Dark Skies

by Tiffany Francis-Baker

  I’d brought my snazzy bridge camera to take photos of the birds and scenery along the way, so my phone stayed quietly stowed in my pocket with only its GPS tracker working away to record our route and mileage. The phone itself had been on silent for about eight years as I hate ringtones, so we soon forgot all about it, focusing instead on the beauty of the place, turquoise lakes sparkling in the spring sun, quartz rocks and luscious greenery, birds hopping over the paths and into rainwater puddles that had formed in the rocks overnight. We saw a wheatear washing himself: a handsome, ground-dwelling bird with a bluish-grey back and a sharp, black cheek stripe outlined in white. This was the first I’d seen of the year, as they migrate over from Africa in the spring, another species to fly through the night, relying on their fat reserves for energy.

  The Miners’ Track climbed across the base of Snowdon and wrapped itself around the mountain like a snake, the steps crumbling, hikers stumbling over craggy stones and boulders. The path felt old – not just in the sense that mountains are geologically old, but with a taste of human history too. It was built to serve the Britannia Copper Mine on Snowdon, but before that the miners had had to heave the copper up the eastern side of the mountain so it could be taken down to Llyn Cwellyn on the other side by a horse-drawn sledge, where it was then transported on to the town of Caernarfon to be processed and dispatched.

  The first recorded mine on Snowdon dates back to the 1800s, but there are rumours of copper mining here in the Roman period. In the mid-eighteenth century, demand for copper increased when warships started being built with copper bottoms to prevent worms boring into the wood, and a mine was opened at Cwm Dyli, where the hydroelectric power station now stands. Copper extraction on Snowdon was never a lucrative endeavour, with many mining companies going bankrupt and most closing for good by the start of the First World War. The mountain is still speckled with fragments of mining history: an abandoned barracks for the miners, the ruined crushing mill, crumbling buildings and even subterranean sections of the mine that can be explored with an experienced guide. The Miners’ Track took us past a lake called Llyn Llydaw which, although beautiful, we had heard was ecologically almost barren, a result of contamination from the shafts of the old copper mines. On the bank overlooking the lake stood the remnants of the abandoned mine, a haunting, broken building jutting out of the mountain like it had been hewn from Snowdon itself, staring morbidly across the blue lake.

  Travel back a few centuries, and this is where legend claims King Arthur came across the Lady of the Lake one night. Given powers of enchantment by the goddess Diana, she enticed Arthur and gave him his sword, Excalibur. Alfred Lord Tennyson reimagined the scene in his poem collection Idylls of the King, in which Arthur reflects on his first visit to the lake:

  ‘Take my brand Excalibur,

  Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how

  In those old days, one summer noon, an arm

  Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,

  Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

  Holding the sword – and how I row’d across

  And took it, and have worn it, like a king.’

  As he lies wounded, Arthur asks his marshal Sir Bedivere to return Excalibur to the lake in order to fulfil the prophecy etched onto the blade. On his third attempt, hypnotised by the beauty of the bejewelled sword, Sir Bedivere manages to throw the sword into the water and recalls how he saw the Lady of the Lake for himself:

  ‘Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems

  Should blind my purpose, for I never saw,

  Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die,

  Not tho’ I live three lives of mortal men,

  So great a miracle as yonder hilt.

  Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him;

  But when I look’d again, behold an arm,

  Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

  That caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him

  Three times, and drew him under in the mere.’

  It was easy to imagine an enchantress emerging from the lake, but the abandoned mine brought darker thoughts into my head. I remembered learning about mining communities on Victorian Day at primary school, when we’d all dress up in smocks, play hoop-and-stick, and have sepia photos taken. We were told how entire families were encouraged, out of poverty and the need to survive, to work in the mines, although I later found out that coal mining was more associated with child labour than copper and tin. Women were expected to carry the same loads as men while working for less pay (can you imagine?), and to continue working into the last days of pregnancy. Both women and children, who were smaller than their male colleagues, were required to crawl through tunnels less than 60cm high for 12–14 hours a day, hauling wagons for coal, tin and copper, to which they were attached with chains. The air quality was also low in oxygen and full of carbonaceous particles from blasting and mineral dust, with the air in one Cornish mine in Gwennap described as so thick with powder smoke that the workers could barely see their own hands. It wasn’t until 1842, after years of campaigning by the Victorian philanthropist Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, that the Mines Act was passed, prohibiting the employment of women and children under 10, although the working conditions and long hours were still terrible for the remaining employees, many of whom died in accidents or through severe lung conditions.

