Part 6

I have incidentally mentioned the bull; and who that has walked much in Carnarvonshire or Merioneth will be so pedantic as to deny the bull his place among the _fauna_ of these districts? Theoretically, no doubt, he must be classed with the domestic; but in practice there are times when his domesticity is apt to be doubted by the wayfarer, and when even the cheery assurances of the Welsh herdsman (if within hail) that “she will do nothing to you,” leave much to be desired. Turned out in early summer on the roadways and hill-slopes, with that national disregard for Saxon weaknesses which has characterized the Cymry from of old, the black bulls of these hilly regions are an element that has to be taken into account, together with winds and waters, in the traveller’s plan of campaign. I have known a party of tourists compelled to elect between meeting the angry animal or relinquishing the direct ascent--a choice between bull and “bwlch”--and unanimously agreed in favour of a rearward move. I once camped with a friend for a fortnight in an artist’s van, pitched on an open plot in an upland valley where a big bull was pastured; and when we heard him in the darkness playfully scratching back or sharpening horns on our door-step, we bethought us of those weird stories of wild life in the backwoods, where the dwellers in the lonely log-hut hear the long-drawn sniff of the strolling bear, as he “samples” them under their bolted door at night.

In some of the valleys round Snowdon there is a strange-looking breed of black and white Scandinavian cattle, whose appearance at close quarters on a dark night is rather eerie, because only the white part of each animal is easily visible, and the traveller has the spectacle of a detached head, or shoulder, or hind-quarter, as the case may be, confronting him through the gloom.

As a rule, it is only in spells of great heat, such as occasionally descend upon the mountains, that the bulls are really dangerous, and then they are seldom approached, even by the herdsman, without the aid of dogs. It is said that the most ominous symptom on the bull’s part is when, instead of the usual shrill bellow, he gives vent to a low querulous grumbling sound, which seems to imply a deeply felt long-cherished grievance; at such times it is wise to give him a wide berth. After all, can we men complain, if the bull sometimes shows himself dissatisfied with our treatment of his fellows? Who knows but that his splenetic outbursts have some reference to the massacre of his kith and kin at the hands of the “family butcher,” or to the savage dietetic habits of the very people who denounce _him_ as “the savage brute”? What I have thought a little hard, however, is that no discrimination is made by the bull between beef-eater and vegetarian, and that the peaceful pilgrim who has not tasted sirloin for over forty years is compelled to skulk up the hill under cover of a stone wall as guiltily as the shameless intruder who has a beef-sandwich in his pocket. Some vegetarians, I believe, advocate the wearing of a badge; there would be more to be said in favour of the distinction, if the black bulls of Snowdonia would consent to recognize such flag of truce.

We see, then, that the Cambrian and Cumbrian hills, though far less richly populated than they were some centuries back, have yet no little interest to offer us in the races of non-human peoples, wild or half-wild, that inhabit them--races whose life is much more closely intertwined with the life of the mountain itself, and more responsive to its varying moods and seasons, than that of the shepherd born and bred on its slopes, not to speak of the summer visitor who comes there for mere pastime or recreation.

VI

The Barren Hillside

We talk of the barrenness of the mountains, and barren in a sense they are, when contrasted with the teeming wealth of the plain, yet the bleakest of them, if studied with sympathy and insight, will be found to have a living and life-giving freshness of its own. Now and then, perhaps, when face to face with some scene of more than common severity, we are tempted to exclaim, with Scott:

The wildest glen, but this, can show Some touch of nature’s genial glow: On high Benmore green mosses grow, And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe, And copse on Cruchan-Ben; But here, above, around, below, On mountain or in glen, Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower, Nor aught of vegetative power, The weary eye may ken.

But austereness, too, has its place, and often is to the mountains what fertility is to the fields, not a blemish, but a glory; and if grey crag[19] and wild hillside bear no visible fruitage, yet many are the spiritual crops which may be gathered from them by the understanding eye and mind.

Some centuries ago the Lake District, as Wordsworth has remarked, “must have been covered with wood to a great height up the mountains, where native Scotch firs must have grown in great profusion, as they do in the northern part of Scotland to this day”; and he quotes a traditional saying that a squirrel might have travelled from Wythburn to Keswick without touching earth. In Wales the same conditions once existed, and Pennant, in 1773, referred to the earlier destruction of the oak forests which had clothed the upper dales. “Avarice,” he wrote, “or dissipation, and its constant follower, poverty, have despoiled much of our Principality of its leafy beauties.” We can no longer say of Snowdon or of Helvellyn, as of Mont Blanc, that “around his waist are forests braced”--even miniature forests--but a closer knowledge will teach us that the hillside, even when barren of vegetation, is never barren of charm, and it may be that these mountains have gained as much as they have lost by the change. Certainly there is a keen pleasure to the climber in standing free of all entanglement of trunk or thicket on the bare and open fells.

