The lane that climbs steeply through conifers from Cwm Penmachno relaxes finally on reaching the moor above, and dawdles for a narrow mile through peat hags to arrive at a road junction in the lonely heart of Migneint (“place of quagmires”). Eastwards, the B4407 broaches the moor to descend alongside an infant Afon Conwy. The experimental novelist BS Johnson (1933-73) wrote a remarkable “phantom hitchhiker” story about encountering a sheela-na-gig while driving across here on his way from Kilpeck in Herefordshire to the Llyn Peninsula one wild evening. Whenever I visit the remote abandoned tyddyn – now a bothy – of Cefn Garw, two miles across the moor by the Afon Serw, it returns to haunt me, as though Johnson’s story had invoked the tutelary spirit of this wild and watery place, more suited to soaring buzzards, scudding merlins and quartering kites than to human habitation.
West and south, the B4407 passes the fine little rock outcrop of Carreg y Foel Gron above Llyn Du Bach before coming to Pont yr Afon Gam, where the road from Bala heads down to Llan Ffestiniog. This is bracing country.
At that first lane junction after crossing the Afon Conwy watershed there is a mystery. It’s a well, sturdily reconstructed in 1846, bearing the carved exhortation “Yf a bydd ddiolchgar” (Drink and be thankful). It’s alongside one of the old drove routes from Wales to the English smithfields. But this well was not for cattle, or for pigs, though traces of a retaining compound for swine still abut the structure. The access to its stone basin is staggered, leading through interlocking baffles that fattened animals could not have negotiated.
Ffynnon Eidda (Eidda’s well) is its name, and that’s a further mystery. Eidda may be related to local names for understated features on these moors. In summer, children from Llan pedal noisily up here to roll up their sleeves and retrieve coins flung by passing motorists into its chill, clear water. Fancifully, I think of the Elder Edda tale of Odin trading an eye for a drink from the well of wisdom. If sheela-na-gigs can appear on these moors, cannot Odin also?
