How walking Wales's Cambrian Mountains unleashed this author's wild side

12.08.2023 - 15:53 / nationalgeographic.com

I don’t know when I started using the word exotic to describe the Welsh uplands. The more commonly used adjectives are lonely, barren, windswept. But today, so close to the summer solstice, after weeks of constant sunshine, this Cambrian Mountain scene is almost African, reminding me of the uplands of Kenya. The little River Elan, far below, is fringed with blazing trails where algae has dried hard on the rocks turning salt white. The slopes are tan and umber. The line of the horizon shifts and undulates in a heat haze. Replace the ubiquitous sheep with antelopes and you’d believe you were far away from here.  

This is a miniature wilderness in a tiny country, pathless, but always within walking distance of civilisation. I’m following a barely visible animal track through knee-deep grass and areas of dried bog, heading north with no destination in mind, just wanting to see what’s over the next summit. It’s a very different experience to the first time I walked in the Welsh hills when I moved here two decades ago. That walk was in an all-day dusk, the mist shifting in the wind. Within a few steps of the road, I was lost. I followed a rising track and stopped by a half-collapsed pile of stones. The silence of the place engulfed me, I’d never been anywhere so seemingly empty. 

Listening is like watching — more appears the harder you concentrate. But in that place, I could only detect a distant, mewling buzzard. After years of city living the emptiness scared me. Then the mist drifted away, and a pool of sky opened and filled with lapwings. To me, lapwings are the most exotic birds we have on these islands, the equivalent of the hummingbirds of the Americas, or the hornbills or turacos of Africa. Then, the sky closed as quickly as it had opened, and the lapwings vanished. But seconds later I saw and heard a curlew for the first time, its trailing call as exotic as its impossibly long beak. I fell in love.

Since then, I’ve walked almost daily in these hills, watching and listening. The Cambrian Mountains have become a focus, particularly the peaks surrounding the Aberystwyth mountain road, which folds all the landscapes of Wales into a few winding miles: boulder-strewn rivers, high waterfalls, stone-walled farms, oak woods and industrial ruins taken back by the wild.

This terrain is best witnessed at twilight, the time of appearances and disappearances. The literal meaning of twilight is two lights, which became the theme and title of my new book. I’ve sat at dusk watching for comets while swans called invisibly from upland pools and the Cygnus constellation blinked into life overhead from one of the darkest skies in Europe. Its brightest star is Deneb, a supergiant so huge that it would fill half the