Rail diaries: Snowdonia
Among close friends, it has become something of a tradition to write reports of memorable train journeys. What follows is my most recent entry into this collective rail diary, written about an adventure in the summer of 2022.
The trip to Snowdonia began not with a train, but with the conspicuous absence of one. The Boston subway’s Orange Line, which I would ordinarily use to get to the airport, was shuttered. Vital, delicate, distended under duress, and not quite red—the jugular vein of the greater Boston area, really—the line had just begun a historic 30-day shutdown to address a list of repairs that was decades in the making. I borrowed my neighbors’ car to drive to the airport instead.
I left in late August, trading the soporific heat of the Massachusetts summer for the sterile and equally sedative atmosphere of an airplane cabin. Hop-skippity over the Atlantic, a quick stop in Dublin to have a chat with a rather congenial immigration officer, and through the international arrivals gate of Heathrow where Thomas, my friend and hiking partner, was waiting for me. Bright-eyed, boot-shod, and rucksack-backed, Thomas held two rail tickets to Wales in his hand. The tickets noted that they are “valid via any permitted route,” a feature unique to the British rail system made possible by the network’s extensive interconnectedness. As long as the path taken is not ludicrously meandering, we were allowed to follow any itinerary of our choosing to get to our destination. Thus began a game of optimization—estimating train delays, calculating the number of seconds needed to run from one platform to another within a connecting station—to find the quickest possible route to the Land of Song. This game kept us occupied for most of the day.
We took a train into central London, then another heading north out of the city. Soon we reached England’s agricultural core. Charming oaks interrupted hedgerows that delineated fields of wheat and corn. Between sips of coffee, I closed my eyes and I pictured an organic network of British rail lines overlaid against this agrarian grid. The image brought to mind what art historian Svetlana Alpers calls the “mapping impulse”—the need to reconcile the objective traits of a landscape (often recorded in maps) with the subjective experience of the same (often recorded in painting). With few notable exceptions, “we can always tell maps and landscapes apart by their look,” writes Alpers in The Art of Describing, her influential study of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. “Maps give us the measure of a place and the relationship between places, quantifiable data, while landscape pictures are evocative, and aim rather to give us some quality of a place or of the viewer’s sense of it.”
The canvases of Vermeer and van Ruisdael are remarkable, Alpers argues, in their ability to unify the seemingly incongruous objectives of landscape mapping and landscape painting within a single visual field. Moving through the British landscape by train—simultaneously optimizing rail routes while savoring the views of crows gleaning wheat from recently harvested fields—struck me as significant for a similar reason. I felt myself mapping the landscape through experience.
My thoughts of maps and crows and the places they inhabit, already slowed by jet-lag and hypnotic views of the hills undulating outside our train window, became considerably more convoluted when Thomas unfolded a map of north Wales on the table between us. We began planning our route through Snowdonia. We drafted a course beginning with a summit of Snowdon, proceeding south in a counterclockwise arc through the valley of Nant Gwynant, and ending with a septentrional push to the coastal village of Llanfairfechan. Our discussions piqued the interest of a gruff-looking man sitting beside Thomas, whose eyes began following Thomas’s fingers as they danced across the laminated surface of the map.
“Where are you going?” he eventually asked.
“Snowdon, Ogwen Valley,” we replied.
He gave a knowing smile. “Have a good walk.”
We discovered that he participated in mountain rescue operations in the Lake District. Some logical gymnastics ensued when Thomas began pondering contingencies for our own journey: “… and if we get in over our head, mountain rescue in Wales is pretty good. I mean, I’ve heard it’s good. I’ve never needed it. But my friends needed it, just once…”
As a result of our route optimizations and train station sprints, we alighted at the northern Welsh town of Bangor four hours ahead of schedule. We stopped for lunch, stocked up on provisions for the hike, and boarded a bus headed for the Snowdon peak trailhead. I watched gulls soaring stiff-winged towards the Isle of Anglesey. Delicate maidenhair ferns writhed entrancingly like tentacles from fissures in the stone walls that line the highway into the mountains. We stopped just short of the trailhead to spend the night in a Climber’s Club cottage and began our walk the following morning.