  We departed the abandoned mine and the lake and continued hiking up the Miners’ Track, the air cooling as we walked, the wind bristling on the back of my neck. It was not long before the ground became smothered in patches of snow, thin and watery at first but soon forming thick, velvet slabs, smooth and untouched by footprints or pawprints. We greeted other hikers on their way back, and most told us smugly that we’d never reach the top. Nevertheless, we persisted, and soon came upon two men in their sixties who confirmed that they had been to the summit that day, laughing that if they could do it, so could we. We were delighted! Ever optimistic, I was always more interested in what could happen rather than what should, and if these healthy sexagenarians could clamber up there, we would too. With renewed vigour, we kept hiking until the path steepened, and was soon lost under the snow. We half-climbed, half-crawled our way to the summit, every step ascending into colder, bitter winds. The path had disappeared behind us, and we could now only traverse over slabs of rock, sheets of snow and glassy layers of ice that made us slip and stumble up the mountain. Eventually, we pulled ourselves up the final shelf of snow and rock to see the mountain railway, closed until summer, abandoned in the early spring weather and glowing copper-red against the snow. We followed it up to the peak and there, 1,085 metres above sea level, a trig point stood brave and firm against the weather, the beacon of hope for every hiker in Britain. It was built on a platform encircled by two flights of stairs, and, battling the wind, we climbed carefully to the top and looked out over the mountain into a panorama of ice and mist.

  It was still broad daylight – at least, further down the mountain it was. Up here, the weather was so ferocious that the sky was opaque, the colour of slate, bearing down on us like the vengeful spirit of Rhitta Gawr himself. The rest of Snowdonia might not have been as tempestuous as the mountain summit, but it reminded me of how wild this place was, and how to live here must be to surrender yourself to the power of the elements. Nevertheless, the journey here had been mesmerising, the landscape of Snowdon encapsulated in an enchantment of its own, and I understood why Charles Darwin had written in 1835 that this mountain was ‘more beautiful than any peak in the Cordillera’ of the Andes. We caught our breath, took a swig of coffee and enjoyed one last look at the bleak, brave beauty of the mountain, before leaving the trig point platform and starting our long descent back to the ground.

  This was easier said than done. As most hikers know, the climb down is often more difficult than the climb up, a lesson I learned the hard way when I completed the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge with my friends Sacha and James: by the time
we had finished descending the final peak, our knees were obliterated, and we found ourselves sitting in a traumatised huddle in the Golden Lion pub in Horton-in-Ribblesdale, eating lasagne in silence.

  The path down from Snowdon’s summit was hidden by snow and ice, so rather than trying to inch down at a snail’s pace, I decided to traverse the slope sitting down – a speedy but chilly method that required me to make a snowplough with my legs to stop me falling off the edge and, at one point, crashing into someone’s dog. We soon made it down past the snowiest peak and back into the warmer, greener plateaux of the lower mountain, where we decided to take the Pyg Track back for a slightly rockier route home.

  By the time we arrived back at the camper van it was late afternoon, and the car park was almost empty. We warmed up over soup and cider, and plotted a short route through the park to one of the waterfalls the area had become famous for. Our layers shed and our bellies full, we started up the camper van and left Pen-y-Pass, winding slowly through the glittering landscape now glowing with a few streaks of sunlight filtering through the afternoon clouds. On the way to the waterfall we passed through a vast, desolate moorland, empty of buildings or people, just miles and miles of burgundy heather that had not yet bloomed with the mauve flowers of a new summer. It was so beautiful, so still and golden in the evening light that we decided to abandon our waterfall plans and sleep here – a night on the moor with nothing but the wind and rocks for company. We parked up and made tea, the sunset already fading and the downy light of dusk settling over the moor.

