A Path to Nowhere

Below is a short observational piece inspired during a visit to Wales. Calvin

A Path to Nowhere

Llanberis, a village buried amidst the hills of Snowdonia, happened to be my starting-point for a hike up Mount Snowdon.  I looked forward to the prospect.  The sun was at its brightest, and there was not a wisp of haze.  My route began between the Llanberis Lake Railway’s boarding point and the Padarn Country Park.  Having gathered my kit together, I set off towards Llanberis Lake.

            There were in fact three paths: a nature trail and the Snowdon walkway were sign-posted, but the third was not marked.  My curiosity ignited immediately.  I suspected the third route to be short, uninteresting, and not worthy of signage.  There was no harm investigating, just to be certain.

            The path led between a steep hill and a copse.  Beyond the trees, the mystery began to unravel.  A pool lay here, hemmed in on the far side by a rocky bluff.  The water’s colour was the most striking iridescent blue, metallic, shimmering, fantastically bright.  Its beauty held me motionless for some time, but I realised such vibrancy had to be unnatural.  Something had caused it, and I suspected industrial pollution.  There was something else about the water, or rather, the air over it.  For some reason, there appeared to be a hazy effect above the surface, as though the scene were being viewed through a camera’s soft-focus filter.  I shifted my position, but the haze remained, adding a romantic, almost magical edge to the beauty spot.

            I glimpsed something hanging through the trees.  It was a small red railway truck suspended from a rusting jib.  These objects seemed ludicrously out of place, but it was now obvious there had been workings of some kind here, and this dazzling lakelet served as the spoil pond.

            The path curved to reveal another piece in an intriguing jigsaw.  Up the hillside, a cutting had been made, and a narrow-gauged railway ascended out of sight.  Everything about this place seemed strange.  The cutting was of some antiquity.  The rails, distorted and encrusted with flaking rust rime, had long been redundant, and yet the cutting itself remained free of grass or plants — odd because both banks were replete with growth, and the bare soil did not look tended or much trodden.  Not far off, flagstone steps ascended.  Some were loose, and the entire stairway was roughly hewn and without the security of a handrail — a strange omission given the ever-increasing tyranny of the health-and-safety paramilitaries’ carping about bumper car dangers, the perils of snowballing and conkers, or any covering of winter ice no matter how millimetric in thickness.  The flight climbed a hundred feet or so and emerged onto a flat terrace thirty yards deep, carved out of the hillside.  This was journey’s end.  All about lay irregular pieces of blue-grey slate like shed dragon scales.  The thinner fragments crunched underfoot; larger pieces sat half buried in the mess.  It was a scene of hasty abandonment.  Near the cutting stood shoulder-high stacks of cut slate.  Each slab was five feet long, two wide, and four inches thick.  At the back of the terrace, a ten-foot strip of bare slate marred the hillside as a dark scar.  Its face caught the sun in places as I moved, making the rock appear wet and as though cut just the day before.  A line of stout slate dwellings overviewed the precipice.  They were small, rectangular, squat, flat-roofed, and functional, utterly functional in fact.  They were so bereft of aesthetics, their ugliness seemed a begrudging concession, a reluctant admission of the weather’s privations.

            I took out my Pentax and fired off a few shots of the hovels, but it was only after having snapped several picturesque landscapes from the terrace’s edge that I realised I was missing the point.  I was basking in the heat and luxuriating in the tranquillity, the solitude, and the sheer beauty of the hills.  Snowdon’s great mass, serene and blued by distance, dominated the skyline.  Nearer mountains, bedecked in an olive-green drab of fir and larch trees, tumbled down to the long, thin shoreline of Llanberis Lake, which stretched to the right almost out of sight.  Closer still, great outcrops of grey rock erupted from the earth, their rugged detail emphasised by early sunlight.  Shining through it all as a backlit sapphire was the gleaming quarry pool.

How different the outlook, though, for those wretched souls who had lived in and worked this place: a captive community toiling amidst the din, filth, and perils of a working quarry.  Each breath, laced with razor-edged slate dust, induced emphysema, increased misery, and hastened death.  Life was Saturday night’s binge and the dutiful trudge to Sunday chapel.  Such rugged remoteness would add to the workers’ pains, their scenic appreciation eroded by drudgery, hunger, ill health, and bone-deep weariness.  Most desperate of all was, for those bygone workers, week followed week, month after month, each a milestone on a path, but where did it lead? — not to an escape from poverty, toil, or sickness.  Perhaps the path led to salvation, or perhaps it was a path to nowhere.

            I put my SLR away, shucked my bag onto my shoulders, and headed off, more thoughtful than when I had arrived.

 

© (2014) Calvin Hedley all rights reserved