Snowdonia Slate Trail, day 3: Y Fron to Beddgelert
There’s no room for doubt. The Met Office’s app shows black clouds and two black raindrops, every hour from mid-morning to the end of the day. Other weather apps say the same. But we’re stoical, as we wait for the taxi to take us back to Y Fron for a twelve-miler to Beddgelert.
The taxi’s driven in a marginally less Formula 1 style than yesterday, and we’re delivered safely to the Community Centre in the village. For now it’s dry, and we set off south along the path through fields, punctuated by the old slate-and-metal gates that appeal to us so much. We ponder whether one of us should write the definitive monograph on the pedestrian gates of Eryri, to be published in an extravagant, full-colour edition by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.
The path turns into an old slate trackway or railway, on a level gradient, and then we’re back among abandoned workings. Below we can see even more substantial ruined quarry buildings. We pass a scooped-out pit, an island of rock left intact in its centre, and still more tips, slate huts and fragments of iron machinery. At last we leave the stones behind and join a green path downhill, past an abandoned bath – which reminds us that we’ve not had the luxury of a bath for a few days – and Pen-y-bryn, a ruined seventeenth-century house belonging to the Garnons family. When the slate industry came, its outbuildings were converted into slate-workers’ barracks; when the industry died, they reverted to being outbuildings. Now the bracken has them.
After getting lost near the drowned and dangerous Dorothea Quarry, named after Dorothea Garnons, we slither down a slatey slope to gain the low track we should have been on a while ago. There we have a conversation in Welsh with a man from Morriston, Swansea who’s settled in the area with his wife from Bristol and their two young children. The track leads to a road, past Tŷ Mawr, a house sixteenth century in origin, and the Tŷ Mawr barracks, restored by Antur Nantlle as commercial units for local people. One of them houses Poblado Coffi, and since it’s coffee time we divert into the barracks courtyard. The shop has its own roastery and serves what must be among the best coffee to be had in Eryri.
In Nantlle village we join the main valley road and turn right, along the west side of Llyn Nantlle Uchaf. An information panel reminds us that this was the viewpoint used by Richard Wilson in his famous painting Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle. The view’s the same today, but the weather isn’t. For us the skies are dark, and Yr Wyddfa is hidden in low cloud.
At Ffridd farm and its field of handsome black rams, we turn off the road and head east up the Nantlle valley along a track not far from the lake shore. Where the water ends we carry on eastwards towards Tal-y-mignedd Isaf farm. With no warning at all, a violent gust of wind hits us and almost knocks us to the ground. Within seconds, an equally violent rainstorm whips into our faces, and we scramble to get our leggings on. These are the ‘black raindrops’ the Met Office promised. Blustery winds and heavy rain will plague us for the rest of the day.
The path joins the main road for a while before the hamlet of Drws-y-coed. At the roadside is a short stone pillar and a plaque bearing the words: ‘Dyma safle hen gapel Annibynwyr Drws-y-coed a chwalwyd gan y garreg hon, Chwefror 17 1892.’ Beyond it lies a giant boulder. Newspapers at the time reported the event. Loosened from the steep mountainside above by thawing ice, the rock smashed into Drws-y-coed chapel and destroyed it. No one was killed or injured, though earlier in the day the building had been full of worshippers. We wonder what the God-fearing Independents concluded from this event. Donations from far and wide funded a replacement chapel, which still stands.
At the village we leave the road and start a long climb up the top part of the valley. We pass a farm with an inviting-looking open barn, and I suggest we shelter there to eat our sandwiches, but I’m overruled: C1 and C2 are keen to get further and wetter before we stop. This is wild, rough country. Mynydd Mawr and the crags of Craig y Bera stare down from the north, and Mynydd Drws-y-coed towers, its heights invisible in the clouds, on the other side of the valley. By now cold water has worked its way into every part of us, and my phone and its camera have given up the ghost.
The path becomes boggy and indistinct, but once we’re past the wall of an abandoned reservoir we can see ahead the forest we need to enter, above Llyn Cwellyn. The wood gives us shelter from the wind, but rain pours through saturated leaves and branches. The path descends steadily and emerges near Rhyd-ddu, where I sheltered in similarly drenching rain after taking our grandson up Yr Wyddfa in May. We find a bus shelter to eat our damp sandwiches, and then walk through the village, past the schoolhouse where T.H. Parry-Williams was born and brought up. A wall plaque marks the fact, with a quote from his poem ‘Bro’: ‘Mae darnau ohonof ar wasgar hyd y fro’ (parts of me are scattered through this land). In his sonnet of 1931 ‘Tŷ’r Ysgol’, Parry-Williams recalls returning to his childhood home after the death of his beloved parents, and asks himself why he returns: ‘Onid rhag ofn i’r ddau sydd yn y gro / synhwyro rywsut fod y drws ynghlo’ (in case, maybe, those two below / somehow sense the door is closed).
At the end of the village the path joins Lôn Gwyrfai, an easy track, for the rest of the way to Beddgelert. Elaborate boardwalks take us round the edge of Llyn y Gadair, as the wind hurls cold rain into our faces. The lake is the subject of Parry-Williams’s characteristically fatalistic sonnet ‘Llyn y Gadair’. Then we’re into Beddgelert Forest. We discuss how miraculous is the survival of the public footpath in the UK, given the overwhelming power of landed interests through the centuries. But then conversation lapses and we trudge in military style, three abreast, along the forest track. By now it’s been raining so heavily and for so long that no part of me, body or rucksack, is dry, except my feet (take a bow, new Scarpa boots). The guidebook claims to be ‘rainproof’, but maybe it hasn’t been tested in extreme conditions. There’s nothing to depress the spirit more than a soggy, clingy T-shirt inside a dripping waterproof. We’re all relieved to cross the track of the Highland Railway for the last time (it makes three loops to descend the slope) and reach Beddgelert.
Time for a long, hot shower and fresh clothes, and then another compensatory pleasure, a pizza and ice cream in Glaslyn Ice Cream and Pizza, at a table we’d wisely booked in advance. We’ve deserved a treat, after the wettest day of walking since Llanystumdwy in July 2016. Richard Wilson, when he came through Dyffryn Nantlle in 1765, seems to have encountered the calmiest, driest, balmiest Mediterranean weather you could hope for. Or did he, I wonder, edit out the horizontal rain and whipping winds before putting paint to canvas?
