are all human-animals after all.
The were strong winds at the summit. With wind-chill the temperature was 0°C. The visibility was awful. As we leant into the wind and decided not to join the queue to the very top of the mountain, I was more focussed on getting into the warm café than on the liveliness of the mountain. And yet, even in that moment the life of the mountain insisted on breaking into my thoughts, “Here I am, underneath you, and here is the fierce wind at your back. We’re all alive.”
We had it tested. It’s definitely not tap-water leaking from a pipe.
Lly Llydaw is one of the lakes associated with the lady of the lake, who offers Arthur the sword. According to Wikipedia list of possible lakes associated with Lady are: Dozmary Pool and The Loe in Cornwall, the lakes Llyn Llydaw and Llyn Ogwen in Snowdonia, River Brue's area of Pomparles Bridge in Somerset, and the lake Loch Arthur in Scotland.
What a beautiful place, and equally beautiful sentiment.
We are alive AND no one ended up on the Radio 1 headlines. Thank you for this beautiful write up, a gift to remember an adventure in this way. And fills me with gratitude to both of you for being part of the adventure, for all the people on the mountain having their own adventures, to the mountain elf in the high vis jacket picking up tangering peels, and to the land itself allowing us to be part of it.
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