Sophie McKeand

I wasn’t really sure where to start with following Thomas Pennant, he wrote so much about this region. The original plan was to look for references to sighthounds (as we have two) but this bit didn’t excite as much as I’d hoped. Further reading soon threw up some images that had us itching to get across to north-west Wales.

Pennant writes of Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach: ‘Our pains were fully repaid on attaining the summit. The area was covered with groups of columnar stones, of vast size, from ten to thirty feet long, lying in all directions’ (A Tour in Wales, vol. 2, p. 151).

He continues on the next page, ‘Many of the stones had, bedded in them, shells, and in their neighbourhood I found several pieces of lava. I would therefore rather consider this mountain to have been a sort of wreck of nature, formed and flung up by some mighty internal convulsion, which has given these vast groups of stones fortuitously such a strange disposition…’ (vol. 2, p. 152).

This alien landscape appealed to my partner, Andy and I, so the next day we set off on the drive to Snowdonia, along with our Kit-the-lurcher and Bonnie-the-Whippet. Photo diary below: