SNOWDONIA
(WITH A PADDLE)
Lured by the daft challenge of exploring a tiny island in the middle of a remote mountain lake, we head for the heart of the NORTH WALES mountains – with a folding kayak and paddle for company.
I hauled the kayak onto my back and set off up the mountain. I’d be willing to bet that’s not a phrase that’s appeared in Trail very often. But that was the plan for the day’s adventure. This wasn’t one of those eccentric ‘round Ireland with a fridge’-type challenges though. Oh no. This was a voyage of discovery, a conquest of new and untrodden territory. For once, I was venturing into the hills with a different objective in mind: not a summit, but an island.
The island in question is only a couple of metres wide. It lies not quite slap-bang in the middle of Llyn yr Adar, one of the many mountain lakes north of Cnicht, in the heart of Eryri (Snowdonia). It’s a quiet spot, only really frequented by wild campers and anglers. Over the years, I’d visited the lake dozens of times and always wondered: what would it be like to set foot upon that little hump of grass-covered rock?
Llyn yr Adar isn’t the only lake with an island in Eryri, as there are a few others. Not as many as you’ll find in the Lake District, with its myriad meres, waters and tarns, but there are a handful of Eryri islands. And one in particular that has some intriguing legends attached to it.
Lake of legends
In 1188, a priest and traveller called Giraldus Cambrensis wrote of a remarkable lake that had a ‘floating island driven from one side to the other by the wind’. Giraldus speculated that the floating island was a piece of turf being kept afloat by marsh gases. The lake thus came to be known as Llyn y Dywarchen (‘lake of the turf’). The island was apparently still floating around in 1698, when astronomer Edmund Halley claimed he’d swum out to it and steered it around the lake with a punt. The 18th century Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant also observed the floating island, noting that when it drifted close to the shore, cattle would occasionally walk onto it while grazing, and be carried away to distant parts of the lake.
Another tale tells of a young farmer, who found a beautiful fairy reclining by the lake. She refused to tell him her name but agreed to marry him if he could discover it, which he did by eavesdropping on a fairy conversation as he returned from market. Clever lad. Anyway, the fairy’s name was Bela, and she agreed to take the farmer as her husband on condition that he never touched her with iron. Inevitably, the tragic day came when he unthinkingly threw her a horse’s bridle and she vanished instantly into the lake. He was left heartbroken. Feeling a bit
