The sense of severity and aloofness which haunts these mountains as compared with the Cumberland “fells,” is due chiefly no doubt to their sterner physical features, and to the greater depth and bleakness of the bare valleys which intersect them, each group of peaks rising apart, like a mountain system of its own; but we Saxon visitors are also moved, perhaps, by a feeling of racial strangeness in a land which has no interpreter for us--no literary associations such as those by which the English lakes are endeared--nothing but a dim record of earlier inhabitants, with wild tales of battles and feuds, soldiers and banditti, insurrections and invasions, now alike buried in the past. We seem to be looking on savage mountains in a foreign land. For me at least the first impression of “angry grandeur” in the Welsh mountains[9] has never been wholly obliterated by the intimacy of years, and has lent an unfailing zest to my walks. I can still recall the youthful eagerness with which, after my first ascent of Snowdon with a College friend, we set off, then and there, to toil from Pen-y-Gwryd up the long ridge of Moel Siabod; and how on a later occasion, after crossing Snowdon to Beddgelert, I was not satisfied until I had stood on the opposite crest of Moel Hebog in the afternoon. There must assuredly be some strong attraction about the mountains that can draw one, even in the fervour of boyhood, to pay them double homage such as this.
Next to the fact that they fall into the three great groups of Snowdon, the Glyders and the Carnedds--with Moel Siabod, and the heathery moorlands that link it to Cynicht and Moelwyn, forming a boundary on the south-east--the first point that strikes the watcher of these stimulating heights is that they offer, for the most part, a precipitous face on their northern or eastern fronts, while to the south and west they sink less formidably, though often with great steepness, to their dividing “bwlchs.” This structure is very marked in the central range of the Glyders,[10] where for four miles around the head of Nant Ffrancon the great escarpment looks down on the waters of Llyn Ogwen; on the south there is but a formless steep of intermingled heather and rock, so that it would be surprising that strangers should be instructed to ascend the mountain from that quarter, if the art of climbing--that is, of selecting the routes that yield the greatest satisfaction to the climber--were not so entirely overlooked.