Tlisted here are locations within the Welsh hills the place I’m assailed with a way of unease. Usually they’re hill-passes. Beneath Garn Prys, the descent from Bwlch Blaen y Cwm alongside the Nant Llan-gwrach – “stream of the witch’s enclosure” – all the time brings an involuntary shiver; as does that from Bwlch y Ddwy Elor – “the cross of the 2 biers” – into Cwm Trwsgl, the “tough cwm”, and thence into Cwm Pennant.
I walked this manner lately in vivid wintry climate and nonetheless felt a sure dread that solely light as I emerged from the cwm and began the rattly descent over slate spoil to the outdated tramway that contours around the western slopes of Moel Lefn and Moel Hebog.
If anyplace in Wales is my milltir sgwâr, my very own sq. mile, that is it. I lived right here alone in a distant farmhouse by means of probably the most adolescence of my life, walked these hills in all weathers, in any respect seasons. Bwlch y Ddwy Elor is likely one of the locations I then principally prevented. Was it simply the standard of suggestion implicit within the title? No matter it was, I’d hurry away.
In Cwm Trwsgl, maybe the bodily kind shapes the atmospherics? The large, vegetated, falcon-haunted cliff that towers above the frozen llyn shadows the mountain hole, acts as a sounding board for wind and rattle of stone. I’ve had doppelganger experiences right here. Have been they simply amplifications of my very own anxious heartbeat?
As soon as, when hanging on a rope within the mist to scrub a potential new rock-climb on the effective, diamond-shaped slab above the cross into Beddgelert forest, all day I sensed voices drifting up from bronze age hut-circles beneath. Nightfall thickened the mist. I coiled my ropes and hastened away.
The title I gave to the climb, when accomplished, was the Exterminating Angel, from sure inescapably anxious moments skilled on it when confronted with a fall on to boulders from the crux at 60ft. That feeling once more hovered at my again this week as I gained the tramway’s chic grassy belvedere, which contours spherical into Cwm Ystradllyn and a ready automotive.
