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Photos: Big G


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This month Big G casts his roving eye upon a curious rock bluff on the northern side of the quaint mountain village of Beddgelert:

Dear NWB.com readers, it is January and soft rain falls from the endlessly giving sky, cleansing the rock surfaces, bathing everything in a watery elixir, feeding the decorative mosses and lichens, making the place ever greener.

And what is that, glanced through a rain-streaked car window?

THE BEDDGELLERT WALLS

Awful, huh!

..it is actually worse than it looks.

Much as we boulderers are a fairly existential shower, it does no harm now and again to dip ones rubbered toe into history, if only to check that it is still as irrelevant as it ever was.

And so, in passing the queer little hamlet of Beddgelert (historic world centre of poor pet management-see Gelert’s Grave) ones eye may be drawn to these dull rock walls at the roadside. They are poor things, bereft of aesthetic clout or defined problems. They are just there.

And because they are there climbers have played on them whilst hitching back to Llanberis after heady Tremadog adventures in the late seventies and early eighties. With their racks and ropes packed away in what were to become rudimentary crash mats the pig-tailed and pectoraled godfathers of rock; people like Haston and Crook paused here, and touching these cruddy edges felt the glimmer of a higher art.

These crappy facets are the acorns from which great oaks grew. The mind that finds fun here would find it on the brick edges of a house, on the balanced-on urban bollard and railing. And when they had discovered the true path that is the single move, then, they lifted up their eyes unto the hills.

Just down the road there is a gold mine. Mind you they do say it's everywhere; if you look hard enough.

Blessed are the easily pleased,
For they shall be easily pleased.

Love, Big G


The Gelert Grave Story
Hundreds of years ago there was a misunderstanding between a father, a baby and a dog. Due to some confusion the baby got the innocent dog into trouble. This heart-rending story has influenced literature through the ages, culminating in recent times with the very successful ‘Family Guy’.

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