Navigate a walk in Eryri using only the Welsh place names on the OS Explorer map, and the map becomes a story. Every summit, every valley, every stream and farm has a Welsh name that describes precisely what it is: Bwlch means pass, Cwm means valley, Llyn means lake, Mynydd means mountain, Afon means river. The landscape ceases to be a map of sounds and becomes a map of meanings. This is Experience #72 of the Snowdonia 100.
A Glossary of the Map
| Yr Wyddfa | The burial mound (of the giant Rhita Gawr) |
| Pen yr Ole Wen | Head of the white slope |
| Bwlch y Saethau | Pass of the arrows |
| Glaslyn | Blue-green lake |
| Nantgwynant | Valley of the white stream |
| Capel Curig | Chapel of Curig (a 6th-century saint) |
| Betws-y-Coed | Prayer house in the wood |
| Carnedd Llewelyn | Llewelyn's cairn |
The Exercise
Take the OS Explorer OL17 (Snowdon/Yr Wyddfa) and walk any route using only the Welsh names. At every junction, at every landmark, decode the name rather than treating it as an arbitrary label. The exercise is simultaneously a navigation exercise and a lesson in Welsh descriptive geography — and it reveals a language that is extraordinarily precise about landscape features, developed over centuries of naming by people who lived in and worked this terrain.
Place Names as History
Some Welsh place names encode mythology: Bwlch y Saethau ("pass of the arrows") is where Arthur fell in his last battle. Some encode history: Carnedd Llewelyn names the mountain for the last native Prince of Wales. Some simply describe: Pen yr Ole Wen, "head of the white slope," describes exactly what you see looking north from Llyn Ogwen. The map is a layer of the Welsh past laid over the present landscape.
Experience #72 of 100 — Language and Culture category.
Independently written — Snowdon.com