To experience Snowdonia is to experience a soundscape as much as a landscape. The mists caress the fells like cold lovers, and there is at times very little to be seen and much to be heard. RAF fighter pilots enjoy using the mountain range as a training ground, thundering low through Ogwen Valley with as much relish as the ravens who inhabit it. Children detest ascending Snowdon in heavy rain, and their cries of anguish ring through the clouds as their parents half drag them up the trail to take in the misty non-views at the summit. And everywhere there are sheep. Their bleats echo across the fells on windless evenings, lonely narrators to dramas unfolding in the fog. They roam the hills in the summer months, grazing on wildflowers and intrepid seedlings. Traces of their presence—tufts of wool snagged on sharp stones, droppings in the grassy fields, carcasses of errant individuals killed the previous winter—are always evident. The sheep are reminders that this is a working landscape, trodden and toiled over for millennia.
Over five days Thomas and I strode atop the summits of Snowdon, Tryfan, Carnedd Llewelyn, and Foel Grach. We walked along dry stone walls shrouded in cloaks of moss that have weaved themselves for centuries, undisturbed, in the shade of the few remaining lowland groves. We tip-toed across flat grasslands so laden with moisture that the ground shook like water mattresses underfoot. We ambled through foothills mottled with dense thickets of thigh-high bracken fern. I understood, in this landscape, the need for the Welsh word rhedynog—a place that is abounding with ferns. It is a fabulous word, almost whimsical in its precision. But it also serves a utilitarian purpose, describing as it does a salient feature of the region that affects how sheep and people orient themselves to the land.
We also took advantage of Great Britain’s venerable right-to-roam policies, navigating freely through private farmlands and exploring misty gullies as quiet as catacombs. As someone raised on a stay-in-your-lane western American trail ethic—“all you do in the States is follow blazes,” muttered Thomas, a UK native, at one point in our journey—this more improvised approach to walking made me uneasy. But the right to roam in the British Isles is as fundamental to the experience of the British landscape as Smokey the Bear is to the experience of the American landscape. Why the British cherish the right to roam whereas the Americans, with their extensive tracts of wild and successional landscapes that seem so well-suited for roaming, do not is a fascinating question. Much of the answer, to be sure, is to be found in the deeply intertwined histories of land use and ownership, population expansion and colonization, governance and national security. But my mental picture of Britain’s rail network inscribed within a grid, of a landscape mapped both on paper and on the very earth that defines it, made me wonder if the right to roam also has roots in the experience, both physical and conceptual, of a place.
The yearning to freely roam the British landscape is an old one—picture Elizabeth Bennet in the opening scene of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, walking and muddy and briefly liberated, or J.M.W. Turner traveling through Cornwall on foot in 1811, filling six sketchbooks with views of the southern coast over the course of several weeks. But legal protections for roaming are strikingly young, and the right-to-roam laws extant today are intimately related to the practice and politics of mapping. The modern campaign for the right to roam in Britain began in April 1932, when hundreds of factory workers from Manchester and Sheffield walked in a “mass trespass” atop Kinder Scout, a privately owned grassy plateau in the Peak District. Skirmishes with gamekeepers ensued, a half-dozen walkers were arrested for their transgression, and the storied British Ramblers’ Association was formed with the mission of securing public rights of way in the British Isles.
Largely thanks to persistent advocacy by the Ramblers over the better part of a century, the right to roam was finally codified in 2000 through the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (cheekily given the acronym CROW). According to the law, members of the public have a right to walk unrestricted within areas of England and Wales that are designated as open access land. CROW came into effect in stages over five years following its passage in Parliament, becoming law for different regions of the British countryside at different times. This was primarily because the law included a provision requiring the production of high-quality, “definitive” maps that depict the boundaries of open access land.
Under CROW, footpaths and bridleways not recorded on any such maps by 2026 will cease to be publicly accessible. Like souls departing bodies, the law calls this process “extinguishment.” The ultimatum has prompted enduring advocacy by the Ramblers’ Association to identify these “lost paths” that have not yet been recorded on any definitive maps. The organization estimates that some 49,000 miles of footpaths in England and Wales are under threat of extinction if not properly documented. Extinguishment places the burden of proof for a trail’s existence on measurement and quantification—on mapping—instead of on walking and experience. The right to roam, that peripatetic genius loci of England and Wales, lives not within the landscape itself, but within the folds of a map.
