I don’t remember ever questioning the need to climb or walk the area as a child. Mornings were spent perusing Ordnance Survey maps that billowed out over the toast crumbs as my dad pondered where we should go. His kit comprised a compass, carabinas, brown dubbin-polished walking boots with red laces, and, in the early days, plus fours. I knew our preferred local routes: for Cader, up the Pony Track and down the Fox’s Path – the latter a steep scree slide.
After climbing Cader, we would go to the George III (georgethethird.pub), an inn and sometime railway station reflected in the coot-dotted mirror of the Mawddach Estuary. The inn has a poem in its visitor’s book by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The Mawddach, how she trips! Through throttled/If floodtide teeming thrills her full,/And mazy sands all water-wattled.”
At the time, I was only vaguely aware of the wide flat sandy beach at Barmouth. Crossing the 19th-century estuary toll bridge usually meant heading for Precipice Walk or New Precipice Walk, and only when the drizzle was too profound to attempt a mountain. Both these trails are fairly flat, but have views over the snaking estuary, backed by the billowing watercolour greys of Cader Idris. The last time I walked here with him, Dad led the way, Gore-Tex-clad, only his glasses exposed to the rain, while my boyfriend and I followed, drenched and hysterically laughing at the contrast in our preparedness.
Further north, we would often camp in leaky tinker tents in a farmer’s field in order to climb Tryfan, the most cartoonishly pointed of all the Welsh mountains, glowering above us. You have to scramble, using your hands, all the way to the top. This was also the launchpad for the Snowdon Horseshoe, and Dad would drive the six hours from London to walk the seven-hour route alone. He would start with the serrated knife edge of Crib Goch, where precipices drop away on either side. As a teenager, he told us, he had once walked along it with his hands in pockets, then the next day, after trading gung-ho tales of mountain accidents, crawled the same route on hands and knees.
But it was Snowdon that my brothers and I decided to climb in his memory. As we so often travel to mid Wales, we felt we should go further north for this commemorative walk – to return to a place that we hadn’t been for decades. We met, still caught in the headlights of grief, on a clear evening in June, at Betws-y-Coed, amid the Alpine, tree-knitted splendour of Snowdonia. We wandered through the town, slipping into well-worn sibling roles as we wandered over the town’s Pont-y-Pair (“bridge of the cauldron”), waterfalls foaming beneath it. We clambered across the rocks beneath the bridge, and sat overlooking the bubbling pools and crashing water as other visitors took selfies and the sun smeared the sky pink. By comparison, we felt oddly nervous for the next day.
We opted to walk the Pyg Track – an acronym of Pen-y-Grwd – because it begins beside another favourite place of Dad’s, the ivy-wrapped hotel (pyg.co.uk) that hosted those training for the 1953 ascent of Everest. We used to sit here for the essential post-walk pint, next to a roaring fire and in the wood-panelled bar where there are the signatures of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on the ceiling.
