Country Diary: Snowdon

A cracked Rayburn rusts among the ruins of Sir Edward Watkin's chalet, colonized by mosses, the sessile oakwoods crowding around. Wild goats assume statuesque poses on sylvan boulders and survey my progress. I descend from the Watkin path before the mountain wall, cross the Afon Cwm Llan on a single-span stone bridge high above cataracts and deep turquoise bathing pools, and broach the forested hillside by way of a gate. The track onwards is short-turfed, springy with leaf-litter, winding up through stands of Scots pine, the views to south and west novel and ever widening. In many of our other hill regions, the way would have been desecrated by off-roaders and the 4WD fraternity, all criticism of their activity met with bellicose assertions of legality and freedom. Here the difficulty of approach gives protection.

Exquisitely situated, the track is one of only two marked on the 1840 Ordnance Survey map of Snowdon, both leading to mines. It is barely trodden even by the modern recreational walker, avoids the marshy base of the upper cwm and zig-zags gently up to the shaggy, quartz-speckled back of Y Lliwedd - the last peak on the Snowdon Horseshoe.

A dismantled water-wheel made in Hawarden and crushing rolls, their cogs worn with heavy usage, lie discarded amid spoil and broken walls, spleenwort and the emerald brilliance of parsley fern. There are deep crevasses beyond, where copper was mined. The mine closed 140 years ago. Now it stands as testimony to the enterprise and hardihood of those who worked it, and as a danger to the unwary hill-walker, while the track provides the least crowded and most picturesque approach to the highest British mountain south of the Scottish border.