Читать книгу Great Mountain Days in Snowdonia. 40 classic routes exploring Snowdonia онлайн

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In 1857, an anonymous writer commented on the number of walkers, saying: ‘Snowdon is ascended by everyone because it is the highest top; no one seems to ascend the other mountains but the shepherds of the country. Snowdon is the Righi of Wales, with a trifle worse inn at the top.’ Snowdon is certainly the highest mountain in England and Wales but it has so much more to offer than its bare altitude. It has something for everyone, easy ways and hard ways. In the words of the English judge and sometime Member of Parliament for his home town of Reading, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, who, comparing it with Cadair Idris, Helvellyn and Ben Nevis, wrote: Snowdon ‘forms…the noblest aggregate, because, except on the side opposite Caernarvon, its upper portion is all mighty frame-work, a top uplifted on vast buttresses, disdaining the round lumpish earth, spreading out skeleton arms towards heaven, and embracing on each side huge hollows, made more awful by the red tints of the copper ore which deepens among its shadows, and gleams through the scanty herbage of its loveliest pathways’ – which really says it all.