Not that the mountain is often a mere treeless and shrubless waste, for in some places, on the lower slopes, there is a thick ground-growth--carefully shunned by the traveller, but rich and beautiful in itself--of heather, bracken, and bilberry, and there are not a few spots where the flanks of the hills are a very wilderness of intermingled crags and brushwood, ancient lurking-place of “mart” or fox, but rarely if ever trodden by foot of man. When these fail, there may often be seen a line of stunted yews, or hollies, or junipers, straggling up the slope, or a mountain-ash jutting out slantwise from the side of some narrow ravine and almost bridging the watercourse. The bilberry, like the heather, is at times found growing at great heights, especially in the rockier and less accessible places, such as the sides of Tryfan or Scafell Pike, where it flourishes amazingly in some seasons and produces berries of giant size.[20]

Not less delightful is that close-fitting vestment of the hills, which follows so faithfully each ripe curve and contour, and so trimly encircles the projecting bosses of rock--the short crisp sward, on which the mountain sheep have their pasture. Even the stoniest tracts are softened, here and there, by these verdant interspaces, and it is refreshing to see a steep saddle of turf flung across a craggy ridge, or a streak of greenery running far down, like a path, among the grey and pathless screes. These grass banks are in parts notched and graded into a kind of natural stair, easy to climb and luxurious to descend; elsewhere they have a smooth and glassy surface which in dry weather becomes highly polished and rather treacherous to the feet.

Very inviting, too, are the narrow winding tracks, models of skilful engineering, which sheep and shepherds between them have worn along the slopes--slender thoroughfares which often skirt the fells for some distance at the same level, and offer a less toilsome footing to those whose course is round some projecting bluff or hollow combe. A terrace-road, where one has a steep rise on one side and a steep drop on the other, is always a delight, even when one’s terrace is but a tiny sheep-path of a few inches’ width; nor is there any need to go to show places, such as the so-called “Precipice Walk” at Dolgelly, for a sensation which can be enjoyed in abundance on any unfrequented hillside.

But let it be supposed that verdure of any kind is lacking, and that we stand face to face with an expanse of bare cliff and scree--such as the south face of the Great Gable--the solid cliffs rising above, and the broken screes streaming downward and outward from their base. Here is barrenness indeed, yet a barrenness which, to the lover of such solitudes, is more fruitful than the choicest vineyard or cornfield. For how weird and suggestive is this stationary rock-fall of screes, this stony glacier arrested in its flow, yet retaining in its stillness something of the undulant shape! Viewed from across the glen, it looks like a great “tongue” of rocks lolling out from the mouth of the gorge many hundreds of feet above, and gradually widening in its fall; at closer quarters, it presents itself as a tolerably compact mass of individual boulders, none of any great size, across which it is necessary to pick one’s way with some deftness, because, like Wordsworth’s cloud, it “moveth altogether if it move at all,” and a floundering step may set half the hillside creeping daleward.

It is centuries, no doubt, since these detached stones fell from their holdings, and they are themselves for the most part weather-worn and sun-stained like the parent crags, but they are still occasionally reinforced by new outcasts, when some exposed layer of rock has become disintegrated by winter frosts and rains; and then the story of the latest landslip is written visibly for several years in the paler hue of the screes and in the discordant rift in the escarpment. As a rule, falling stones, so great a danger in the Alps, are rare among our mountains; once or twice in a season, perhaps, you may see, or hear, a big stone go thundering down the hillside when no human agency has been at work.

I refer to human agency, because the mention of falling stones reminds me of the now disused sport of crag-bowling. The rolling of stones down mountain sides, still a recognized method of warfare among hillsmen, has rightly been anathematized in this peaceful country since rock-climbing became popular; but in the old days, when no one went on the crags, it was a harmless and diverting practice. Thus Gilpin, in his travels among the mountains of Cumberland, a hundred and thirty years back, remarked how the native children amused themselves in this manner; and Bingley, describing his ascent of Tryfan some half-century later, observes: “We stood on a mere point, and on each side of us was a precipice more deep than any I had before seen; we united our strength, and rolled down it several huge pieces of rock.” Forty years ago it was common to see guides and tourists assiduously engaged in the sport, the process of which was somewhat as follows. Having first selected a steep “scar,” or a grass slope, with a pool if possible at the foot of it, and having made sure that neither man nor sheep was in the line of fire, the party turned their attention to some “huge stone,” as Wordsworth has it,

Couched on the bald top of an eminence,

and expended such energy as they had to spare in detaching this rock from its station, until it slowly toppled over, gathered fierce speed, went smoking and crashing down the hillside, and buried itself with a wild plunge in the waters. Such was the pastime, a sort of vicarious glissade, and from my own bygone enjoyment of it I have been led to hope that the famous “labours” of Sisyphus, who, according to the old Greek legend, was condemned in Hades to roll a large block up a hill only--only!--to see it roll down again, were not quite so cheerless a form of punishment as poets have feigned. The self-imposed labours of the tobogganist seem to belong to the same class.

