Mountain portrait
Jim Perrin turns his eye to Y Berwyn, an often overlooked mountain in North Wales
THE FIRST REAL HILL-WALK I ever did in Wales was the moorland ridge of Y Berwyn. For me, there’a kind of magic about its name. I’d first encountered it in the library of my school’s outdoor section, which had a few mountain books that I devoured time and again: Charles Evans’s On Climbing, Colin Kirkus’s Let’s Go Climbing. Both of them recounted outdoor odysseys that began on Y Berwyn. The latter had, between pages 40 and 41, a Bartholomew’s 1:63,360 map of the Berwyn high tops, contour-shaded in fawns, umbers and russets at strangely irregular intervals, its summits white in unconscious cartographic homage to the meaning of the name (Ifor Williams, in Enwau Lleoedd – the bible to anyone interested in Welsh toponymy – explains Berwyn as deriving from bargwyn – white-headed – barr having the same meaning as pen in Welsh). I was transfixed by this map, at the age of 12 knew its every name and hill and detail, their position and their meaning, by heart.
Where, you might reasonably ask, and what is Y Berwyn? “Anial chwith y Berwyn” – the forlorn wilderness of the Berwyn – is how the Welsh essayist Tecwyn Lloyd, from Corwen, described the moorland rampart between the river-valleys of Tanat, Ceiriog and Dyfrdwy. These are the “blue remembered hills” that swell to the west of the shires of England – high, bare moorland that stretches for well over 20 miles from Y Waun on the English border to the Hirnant pass above Bala. It reaches its highest point along the ridge between Cadair Berwyn (827 metres, or 2713 feet) and Moel Sych (also 827 metres), and rarely falls much below 600 metres in its whole length. You’ll have noticed in the above quotation that even Patrick Monkhouse – an avid reader of maps – was unsure about the actual high point of the massif, or its name.
Well here’s the solution to that long-standing outdoor semi-mystery. It’s neither of the points mentioned above, and its actual name has long gone unrecognised. So I’ll give it you here. It’s Moel yr Ewig – the hill of the hind. Its beautiful, smooth ridge encircles the corrie-lake of Lluncaws on the north-east and rises to the main Berwyn ridge at the spiky knoll Monkhouse mentions – a worthy little summit about 450 metres SSW of the cairn on Cadair Berwyn. I met a local fisherman, casting his fly at dusk for the small trout that teem in Llyn Lluncaws, who asked me if I knew the name of the highest point of Y Berwyn? I trotted out Moel Sych and Cadair Berwyn from my roteknowledge. He shook his head gently, drew my attention to the ridge on the far side of the lake, described it with a gentle motion of his hand and said, “See – just like the elegance of a roe hind’s neck, and the rocks on the ridge are the deer’s ears. That’s the highest point of Y Berwyn!”
The 1:25,000 map, to which Monkhouse didn’t have access, bears him out in this. At the point where north and east ridges abut, just at the knoll, is a tiny contour-circle at 830 metres
– the summit of Y Berwyn, and a worthy and characterful one too. It even looks like a roe-hind’s ears, perfectly positioned above that long, graceful neck of ridge, so don’t be misled by the fact that, with characteristic obtuseness, the OS map places the name 250 metres away so as not to interfere with contours and crag-hachuring. Moel yr Ewig is Y Berwyn’s summit, and the highest point in Wales between Parc Cenedlaethol
Eryri (Snowdonia) and Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons).
How, then, to climb it?
My advice these days would strongly be to avoid the northerly routes, which are easy, gradual, and dull. Instead, betake yourselves to the waterfall café and car park at Pistyll Rhaeadr. From here you can make a clockwise circuit to the high summits, along
Afon Disgynfa, through the exceptional megalithic landscape around Cerrig Beddau, and up an unspeakable heather slope where you might be fortunate enough to find cloudberries in season.
Alternatively, and more sensibly, take the circuit widdershins, walk back down the Llanrhaeadr road for a quarter mile, and pick up an exquisite greensward track that rises gently to Lluncaws. This is one of the loveliest approaches to any Welsh hill. Ring ouzels flit around the waterfalls of the Nant y Llyn to your left, and to the right hobbies screech from the shaley cliffs of Cerrig Poethion. At the lake a gentle ridge to the left climbs to the summit of Moel Sych, long thought to the Berwyn high point. From there a brief downhill canter and short rise takes you to that striking knoll of the hill of the hind, from which you peer down shaley, plunging slopes to Lluncaws, the name of which suggests this cwm was a former site of transhumance, though no remains of hafodtai (summer dwellings) exist.
More summits occur along the ridge if you’ve the legs for them, and – legs willing, beer calling – you could continue down to Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog. Y Berwyn was made for itineraries like that!
“There is a small, almost spiky knoll, before you come to Cader Berwyn; it deserves a name, but I do not know one for it.” Patrick Monkhouse, On Foot in North Wales (1934)