Читать книгу Hillwalking in Wales - Vol 1 онлайн

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Yet there is much more in Wales: not another Snowdonia, not something better, not a lesser creation, but hills with their own unique charms. The Black Mountains with their expansive, whale-backed, grassy ridges; the precipitous escarpments of the Brecon Beacons; the strange uplands of the Cwmdeuddwr hills; Plynlimon and its unknown valleys; the heather-clad Berwyns.

Further north the hills start to shed some of their softness and assume the rockier profiles one associates with Snowdonia. The grassy tops of the Dovey and Tarren hills face the corries and cwms of Cader Idris; the east cliffs of the Arans yield nothing in severity to the Glyders. The Arenigs offer the walker the widest choice of all from the vast solitudes of the Migneint, through Arenig Fawr and the rolling moors of the Lliw Valley to the shapely top of Dduallt. Then there are the Rhinogs and the wildest land in Wales.

The point is not that these hills and the others in south and central Wales are in any sense ‘better’ than the mountains in the north, but that they are ‘there’, each with their own special attractions and each offering more grand days in the hills. It is for this reason and in the spirit of more worlds for the walker to ‘conquer’ that I cover these lesser-known hills as comprehensively as the better-known heights of Snowdonia.