Cadair Idris may not attract the vast crowds of Snowdon, which sees more visitors every year than there are people living in Bristol, but it’s still not a mountain you get to yourself on a sunny September Saturday. In the Minffordd Path car park, scores of people perch on car bumpers pulling on socks and stout footwear. A man with an Estuary English accent is ribbing his companions, who have voices from the Valleys. A jovial but slightly pointed argument over Welsh independence ensues.
My dad and I join the procession, which takes us up through a swath of relict woodland. Summer’s green lustre is going; oak leaves are crisping at the edges. But out on the open hillside, clusters of rowan berries shine lipstick-bright in the light, their ripe autumnal red contrasting with the brooding volcanic sublimity of Craig Cau. Sleep on these slopes, goes the local legend, and you wake up either mad or a poet (it doesn’t specify which is worse).
With a Scottish tinge, a man remarks as he passes us: “Lovely day, isn’t it?” “Certainly is,” replies my dad as he labours upwards. “Shame we’ve got to climb this bloody hill.” He also betrays the trace of place in his voice. He has lived two-thirds of his life in Yorkshire, but while his sense of fealty has moved up north, his accent has stayed in Woking.
Cadair Idris’s summit is only a few miles from the sea, but almost 3,000 feet (900 metres) above it. We can see maybe 70 miles of the blue-hazed Cardigan Bay coastline, a vast curve scything across the horizon towards Pembrokeshire.
Around the crowning trigpoint, the crowd is a confusion of tongues; Hebrew, Dutch and Japanese join the variants of English, and for the first time today I catch snippets of Welsh.
This diverse aural geography perhaps reflects the transformation of the Welsh hills, like their Cumbrian and Scottish Gaelic counterparts, from a rural landscape into a recreational one, as much the preserve of urban escapees as the “indigenous” inhabitants. But looking north to the rugged Rhinogydd, or south into the hilly heart of Wales, you sense places where silence and stillness pervade.
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