A right to roam seems to make the most sense only in certain ecological contexts. It does not strike me as a coincidence that the two places I have explored with deeply cherished right to roam policies—Norway and Great Britain—are to a large extent devoid of trees. The very low tree line of the Norwegian arctic and subarctic ecosystems lead to vast plateaus populated by grass and stone. Likewise, the omnipresent sheep of the Welsh mountains, fond of young foliage and allowed to wander semi-wild in the summer, keep the region in a state of near perfect deforestation. Forests nurse dense undergrowth that makes a landscape less inviting to ramblers, and trees obstruct views. A deforested landscape is therefore more visible, more navigable, and more easily roamed.
The second-to-last day of our hike began clear and sunny but turned cool and misty by mid afternoon. We stopped for lunch at the end of a steep spine running east from the summit of Carnedd Llewelyn, watching the fog build in the mountains above. Thomas, familiar with this region of Snowdonia and eager to reach our camping spot for the night, started along the spine before I had finished my sandwiches. He quickly slipped out of view. I watched the mist tease Llewelyn and its neighbors for twenty more minutes before heading up towards the peak in the direction that Thomas had gone, and I entered the fog before I could catch sight of him. I soon lost the trail—a loose line of matted grass between rocky outcroppings—and tacked my way up to the summit by following the gradient of steepest ascent. A black sheep and her lamb, stark against the patinated silver of the fells, watched me in silence as I passed them. I eventually found Thomas at the summit, his blue jacket a beacon against the grays of stone and sky, hunched inside of a windbreak assembled from melon-sized rocks. He was holding his laminated map of Snowdonia in his hand, studying it. He looked up at me, smiling, when I entered the stone circle. “I thought I had remembered there being a windbreak here,” he told me. “Plus, if you look carefully, you can see it on the map.”
If there ever existed a place that is its own map, that place would be Great Britain. Many, indeed most, of the lost paths that are the focus of the Ramblers’ ongoing campaign are not at risk of vanishing from the earth into which they are inscribed—they are at risk of vanishing from the maps that represent them. To make a useful map, one must have full and coherent knowledge of a region. The detailed, beautiful, and readily obtainable maps of the British landscape are a testament to this, as is the totality of the extent to which the landscape itself has been gridded by wheat fields, networked by trains, and trodden by sheep. Britain is a landscape as certain in the mind as it is on foot. And in the mind’s eye, a fully elucidated landscape looks very different to one that retains some of its mystery. I think here of the somewhat unique and deeply symbolic role that wild places play in the American imagination.
The untamed landscape is a place of promise, of opportunity, and of discovery—a symbolism exemplified, among many other American paintings, by Albert Bierstadt’s monumental nineteenth-century canvas of Yosemite Valley. Bierstadt shows the sun, framed by the valley’s imposing cliffs, illuminating the feral forest below. There is a very intentional visual irony embedded within this painting—the sun’s golden light is so intense that it obfuscates the view of the valley. This is in striking contrast to the mapped landscape typified in Vermeer’s and van Ruisdael’s paintings, crystal clear in every detail, whose lucidity imparts the cartographic character that Alpers observes in her studies. To roam unfettered is to walk a promise fulfilled, and the potential of the American landscape can only be kept alive if some portion of the land itself remains out of reach.
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We reached the summit of Tryfan in the early evening of a day as bright as polished silver. Owing to its unique craggy geology, Tryfan is said to be the only mountain in Britain that does not have an established footpath leading to its summit. At least with regard to the way it is experienced by hikers, Tryfan is, in some sense, unmappable. Thomas, a seasoned climber, scrambled light-footed to the top, pulling with delight on short pitches of stone. I lumbered behind him, seeking a gentler route of ascent. At the summit we found the sun settling lazily towards Ogwen Valley’s western aperture, an old-world analog to Bierstadt’s painting. We saw Anglesey in the distance, and the valley stretching in gentle curves beneath us. A raven circumambulated the peak, rising on thermals flung from Tryfan’s western face and falling again with airborne somersaults as it rounded the mountain’s enshadowed eastern flank.