Dear fellow travellers,
The highest mountain in Wales is shown on older maps as Snowdon. If you follow the Watkin Path towards the top, you pass beneath a smaller, shapely summit. That latter mountain does not have the height of its celebrated neighbour, but has the benefit of fine views of Snowdon. Wales’ loftiest summit looks very fine from Yr Aran.
Yr Aran means ‘the peak’ in Welsh, a translation that is somehow disappointing. It is too prosaic, marking out this peak as having no name. And yet it is actually somehow apt. After all, from the right angle, Yr Aran looks exactly like a mountain peak should. In elevation, it’s not quite a Matterhorn but it is pleasingly triangular and pointy. It reflects the iconic mountain depicted in the drawings of so many children.
One of the joys of walking in the Welsh hills, beyond the stark beauty of the landscape, are the names of the hills and the stories behind them. Some, like Yr Aran, feel very literal. The ‘three fingers’ of Tryfan are clearly visible if you look at the mountain from the right angle. Pen Yr Ole Wen (the ‘head of the white slope’) seems about right when covered in a dusting of snow.
The names of other Welsh hills link to history and legend. Elidir Fawr (‘Big Elidir’) refers to a warrior-king of the 6th century. Carnedd Llewelyn is named, some believe, after one of the last independent princes of Wales. And Snowdon – the English name of which is a derivation from ‘snowy hill’ – is known in Welsh as Yr Wyddfa.
Since 2022 the Snowdonia National Park has decided to use the Welsh language names both for the mountain and for the park itself. On its website, and in most hill-walking publications, Yr Wyddfa is the tallest mountain in the Eryri National Park. There is debate around where both the name of the mountain and the name of the park come from. Eryri is believed to come from a word meaning ‘highlands’ or ‘uplands’, while Yr Wyddfa is derived from the Welsh word for burial cairn and based on the legend of the giant Rhitta.
Rhitta, who once ruled Eryri, was buried in the mountain after some adventuring that led to his downfall. Some believe he was killed by King Arthur, who beat the giant in a duel. Others tell the story of another giant, Idris, who lived on a nearby mountain (Cadair Idris) that now bears his name.
Ever since I was distracted by my parents with the meanings of those Welsh mountain peaks during tiring walks in the hills, I have been interested in how places came to be named. Sometimes, when it was misty, we searched for a ‘Brocken spectre’, that reflection of ourselves as a ghostly presence on the hillside. It would be years later before I climbed the Brocken itself, a great hill in central Germany famous as the place of the witches’ dance in Faust, a mountain climbed and written about by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe and Heine, and which – among all the stories and legends – has a number of explanations for its name, from German words for a ‘shapeless mass’ to more poetic origins based on the wood used for witchcraft.
Not far from the Brocken, in the Harz mountains – derived from a word meaning ‘hill forest’ – are two villages called Sorge (‘worry’) and Elend (‘misery’). I puzzled over these names on the map. How terrible it must be to live here! And yet, both seem to be pleasant enough places as we passed through on the way to walk up the Brocken. Perhaps they speak to the long memory of harsh winters and poor harvests, or of visiting witches and what might take place in the immediate aftermath of Walpurgis Night.
In the Czech Republic, close to Karlovy Vary (named for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV) is a beautiful town called Loket. Climb the hill to the old town and you will soon see that it is surrounded on three sides by the River Ohre, crooked like a bent arm. It is this geographical feature that gave the town its name in not one but two different languages. Can you guess what it is? In Czech, it is called Loket. In German, Elbogen. Both came from the word used for the ‘elbow’ in each language respectively.
In the far north of Norway, the building of a church in 1862 gave the town of Kirkenes (‘church headland’) its name. Religion has often been evoked, especially when places are being named by people a long way from home. Elsewhere, it is more a case of say what you see. In the French Alps, climbers sleep overnight at the Dent Parrachée (‘broken tooth’) mountain hut before ascending the peak of the same name. And then, like Karlovy Vary, there is the desire to honour someone by preserving their name in place for all eternity.
Back in Eryri, on the Llanberis (named for Saint Peris) Pass, the old Pen-y-Gwryd (‘head of the river Gwyrd’) Hotel was the training base for the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary stood atop the highest mountain in the world. Of course, the Mr Everest after whom the peak was named had no connection with the Himalayas, and never saw, let alone came close to the mountain. Sir George Everest was the Surveyor General of India, and it was his successor Andrew Waugh who, when tasked with naming what had just been ‘discovered’ as the tallest mountain in the world, decided to name the mountain after his colleague.
As it turns out, we’re even saying it wrong as Sir George’s name was pronounced ‘Eev-rist’ rather than ‘Ever-rist’. So what about the local names? The Nepalis say Sagarmatha, meaning ‘goddess of the sky’ while the Tibetan name for the mountain is Qomolangma (‘holy mother’). Still, whatever we call the mountain in the future, climbers will no doubt make their way to the top via the Western Cwm, named by George Mallory using the Welsh word for a valley enclosed by mountains. From Eryri to Everest, the names of places are full of stories to help us understand where we are and how we, collectively, got here.
Paul Scraton
