Читать книгу Ridges of Snowdonia. The best ridge walking онлайн

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Pinned to the hillside above Bethesda is the suburb of Gerlan; its funny little houses painted blue and pink, and so bound up with the earth that it is difficult to tell where the soil ends and their walls begin. Gerlan is the Shangri La of North Wales, for two decades perfectly preserving its community of hippies and drop-outs. The place absorbs oddities as readily as the sea.

Gerlan has proliferated to such a degree that its uppermost house-holders are able to gaze into the sacred confines of Cwm Llafar. But, as it happens, not many of them do; and so the path up from Gerlan waterworks into Cwm Llafar remains one of the quieter places in Snowdonia.

The right-bounding ridge of the cwm begins almost straight away and yet the valley path is much too comfortable to quit so early. Lazy men’s ways. Sooner or later, though, it must be abandoned for a short pull onto the neat and pathless grass of the ridge top. Over to the right now, beyond a shallow scoop in the mountainside, appears a mirage of exotic slabs. The slabs prove to be those of Carnedd y Filiast, a familiar landmark of the western end of the Glyders; and yet from here they seem much too close for that, as if the intervening Ogwen Valley had been secretly filled in during the night.