After tackling Pen Llithrig on a less-than-successful day yesterday, it was now Easter Sunday. Knowing the traffic would be bad on Monday, I wanted to get in a quick morning walk before heading back to Cambridge in the afternoon, ahead of most of the cars.

Cadair Berwyn (GW/NW-012, worth 8 points) fitted the bill perfectly. It’s not technically in Snowdonia but it is located in north-eastern Wales, not far from the English border at Oswestry. It was about 40 minutes’ drive from my campsite, so I’d get some of the journey home done early too.

The starting point for this walk is at the Pistyll Rhaeadr waterfall, which is a well-known tourist spot in its own right. The only road to the waterfall is a single-track road with passing places from the village of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. There is a large car park (£4 for the day) at the end of the road at SJ074295 but, not knowing this, I parked in the layby at SJ076293.

Once you have parked, you need to walk back down the road to pick up the path at SJ079290 – failure to do this will result in you being on the wrong side of the valley; a mistake I almost made! The path is stony and wide, only rising gently to the lake at Llyn Lluncaws. Just before the lake you need to cross the stream twice. The stream itself is narrow and easy to step over, but the surrounding area is a bit boggy. I can only imagine it is worse in wetter weather.

Once at the lake, the path runs on some slightly boggy terrain along the southern edge and then heads steeply uphill along the side of the escarpment. The path is generally fine but it does get a little close to the edge at a couple points around 700m ASL, so you need to watch your footing. Once you have reached the top, there’s a short walk along the grassy top of the hill to get into the Activation Zone.

Cadair Berwyn has two summits. The northerly one has the trig point and was previously thought to be the highest point. At 827m ASL, however, it is beaten by 3m by the southern summit.

There’s plenty of room here to set up but I was able to do a quick activation on 2m from my handheld only, which enabled me to get back to the car for the drive home. The ascent took me 1 hour 55 minutes and the descent took 90 minutes. This was a very pleasant summit to activate and I’ll certainly be back, especially as it’s only 3.5 hours’ drive from Cambridge.

The only problem was on returning to my car to find that the single-track road from the village had become full of cars, including cars parked in the passing places and along the side of the road. This made actually driving the first mile a very slow experience with lots of very careful passing needed. For this reason, I wouldn’t recommend doing it on a hot bank holiday weekend!

I was up early, despite the long walk around Y Garn and Glyder Fawr yesterday, ready to head on another double-hill day, walking around Carnedd Llewelyn and Pen Llithrig y Wrach.

The car park for this one is in the entrance to the campsite at SH685602. The campsite allows non-residents to park in the layby at entrance for £2/day; payment is taken at the campsite reception.

After parking, walk a little bit along the pavement beside the A5 then head up the steep tarmac private road all the way to Ffynnon Llugwy reservoir. Just before the reservoir, the path splits away from the road and you see the route up the side of Bwlch Eryl Farchog ahead of you.

The path up here is hard work. It’s narrow and steep and I had to pull myself up in a couple of places. There were only a couple times that I felt concerned about tackling the route on my own but it needed a lot of care and I would probably think twice about doing it without a companion in the future.

Once you are on top of the ridge, you can turn left (north-west) for Carnedd Llewelyn or right (south-east) for Pen Llithrig. I duly turned left towards the first hill of the day, which lies beyond the Craig yr Ysfa rocks. On the OS map, it looks as though this is a perfectly reasonable path and indeed a couple behind me did make it through… For me, however, I didn’t feel comfortable continuing. Perhaps it was the hot day or the fact that I was still slightly worried by how much harder the route up to the ledge had been than I had anticipated, or a combination of both, but I didn’t feel safe to climb over the rocks with a steep drop below on my own (and then to return via the same route).

So, Carnedd Llewelyn remains on my to-do list, probably next time taking the longer walk in from the north-east. Instead, I headed back along the ridge towards Pen Llithrig.

Around SH696630, the path follows a contour line but it also requires a lot of care (although I felt it a better option than trying to descend back down to the valley below). You are walking on loose slate fragments on a narrow path only maybe a foot wide. Already feeling concerned that I had bitten off more than I could chew, I put all my effort into watching my steps and forgot to navigate, thereby taking myself further away from the route to Pen Llithrig than I had planned. For the same reason of concentration, I don’t have any photos of this part of the route. Once I had realised what I had done, I had to continue until the slate face above me gave way to less steep grass sides of the hill (at SH697626) that I could clamber up and get myself back on track.

Soon enough I was back in more comfortable territory on the flat grassy top of Pen yr Helgi Du (not a SOTA summit). From here, the walking was much easier: there’s a slightly faint path that leads east from the hilltop down to the col and across to Pen Llithrig.

As the photo above suggests, the top of Pen Llithrig is flat and uninspiring, meaning it has a large Activation Zone for SOTA purposes. Exhausted from the grueling walk, I spent an hour here to have lunch and make a number of QSOs both on 2m FM and 30m CW (the only HF activation of the weekend). On 30m, I found the Swiss SOTA crowd were out in force with 3 HB summit-to-summit contacts in succession! By the way, Pen Llithrig y Wrach is GW/NW-013 and is worth 6 points.