But if any reader thinks that so dangerous a game as crag-bowling ought not to receive even this faint retrospective approval, let me add, as a warning, that I know one pilgrim who, for his former indulgence in it, sometimes pays the penalty in dreams. He has loosened, maybe, from its high parapet some monster of a rock, in weight and girth far exceeding any upon which he ever laid waking hands, and no sooner has he launched it on its mad career than he remembers with horror unspeakable that there is a cottage in the glen below--even now he sees its chimneys as the crag goes thundering towards it, and he awakes in remorseful agony at the sickening thud upon the roof.

From the loose screes we turn naturally to the stone walls, where some at least of the scattered blocks have found lodgment and reconstruction. So familiar are these walls to us, and so closely associated with the hillside itself, that they seem to be a natural part of it, as the bridges of the valleys, and one would not willingly miss them from the bare landscape. It is rather surprising, indeed, to find De Quincey speaking of the “sad injury” done to the beauty of a mountainous country by its stone walls; for to some of us the stone wall has a more native charm in such districts than any quickset hedgerow could have: it has often furnished us with a shelter in storm, a shade in heat, a lunching and a siesta-place; we love it, too, as the haunt of our mountain companions, the wheatear and the rock-ousel. The scaling of a seven-foot wall, when the top stones have become insecure, may present some difficulty to the novice, and it is then that he is glad to find one of those convenient loop-holes or rather sheep-holes, through which, after temporarily removing the door-stone, he may insinuatingly worm himself. On some of the lower slopes, especially among the foot-hills near the seacoast, these walls are often of huge girth and solidity, and, being overgrown and intertwined with numberless ivies, mosses, and lichens, have a rare and peculiar beauty; but the increasing use of barbed wire, as an adjunct or substitute for the walls, is yet another sign of the vandalism which in so many ways is working havoc among the hills.

But of all the treasures of the hillside the brightest and purest are its water springs, sources of those many Welsh “afons,” and English “gills” and “becks,” whose beauty might convince the most hardened and sceptical of town-dwellers that the Naiads were something more than a dream. Follow one of these swift mountain rivers, such as the Cumbrian Esk or the Cambrian Llugwy, or better still, perhaps, one of the lesser and more headlong freshets, from its deep pools and rock-basins in the lower valley to its birthplace under the heights, and you will marvel at the prodigality of its charms--so deliciously do the waves come dancing and singing down the slopes in a succession of hidden falls, no two of which are alike, or in an open cascade of white foam, such as often wins for such streams in the Lake District the name of “Sour Milk Gill”; and at last, as the current dwindles, you will trace it to some brimming tarn, or to its high fount in green mosses among the rocks, or will possibly lose it underground, where it may be heard bubbling and gurgling below the stones in its invisible cradle.

These becks, it must be remembered, unlike the turbid snow-fed torrents of Switzerland, are as clear as crystal, so that in calm weather you may see every pebble at the bottom of the pools, and the trout poised with waving fins; but after a heavy rainfall, when the streams are in “spate,” it is often no easy matter to ford them, for then the merest runnels, across which you step to-day without hindrance, may to-morrow be a raging flood. On the other hand, there are times, though much less frequent, when the smaller streamlets are withered up under a spell of summer heat, and their dry channels are useful only as a stone staircase for the climber, who in such seasons may become acquainted, as never before, with the feeling of thirst. I think the sorest temptation I ever underwent, without succumbing to it, was when, on my first visit to Scafell Pike with two fellow undergraduates, on a burning August day, we found a jug of claret-cup left to keep cool, in the spring above Esk Hause, by a party which had trustfully preceded us to the summit. It must have been owing to some morally bracing influence in the high mountain air that that cup was untouched by us: had we been subjected to the same ordeal on the banks of the Cam, it seems but too certain that not one drop could have been spared.

The mountain tarns, in which many of the becks have their origin, lie for the most part in hidden recesses, unsuspected from below, under the crowning heights, and mark the beginning of the last stage in the ascent. It is rather curious that the older school of nature-lovers should have felt themselves disposed to melancholy rather than to joyfulness amid such scenes; even Wordsworth speaks of a “not unpleasing sadness” as naturally induced by the sight of these pools, and surmises that “the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to give furtherance to the meagre vegetation around it, excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly put forth.”[21] Here is a strange relic, in the mind of a great modern poet, of the medieval sense of antagonism between man and nature: we now think rather of these remote tarns as wells of life and healing, to be repaired to by the pilgrim who needs refreshment and comfort in the jostling conflict of mankind.

