Nature of Snowdonia - a journey

Mike Raine

If there were such a thing as an average hillwalker or climber then I suspect environmental knowledge, understanding and awareness may not be uppermost in their priorities. Clearly, they all enjoy being out in the hills, but most will have been seduced by the physical and mental challenge associated with adventuring in the hills. This is not to say that they don’t appreciate the environment, and most are very receptive to being told a little more about it. It has however been the case, in my experience, that many candidates joining me on mountain leader and mountaineering instructor courses have presented with limited environmental knowledge and they too had discovered the hills as a medium for physical and mental challenge. To be a successful and responsible mountain leader they face the tricky task of gleaning information about the environment from a range of sources and too many have fallen into repeating some dubious mountain leader myths. The flower that made the book happen, more than any other, was probably tormentil. I’d been told several times on mountain leader assessment courses that tormentil was a buttercup. Now, if you are in a one-to-one situation you can deal with this quite easily. But, in a mock leadership position it’s a little trickier. Most of a potential mountain leader’s foibles can be followed through to a point whereby they can correct themselves, ideally before it gets too dangerous. But, if a potential leader turns to a group and tells them something incorrect, then what should the assessor do? It’s not nice telling people they are wrong especially immediately, and in front of, their peers. If, however these mistakes are not corrected immediately then they can be repeated four-fold, given that a mountain leader assessment course typically has four candidates and be taken as true by the other assesses and passed on.

What was needed was a source of information directly aimed at this audience. My attempt to help with this has been the production of Nature of Snowdonia (Pesda Press 2020). The idea of the book was to bring together a range of things that the reader/walker/ climber might see on a typical day out on the hill. Right from the start it wasn’t about daisies, buttercups and clover or about the rarer arctic- alpines. It was a book about tormentil, thyme, and thrift, about striations, erratics and map lichen; the things you

Rhigoliadau, sy’n cael eu drysu’n aml gan arweinwyr mynydd gyda phlanau haenu a phlanau hollti ● Striations, often confused with bedding planes and cleavage by mountain leaders Nature of Snowdonia - Mike Raine

actually see. Inevitably climbers find themselves off the beaten track, so some awareness of the rarer arctic-alpines, including the iconic Snowdon Lily was thought worthy of inclusion. But the broad picture is an attempt to illustrate and explain the everyday nature of a walk in upland Snowdonia, across a range of topics.

Previously leaders would have needed separate volumes on flowers, birds, insects, grasses, trees, ferns, fungi, mammals, mosses, lichens, geology, geography and archaeology to say nothing of the ways of hill farming or the back story of myths and legends. Carrying a dozen or more identification guides has never been something that has appealed to those travelling as light as they can through the hills. This made it a bit unreasonable to fail or defer a candidate for not having what might be considered a good, or even a basic, level of knowledge.

My idea was to take pictures of everything I saw on the hill for a couple of years and then stick it in a book. This, essentially, was the first edition of Nature of Snowdonia. I like to think it has matured over the years, found its audience and speaks to them in an understandable way, no botanist keys here! We identify flowers by season and by colour with a hint towards habitat and size within the text. The second edition is greatly expanded, extensively re-written and has over 100 new photographs. Book info, price and preferred purchase options https://www. mikeraine.co.uk/product-page/nature-of-snowdonia-2nd-edition

Mike Raine is part of the instructional team at Plas y Brenin, the National Outdoor Centre and the author of Nature of Snowdonia (Pesda Press 2020). You can follow him on Twitter @mikeraine or like his Facebook Blog ‘Notes from the Hill’. Look out too, for his private Nature of Snowdonia workshops.