I’m sitting with my sandwiches on Craig Cau, high on Cadair Idris – on a day off, I should say, this is not an expensive senior management awayday – with views of the Mawddach estuary and Snowdonia to the north and the Cambrian mountains to the south. The initial ascent from the south at Minffordd is steep, but the reward is an early sight of the great inner bowl of the mountain – the finest glacial cirque in Britain – with Llyn Cau at its base and the summit, Pen y Gadair, far above.
By the time I reach Pen y Gadair – another strenuous scramble – low cloud obscures the view. At the trig point I meet two elderly but very fit men, on holiday from London and York, and walk with them some of the way down towards Mynydd Moel. They tell me they they’ve just visited the National Library to see the current Claudia Williams exhibition about the drowning of Tryweryn (the Yorkshireman owns one of Claudia’s paintings), and were impressed by the building and what lies within.
No sign today, though, of the National Park’s warden, Jack Grasse, who’s climbed Cadair hundreds of times from his home in Corris and knows more about the mountain than most people alive. Jack is a regular reader in the National Library and a keen researcher of all aspects of Cadair Idris. More than once we’ve met by chance on Pen y Gadair.
There’s plenty in the Library for him and others to study on the mountain. A catalogue search for ‘Cadair Idris’ yields 248 items, with an appetising array of different media: maps, paintings and historic prints (many of them digitised), aerial photographs, television and radio programmes, musical scores and recorded music, archives, and of course printed guidebooks, maps, poems, pamphlets and articles. The name ‘Jack Grasse’ features often: his field notes and diaries are deposited in the Library archives, and in the National Screen and Sound Archive you can watch a 2002 BBC programme of him talking about the mountain’s plant life.
On 16 October Jack will be one of the speakers in the third Condry festival in Machynlleth. The festival, organised by the National Library, celebrates the life and work of William Condry, one of Wales’s greatest naturalists, a friend of Jack’s and another Cadair expert.
Five hours on Cadair Idris helps put the world into perspective. The everyday anxieties of management, the ceaseless round of meetings and travelling to meetings, even the voodoo economics of the UK government – all fade away for a while into nothing in the pure experience of a truly great place.
Andrew Green, Librarian