A path descends from the hilltop village, its route following cloddiau (turf and stone field dykes), bright even this late in the year with mats of trailing tormentil. It arrives at a wood, water loud in the ravine below, and a viewing spot for Rhaeadr Cynfal – an exquisitely lacey fall on the Afon Cynfal. This is Snowdonia’s great folklore river, replete with connections to the fourth branch of The Mabinogion.
A little further along the now-vertiginous path is a belvedere, below which is a rock stack four or five metres high, known as Huw Llwyd’s Pulpit. From this Huw Llwyd (1568-1630) sermonised on magic and morality to congregations gathered on the bank above (although he must have possessed a mighty voice to be heard above the noise of the river). Huw lived at Cynfal Fawr, high on the opposite bank and features in Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall. He was a soldier, sorcerer, poet, huntsman, friend and correspondent with John Dee, the Elizabethan mage.
In Victorian times the Cynfal gorge was a favourite on the romantic Wales itinerary. Postcards in becoming sepia of the striking and mysterious “pulpit” were sold in Betws y Coed. It is less popular now, but the atmospherics still thrum. Huw’s grandson, Morgan Llwyd (1619-59), also came here as a child. He was author of a Welsh religious prose classic, Llyfr y Tri Aderyn (Book of the Three Birds) of 1653, a fascinating tract influenced by the German mystic Jakob Boehme.
The path above the plunging gorge continues to a footbridge, from which an easier route takes you back to Llan Ffestiniog’s Pengwern Arms, a welcoming community-run pub with accommodation for walkers. The English writer George Borrow stayed here on his 1854 walking tour of Wales. He had come looking for a stone bench said to have been frequented by the 15th-century bard Rhys Goch Eryri (such poets’ “chairs” were an obsession of Borrow’s) but it was never here. He had passed it unawares the day before, near Pont Aberglaslyn. My suspicion is that, brains scrambled by the over-proof poitín he’d sampled at Tan Lan, Borrow had confused his stories. He would have loved Morgan Llwyd.
