Driving north from Corris on a December afternoon, I saw the great bowl of Cwm Cau brimming with cloud. It swirled and streamered out of its rocky basin to catch at low sunlight slanting in along Tal-y-llyn. It lit the valley with garish candyfloss luminescence. I parked at Minffordd and took the path for the hill.
This was the first route by which, in 1960, I climbed what is one of the finest of Welsh mountains. Since then I’ve made the ascent by every conceivable route, but the one from Minffordd still ranks high among my favourites. It was popular long before the time of my first acquaintance with it. In Richard Wilson’s 1765 canvas Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris, you can see the ridge path already vestigially traced.
When I first saw that marvellous painting in the Tate, not many years after I first encountered the hill, I thought it exaggerated, romantically overblown. But on a December day 25 years ago, the hill glowing with the golden light of a Claude landscape, I found myself at Cadair’s summit, and on impulse thought to look for the point from which Wilson had sketched his composition.
It wasn’t hard to find. A few hundred metres to the east, a few paces down the convex grassy slope, and suddenly, across the cwm, a huge, triangular black peak reared up, “as if with voluntary power instinct”. The mystery was solved. What Wilson had actually painted was the gable end of a ridge running from the satellite peak of Mynydd Pencoed, and he’d done so with remarkable accuracy and restraint. He’d captured the essence of one of the most dramatic scenes in the Welsh hills. Rock climbers call it the Pencoed Pillar, and it towers over the cwm’s sombre little lake. I drank from this after I’d toiled up from Minffordd, watched the continuing swirl of cloud above, heard the chuckle of a pair of ravens, and listened to “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore”. A legend borrowed from Snowdon by the Victorian novelist Mrs Hemans has it that anyone sleeping here wakes as poet or madman. I can see why.
