Post: The route described here has always been one of Charlie’s finest – finest for its deserted grandeur, and finest for the frequent worst weather a lone cyclist ever endured or travelled. He rarely seems to venture on this road with a companion, it is almost always a solitary crossing, and one must ask is this from choice Charlie, or do the others shy away? Even now, these moors are really deserted and wild, the road a long one and traveller’s infrequent. What more could a young cyclist, intent on the wild and lonely places, hanker after? Charlie has the gift of ticking people’s boxes I feel, making them hunger for the loneliness of the mountain track and the scaryness of the open moors.
I have recorded impressions of misty Arenig in the past. Mynydd Migneint and the wide gap between Arenig Fawr and Arenig Fach may just as well be fifteen thousand as fifteen hundred feet above the waves at Portmadoc, on some occasions. Nowadays the Powers that Be in County Merion have seen fit to put a layer of tar over the turbulent road that somehow links Bala and Ffestiniog. Unless the same Powers keep a watchful eye on their new surface, I predict a rapid degeneration to the old state, for a tar-engine and steam-roller did the job between them, and the irreproachable surface was simply placed down amongst the channelled ruts of the old track. Within twelve months ripples had appeared, with here and there the outcrop of stubborn grit-stone pushing triumphantly through the rolled out, shiny blackness. There were little water-channels too, and water never was kindly disposed towards road surfaces. The fact that the Blaenau Ffestiniog had slate to send across the border for English roofs, and this upland pass was the most direct practicable way caused a railway line to be built under the very cliffs of Arenig the Larger; this line ascends in tedious twists above the Afon Tryweryn, and leaves Arenig by the barren Cwm Prysor, towards Trawsfynydd. A good strata of limestone added to the woes of our moorland col, for someone scenting financial elevation began to quarry that side of Arenig, and now a large works and a small village cluster beside a little railway station. But in the last few years, following the rehabilitation of the road surface, a great new reservoir was built at Trawsfynydd to drive dynamos for electrical power, and now slender pylons of steel carry living wires through Cwm Prysor and across the moors to Bala and – England. Welsh current for the people who live under Welsh slate.
You cannot close your eyes to these things. A railway is not beautiful, but our English railways are often put into tune by Nature; the single Great Western line by Arenig does not intrude upon your vision – I was unaware of its presence on my first visit until the screech of a whistle and a puff of smoke drew my attention to it, and near Llyn Tryweryn I saw the arches of a viaduct. The limestone quarries are a blot upon the scene, but Arenig is too fine and mighty a mass to be marred by a single quarry that bites at an insignificant corner. Steel pylons will never be lovely, but unlike many people I cannot think of them as atrocities. They hardly blend with the scenery, I admit, but they are actually no worse than telegraph poles. We have become accustomed to telegraph wires, and there’s the difference.
I am diverging. I said that on some occasions, Mynydd Migneint can be as wild as though thousands of feet were added to its altitude. Through the winter months grey banks of mist, and clouds descending from Arenig Fawr enclose the pass for days at once, till the hours of daylight may amount to no more than the odd four in twentyfour. I have been up there in semi-darkness at mid-day. At night travel is adventurous, though that is improved now by the new surface on the road. In the days when a tar engine and steam roller had never been pushed over the pass, I have spent hours on that seventeen miles, nerve-racking hours of peering vainly into grey blankets that swathed the night and seemed even to keep sound away, straining eyes for the gates that never seemed to appear, but which always came just when I had relaxed for a moment. Even the brown road has become merged into invisibility at such times, till hardly a glimpse could be caught under wheel, let alone ahead. The road channelled water-courses, furrowed, ploughed, piled with loose stones, often steep with sharp bends and nothing but a ditch or a moorland fringe to protect it from wandering sheep. How often have I jolted off the very road itself into ditch or tangly, bog-woven heather ! People at Bala and Ffestiniog have expressed a kind of wandering awe that I dared risk “the mountain” as they call it. “What of the mist?” they have said, for it is common knowledge on each side of Arenig that mists are paramount there.
I have punctured up there, and wished I had three good hands instead of two frozen lumps of uselessness; I have walked miles aface a wild blast; I have been soaked in torrential rains; I have emerged at last below the mists drenched and weary, with eyes an-ache. Seventeen miles at the price of seventy. Hours of it. Yes, and I would do it again tomorrow, that seventeen miles.
As I have been (and still am) rather fond of Ffestiniog, it follows that over Arenig by both wild ways to Rhyd-y-Fen has been a frequented pass of mine. I have in mind one night early in May, some years ago. In May, mark you, but a wild night, with dusk welling up even as I left Bala. A westerly wind that had the saving grace of summer warmth had nagged me, and there had been rain in patchy quality, and as I climbed up by Afon Tryweryn from Fron Goch, more patches of rain floated across. With darkness the mist came down, and once again I repeated the old process of trying to see through the damp, dense, veil. I hadn’t much time to give to the crossing, for Ffestiniog never keeps very late hours, and I was chancing on a bed there, so I pushed forward as fast as the wind would allow, but faster than common sense advised. I passed the little temperance house called Rhyd-y-Fen; left the gate behind that marks the beginning of the last climb to the ruined farm at 1507 ft, and had tramped almost to the summit when suddenly the mist lifted, and not a vestige remained. In place a full round moon shone down peacefully in rolling wastes of moorland that struck me by their infinite solitude. It seemed that I alone lived then, and all other things were dead. But what surprised me most was the sight of a phenomenon rarely seen……. A lunar rainbow forming a broad amber arc in the western sky – a perfect half-circle touching the moors on each side. I saw it fully five minutes until a single wisp of grey mist floated up. Shortly afterwards I was plunging and crashing down to Pont-ar-Afon-Gam in a welter of vapour as heavy as ever before. I didn’t see Pont-ar-Afon-Gam, but I heard the coursing stream below, carrying its full flood to Rhaiadr Cwm. Rhaiadr Cwm was just a roar in the dark, coming from the bedrock depth of a great Space on my left. The Space was filled with Things that floated about, crossing my vision as I leaned (not too trustily) on the crumbling parapet of the wall. I leaned and listened, and saw those shapeless forms splitting themselves and coming together again in raggy procession. The people at Bala had called the ‘Things’ mists. Maybe they were, but if you go that way, lean over the wall below Pont-ar-Afon-Gam, and watch them. Perhaps they are mists….. You can lean on the wall nowadays, since the road was put in order and motor-cars began to venture over Arenig, but that night in May empty spaces betrayed where Time had brought collapses here and there. The displaced stones were lying below the precipice, four hundred feet down. It is easy to leave the road when grey and black are the only universal hedgings.
From Rhaiadr Cwm I crossed another mile of vapoured wilderness, then my wheels rushed forward, downhill. Then I dropped beneath the mist, shook myself from wispy vestiges, and descended on Ffestiniog in the mellowed beauty of a May night, a moonlit night.
