WELCOME YR WYDDFA
It’s been a couple of months since the news broke from north Wales that the name of Britain’s most well-known and most climbed mountain has changed. If you haven’t heard, Snowdonia National Park will from now on be referring to its highest mountain – which most of us know as Snowdon – by its Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa. And alongside that, the National Park itself has followed suit with its own name by officially switching from Snowdonia to Eryri. If you’re looking for an explanation about the origins of the new names and the National Park’s reasons for adopting them, turn to page 20 for an excellent and exhaustively researched article from Sarah Ryan detailing the need to preserve the history and cultural heritage of the region, as well as the local place names within it and the Welsh language itself. At Trail, however, this has presented us with a bit of a dilemma. I should firstly say, we fully support the new names and will do our absolute best to adopt them going forward in a way we hope embraces and celebrates the reasons behind the changes. Yet at the same time, with Snowdon and Snowdonia still being such widely used names within the hillwalking community, there will inevitably be a period of transition. From this issue forward Yr Wyddfa and Eryri will be our standard, but there will be occasions where we interchange the old and new names, or use both, for the sake of clarity. We know we won’t always get it right, or please everyone all of the time, which is why we welcome your feedback as we welcome Yr Wyddfa to Trail.