The Nantlle Ridge walk on Sunday 4th May. Phil Moore, Martin Astley, Richard Barker & Tim Gould. Dry & broken cloud am, clearing to a sunny & warm pm with fantastic 360 degree views of mountains, Cardigan Bay, the Llyn peninsula and Anglesey.

Starting from the Rhyd Ddu main car park we headed up Y Garn then followed the obvious airy ridge, alternating easy scrambling sections on nicely rough rock with more rounded hill tops to the obelisk at Mynydd Tal-y mignedd & lunch.

After descending from the obelisk, more easy scrambling led up to Craig Cwm Silyn followed by an initially rocky Rhinog-style descent SE along the edge of Craig Penant down towards Blaen-pennant. This shortened our intended route by about 1.5k but involved crossing some barb wire fences as there was no formal path down to Blaen-pennant, and only a patchy path east of Blaen-pennant to the disused quarry – where the path ‘formally’ resumed for a little while before…

…heading down into the NW corner of Beddgelert Forest, where we had assumed it would be plain sailing to the pub at Rhyd Ddu. We were very wrong as the whole of the first section of the forest had effectively been flattened as if by a vindictive Troll – trees thrown into/across each other, hung-up stems scarily creaking with the wind and an impromptu winding path through this arboreal obstacle course. If the Nantlle ridge is a grade 1 scramble, this forest section was at least the same grade!

Back at Rhyd Ddu the beer at the Cwellyn Arms was very good, & extremely welcome on a hot afternoon. For a May bank holiday weekend in a period of good weather there were noticeably less people on this side of Snowdonia than would be expected around t’other side. The next scheduled CMC walk is Llyn Cowlyd from Capel Curig on Sun 8th June – mixed terrain, brilliant scenery and a forest section hopefully free from Troll damage.