With the features which I have mentioned, the barren hillside is not likely to lose its attractiveness for nature-lovers. A wilderness it may be, but of a sort which brings to mind the rapt words of the poet--

Oh, wilderness were paradise enow.

VII

Slag-Heap or Sanctuary?

Mountains have in all ages given asylum to free races. Has the time come when a free race must give asylum to its mountains? If we are to have any voice in the answer, the question is one which, in this country at least, cannot much longer be set aside; for though the encroachments of “civilization” on wild Nature have been more or less discussed since the famous “Tours” of Thomas Pennant created the modern tourist, and sent him roaming through the hills, the problem of how to preserve our mountain scenery--if we wish to preserve it--has become much more pressing with the great industrial development of the past hundred years, and it is no exaggeration to say that if it is not solved within the next half-century there may be no mountain scenery to preserve.

It is not to be doubted that, as civilization advances, mountain districts, like all other wild districts, must be gradually “opened out,” and made to minister more fully to human wants; but, then, what _are_ those wants, and how can they best be gratified? The man who owned the goose that laid the golden eggs wanted golden eggs, but his too hasty method of opening out the goose defeated the purpose he had in view. In like manner, if we want to make our mountains more serviceable to the people, we must think whether the methods which we are at present adopting will conduce to that end. Look at the working of these methods among the Cambrian and Cumbrian hills.

Snowdonia has long been a sufferer from foreign and native aggression. It is said that Edward I, to celebrate his conquest of Wales, held “a triumphal fair” on Snowdon, in open defiance of the national sentiment by which this peak was held as holy as was Parnassus by the Greeks. What is more surprising is that the Welsh themselves have in later times so fully acquiesced in the defilement of their sacred mountain, and that the present plight of Snowdon would seem to be a pride rather than a shame to them; for all earlier outrages sink into nothingness when compared with the work of the past fifty years. The copper-mines in Cwm Dyli, which have been worked, and neglected, and worked again, have greatly defaced the mountain, have poisoned the waters, and submerged the islands of Llyn Llydaw, once the haunt of the sea-gull; but it was not until the railway was built from Llanberis, and an hotel placed on the summit, that irreparable harm was done by deforming the natural shape of Y Wyddfa, the topmost peak, into a dull, blunted cone.

Take the case of the River Glaslyn, which flows from the heart of Snowdon through Cwm Dyli and Nant Gwynant, till it finds its way by the Pass of Aberglaslyn to the sea. Visitors are often invited to admire the “power works,” erected a few years ago at the head of Nant Gwynant, and other signs of enterprise; but from the nature-lover’s point of view, there is a different tale to tell, for the glorious waterfall, through which the stream dashed headlong from Cwm Dyli, has been replaced by a line of hideous metal pipes, by which the whole hillside is scarred. As for the far-famed Pass of Aberglaslyn, defaced as it is by railway works and tunnellings, remorselessly begun and then temporarily abandoned, its state can only be described as one of stagnant devastation.

It is a curious fact, too, that this greed for exploiting the natural scenery of Wales goes hand in hand with a complete neglect of such legitimate and really useful means of utilizing the tourist-season as the erection of signposts, and the maintenance of bridle-paths and mountain-tracks, which, without disfiguring the scenery, are of great service to walkers.

Such is the latter state of this Welsh mountain, of which it used to be said that “whoever slept upon Snowdon would wake inspired.” The inspiration which to-day awaits those who wake upon Y Wyddfa is the sight of a hostel “standing where it ought not,” with the usual appurtenances of civilization--post-office, railway-station, refreshment-rooms, cigar-ends, urinals, hordes of trippers, to whom the mountain means no more than the pier at Margate or the terrace at Windsor--almost everything that is civilized except a police-station, and who knows but even that may come? If there is still any “beauty born of murmuring sound” among the dwellers on Snowdon, it must be born of the slow-panting locomotive, or of the gurgling of whiskies in the hotel. And the view? In clear weather, we are told, it embraces the coast of Ireland. I have seen it embrace a line of “washing,” hung out to dry on the edge of the Glaslyn precipice.

In Cumberland, thanks to the efforts of a few faithful defenders and the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake poets, there has been much less desecration, and the recent attempts of vandalism on these remaining strongholds of Nature have been mostly repulsed; indeed, it might be thought that the immediate danger in this quarter comes in part from overzealous friends, and that it is time a limit were put to the well-meant but mischievous practice of building memorial tablets in record either of personal associations or of fatal accidents. That the guide-books should tell us how Scott’s “pilgrim of Nature” lost his life on Helvellyn, and how Matthew Arnold took a meditative walk there, is well enough; but to erect stones in memory of these events, and marble crosses on the various spots where rash cragsmen have fallen, seems rather indiscreet; for it is not fitting that a wild mountain should be plastered, like a lecture-hall or a cemetery, with epitaphs and inscriptions.