There he goes, swooping and swirling around in a forgotten cwm on the southern side of Wales’ biggest mountain – might there be bouldering treasures in this long lost place? Only the soaring eagles and Big G truly know… (And yes, I know that I’ve just implied that a man made of flesh and bones can fly. How else does he find these things, black magic, astral planing?)

Dear NWB readers,

Most committed boulderers will not know this, but high on the summit of Yr Wyddfa there is a grotesque building with pig-thick walls and dull plate-glass eyes closed to the vista about it. A cafe that is more like a chapel to the worship of the weak beverage and the packaged snack; food for neither the soul nor the spirit.

Perhaps it is out of shame that nature veils it in so much cloud and rain.

Who, then, would imagine that a handful of contours below, creation would, by some painstaking process, make a paradise to take your very breath [away]. This is Cwm Caregog (gr 595 528)…with its buzzing silence.

Some groaning turn of dense-departed ice has worn at the amphitheatre's base, a flat place that now absorbs the sun's offerings. Indeed so level is the cwm floor that it can, in poor weather, be the nemesis of the navigator; the dog-leg streams appearing to flow gently up-hill. And up here this time of the year we will see the small chattering migrants return, swallows interrupting the stillness with their thrusting flight and the smug raven whose nesting is all but over, riding the mountain air with hardly so much as a wing-flap.

Now; legend has it that each spring the first cuckoo to enter this cwm somehow brings with it (or perhaps un-earths) a new rock, until over the eons a disproportionate clutter of boulders grace the place.

Thus there is a temptation to visit every spring.

Just in case.

Nowhere are the presented difficulties that great, but the small facets provide elegant and distinctive possibilities in the very grandest surroundings.

Great for the old ticker; all this hicking.

Blessed are the thin for they take up half the space.

Love, Big G

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