Elidir Fawr – a walk in the wind, and the rain.

I’d planned to knock another peak off my list of 3000 foot Snowdonia mountains this weekend; there are 14 in total, and I want to ‘do’ them all, this summer.The weather forecast for Saturday wasn’t too bad, and I was really keen to start bagging these peaks in earnest, so I set my alarm for 7am and got a reasonably early night – reasonable for a Friday anyway.

Looking down on Nant Peris

Elidir Fawr, is exceedingly handy for the Nant Peris car park on the A4068. The drive was traffic free, as you’d expect at that time of the morning, but even so the Pen-y-Pass car park for Snowdon was full, when I drove past at 8.30am! I parked up at the bottom car park, put my boots on, and a fleece, as it was surprisingly cool; the wind wasn’t what you’d call light either, especially when it gusted. It’s £4 to park all day, but despite numerous attempts, I couldn’t get the machine to take my money, so I wrote a note to that effect to display in my windscreen, locked the car and set off. Two hundred yards down the road, there’s some space to park, so to rule out the chance of the ticket machine miraculously working again, and me being issued with a fine for not paying, I did an about turn and parked my car opposite the chapel, which is right where the route to the top of Elidir Fawr starts.

The view from half way up.

Finally, my walk commences at just gone 9am. The route is easy to follow on the OS map and starts as a narrow lane which winds past some little cottages. You’ll see a small gate on your right where the tarmac ends, and you’re on the footings of the mountain. Only five minutes later you’ll come to a foot bridge – now this is where you get a choice! The route marked on the map ignores the foot bridge and goes straight on, without much of an ascent at all until you reach the head of the valley, alternatively you can cross the footbridge and climb right away, on a clearly visible path. I opted to follow the path which features on the map, ten minutes later the heavens opened, and the cloud dropped; this path was not well used, indistinct from the surrounding field and also boggy, verging on being a river! I turned round and went for the sharp climb, straight to the summit. Other descriptions of the path describe it as a slog, which is probably fair comment, but progress is fairly swift, and you can keep turning round to see Nant Peris rapidly shrinking away from you. As the summit gets closer the terrain changes from sheep friendly grasses, to stone and then right at the top large rocks which you scramble over to reach the peak. You should get great views of Snowdonia, from the top, as it was I couldn’t see much further than the end of my baguette, I only briefly caught a glimpse of Marchlyn Mawr – the reservoir that supplies Dinorwic powerstation – as the clouds swirled around me.

Looking from Elidir Fawr towards Devil's Kitchen

The wind speed at the top must have been gusting up to 60 mph, so I was very grateful for the circular wall, which provided enough shelter for me to eat a sandwich without my fingers dropping off. From the top, I headed down toward the ridge which ultimately takes you to Y Garn, but as it had really started to rain sideways, by now, I took the right hand fork, which takes you straight back to the car park. From this ridge, it was possible to see just how eroded, not to mention steep the path that’s marked on the OS map actually is. It was definitely a good choice, taking the route I did.