#18: [12-Oct-24]

#16: [23-Dec-15]

#15: [23-Apr-13]

#14: [21-Sep-09]

#13: [28-May-09]

#12: [28-May-09]

#11: [15-Feb-08]

#10: [17-Mar-07]

#9: [08-Jul-06]

#8: [24-Sep-05]

#6: [12-Jul-05]

#7: [12-Jun-05]

#4: [22-Nov-03]

#3: [08-Nov-03]

#2: [21-Oct-01]

#1: [18-Feb-01]

#5: [08-Jul-04] (incomplete)

08-Aug-2024 -- I was going to Dublin from Paris via train, bus and ferry, and having not been to Wales, I made time for a detour to Llanberis. On the day I had set aside for this visit, the weather looked such that my host, Rod, an outdoors guide, was taking his group underground, where the conditions were more favourable. But I had to go today or not at all. Suffice to say, I put on my rain pants.

We placed an Ordnance Survey map over his kitchen table and pored over it. The quarry and tip locations all had (disused) or (dis) appended to them. He and his partner Anna had been in the vicinity of the CP before; it was below Cnicht, one of their favourite little mountains, which is apparently beautiful when the weather is good. We discussed the route I could take. Rod favoured an approach from Croesor. This is the same starting location as the last confluence visitors took nine years ago, but most previous visitors have set off from Tanygrisiau. Rod said I was to expect fog, and that it would be boggy ground with an indistinct path.

I began setting up Anna’s bike to get me there and back (30 km ride each way) but as it turned out, Rod’s friend Dave planned to drive past the turn-off to Croesor on his way to assess, for tourism purposes, an old mine. I gratefully got a lift with him, his partner Jules and their husky Brains. We crossed Pen-y-Pass in driving rain. The scree-filled slopes that I could see felt similar to the Lake District in England that I had been hiking through just weeks before. Fortunately, further down the valley, where I hopped out of their van – 52°57'28" N 4°03'53" W at 10:55 am – it wasn’t raining. But the slopes around me were blanketed in cloud, and my route would rise in elevation near the confluence point. In the meantime, I enjoyed the cool conditions on the walk to Croesor, surrounded by moss and ferns, rubble walls, sheep with freckled faces. It was a narrow lane, punctuated every so often by passing places (“Man Pasio” in Welsh) and wild blackberries that I snacked on.

Sure enough, by the time I reached Croesor, the rain had started and it would not stop.

There were about as many ruined buildings as habitable ones. The tarmac road turned to gravel, then a path between paddocks and past old stables that once would have housed some of the horses that hauled slate along the former Croesor Tramway, which had long ago connected the quarries in this cwn (steep-sided valley) to Porthmadog. The fence along the tramway was made of slate stuck into the ground like a long row of gravestones.

I headed onto a rough track into the hills. I could see clear to the short side of the valley to the sheep dotted on the other side and the rain billowing past in light sheets, but the long end of the cwn disappeared into fog after 500 metres. I slipped and slid over slate, and at 12:30 found a large pair of boulders to wedge myself into, sheltering me from the low-angled rain, which was being pushed up the valley but not across. Making lunch on my knees was a delicate affair. By the time I was done, visibility was down to 20 metres in all directions. I was only a little worried about a repeat of my incomplete visit to 47°N 102°E. This wasn’t a storm, nor was it rural Mongolia, and in case you forgot, I was wearing rain pants this time. A recent acquisition. How I managed this long without them, I don’t know.

Around 2 pm I made it to the confluence point. It was surrounded by marshy ground but I could skirt around the wettest bits. The CP itself, 30 metres from the nearest discernible path, was only a few metres from a body of water. I used a point-and-shoot film camera, meaning the GPS shot would certainly be (and was) out of focus, so I used my phone for some back-up shots, getting it so wet in the process that it later refused to charge. (This could have been troublesome due to my itinerary and lack of other devices, but it returned to life the next day thanks to a breeze at Bangor.)

The leg to Tanygrisiau along the main trail was like walking down a shallow river. Visibility improved the further I descended. The remnants of miners’ buildings, a ruined church, the quarry, all shrouded in rain and mist produced a melancholic effect. Llyn Cwmorthin, the lake, was dramatic, looking like a piece of slate itself. Near the end I saw other walkers, including a family, with one of the girls wearing a full-body swimsuit, a sensible choice for the weather.

I got to the upper car park at 3:15 pm and was surprised to see a familiar van. I could see Brains on the backseat huddled up dry and warm. He looked back at me with his soulful blue eyes, but with no sign of Jules or Dave, I kept walking in the hard rain to the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. I waited there in a shelter next to the bus driver on her vape break, both of us looking out at grey paths, grey walls, grey sky, happily tired and empty of mind.

In the Snowdonia National Park.