From the top of Pen Llithrig, I returned to the car by heading straight down the south-eastern side of the hill (there is no path), until I intersected the leat at SH704615. A path runs alongside the leat all the way back to meet the road at SH690609, although be aware that it has a number of stiles along the path, many of which are in a state of disrepair.

Were I to do Pen Llithrig on its own again (without attempting Carnedd Llewelyn), there is a safer, simpler route heading up Y Braich from SH700607. This would then join up with my route on top of Pen yr Helgi Du, and form a nice circuit that way.

With my inefficient route, this walk totalled 9.5 miles with 4612 feet of ascent (no wonder I was tired!). It took me 4 hours and 10 minutes to reach the top of Pen Llithrig and 1 hour 50 minutes to get back down to the car park. I’d have an easier walk, fortunately, on Cadair Berwyn tomorrow.

I’ve recently returned from what has become an annual tradition of spending Easter weekend away climbing hills for SOTA. Last year (and admittedly Easter was earlier), the Beast from the East had just hit and I was walking through snow on Pen-Y-Fan. This year, the weather was completely different with bright sunshine, hardly any wind, and 20C temperatures.

Having driven to Wales after work on Maundy Thursday evening, I stayed the night in the Premier Inn at Llandudno Glan-Conwy, which is ideally situated on the A55. This was a deliberate choice as I knew the carpark at my first target fills up quickly, so I wanted to make an early start on Friday morning. The target was to do the circuit up Y Garn (8 points) and along the ridge to Glyder Fawr (10 points), then descending on the Devil’s Kitchen path.

Car park to Y Garn (GW/NW-004)

As was my intention, I was lucky to be early enough to get one of the last few spaces in the car park near Ogwen Cottage on the A5 (Currently £6 for the day or £3 for four hours, proceeds going to the National Park.) Having said that, there is ample parking along the A5 if the car park is full.

From here, the route from the car park to the summit of Y Garn is an obvious one. The well-made stone path rises slightly to Llyn Idwel lake. At this point, the route splits and the main path goes along the left (Eastern) side of the lake. You will be coming back that way, so you need to follow the fainter track, initially along the north shore of the lake.

Once the path has left the lake, it soon starts to rise along the edge of Y Garn. The route is steep in several places but not especially dangerous or difficult and the path is clear.

From the ascent, you can look down to the Ogwen valley floor where you started. It’s a fantastic view.

The ascent of Y Garn from the car park took me exactly two hours, having started at 9am. It’s a 2.17 mile / 3.5km walk, ascending 647 metres (and most of this ascent is after Llyn Idwel).

On this Good Friday morning. the summit was quite busy and so I quickly made a eight contacts on 2m FM from just my handheld and left it there without unpacking the HF gear. On such a nice Easter weekend, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that there were lots of SOTA activators around but I made 3 summit-to-summit contacts from here – a theme that was to continue through the rest of the weekend.

Y Garn to Glyder Fawr (GW/NW-003)

Y Garn is connected to Glyder Fawr by a ridge, so you only have to drop 250m from the summit of Y Garn to a lake on the col (Llyn y Cwn at 710m ASL) before climbing back up 300m to the 10-point Glyder Fawr. You don’t have to go all the way back down to the valley!

From the summit of Y Garn is just a matter of walking downhill over the grass towards Glyder Fawr. There are a few paths to choose from. The path up Glyder Fawr is somewhat more strenuous, as it climbs steeply over loose slate and other rubble.

This section of the walk took me 70 minutes to walk the 1.7 miles / 2.73 km between the hills. Unfortunately, somewhere approaching the summit I lost my sun hat, which was annoying in the hot weather.

In trying to retrace my steps to locate – in vain – my hat and also with some slight concern about the descent of Devil’s Kitchen (which I’d forgotten since I last did it over 10 years ago), I decided to make this a quick activation as well and just made six QSOs on 2m from the handheld before heading back to the valley floor.

Glyder Fawr to the car park

From Glyder Fawr’s summit, you descend to Llyn y Cwn via the same stony path you used for the ascent but at the lake you turn north-west, following the obvious path towards Devil’s Kitchen.

The Kitchen itself is a flat face of rock used by rock-climbers which, on some days ‘steam’ can be seen emanating from. Luckily, us walkers don’t have to cope with such things as there’s a path that runs alongside the Kitchen, known as the Devil’s Kitchen path. It’s a little narrow in places and I had to use my hands to ease myself down in a couple places but it’s perfectly manageable and, on a day like today, well-frequented.

Once you are down the path from the Kitchen, you can follow the obvious route around to the right-hand side of Llyn Idwel and the back to the carpark.

The descent from the summit to the car park took me 2 hours 45 minutes for the 3.87 miles / 6.22 km, losing 627 metres (mainly through the Kitchen).

By now, it was late afternoon and so I headed to the Dolgam campsite, where I have stayed before, to pitch my tent for the next two nights. It’s a beautiful location on the A5 near the foot of Moel Siabod (a SOTA which is still on my to-do list). I wanted to be up early to attempt Carnedd Llewelyn and Pen Llithrig y Wrach tomorrow.