  In a parallel universe, this would have been an ideal place to find a bird of prey I had only ever seen once, flying across the road on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. The hen harrier is one of the most persecuted birds of prey in Britain, with fewer than 1,000 breeding pairs remaining in the UK – and only four in England. For most of Britain’s history they were widespread throughout the country, but during the nineteenth century they were driven to the brink of extinction by persecution from gamekeepers – which was then legal – and dramatic changes in land use. After the Second World War, hen harriers spread out from their dwindling populations on Orkney and the Hebrides and recolonised their upland ranges, aided by new legislation that protected wildlife, a downward trend in gamekeeping, and the replanting of forests. Despite this, hen harrier numbers are still a fraction of what research suggests they should be, and most illegal persecution is now connected with population control associated with the management of grouse moors.

  The clue is in the name – hen harriers are natural predators for red grouse, which are bred in large numbers to feed the demand for the grouse-shooting industry, a lucrative pastime that can lead to hundreds of birds being shot each day. I can’t bring myself to call it a sport because in sport both sides need to know they are playing and to have an equal chance at winning. The more birds available, the more shoots the landowners can charge for, so to keep numbers up they rid the land of every predator they can, including foxes, corvids, stoats and weasels. And while it is illegal to shoot any bird of prey in Britain, year after year satellite-tagged birds go missing around grouse moors; some are found shot, poisoned or trapped, while others disappear off the face of the earth entirely. The RSPB has even captured video footage of gamekeepers putting out plastic decoy birds to draw others in before trapping and killing them. As a general rule the shooting industry condones raptor persecution, and most agree that it is only the minority of ‘bad apple’ gamekeepers who are causing the damage. Some suggest it is a mindset that’s handed down between generations of gamekeepers, and that shooting birds of prey is just a natural part of grouse-moor management. If this is the case, how can that kind of behaviour survive in a modern, progressive Britain?

  In many ways it’s a complicated issue, and in others it’s not. Grouse-shooting is a rural industry that provides employment for lots of people. There is also proof that grouse moors can be thriving habitats for other wildlife, such as curlews and other ground-nesting birds, although this is hardly surprising when most of their predators have been shot. Some claim grouse-shooting is ‘traditional’, which is often an easy way to justify barbaric and outdated actions such as fox-hunting, slavery and gender inequality. Take away the economic benefits, the love of tradition and the eerie pleasure that comes from killing things, and the bare bones of the situation are this: hen harriers and other birds of prey, which have been living in harmony with the British landscape for thousands of years, are being illegally persecuted to the point of extinction in order to keep more red grouse alive so that they, in turn, can be shot for ‘sport’. If there is logic there, I can’t understand it.

  To top it off, many grouse moors are also intensively burned – far more than the heathland burned for normal conservation purposes – to engineer the perfect habitat for red grouse. This exposes precious peatland that provides a home for wildlife, helps clean water, prevents flooding, and stores carbon. When it is disturbed and exposed to the air, the carbon stored in the soil decomposes and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Research carried out by the RSPB suggests that 27 per cent of the UK’s blanket bog has already lost its peat-forming vegetation due to over-burning, and if we don’t restore these upland peatlands soon, carbon-dioxide emissions are expected to increase by 30 per cent with every 1°C rise in average global temperatures.

  Standing outside under the evening sky, staring out over the tranquillity of the moor, it was difficult to imagine birds being shot from the sky, but that same week I had read a news report about a satellite-tagged bird known as Aalin, born on the Isle of Man the year before, that had stopped transmitting just east of us in Wrexham, north Wales. I scanned the horizon for signs of life, but I knew I would never see a harrier here, despite their bright, pale feathers and hypnotic flight displays that have given them the nickname ‘Skydancer’.

  We opened the sliding door of the camper van and cooked dinner with the moor laid out in front of us, our lights being the only source of electricity we could see. It grew darker, until the individual tufts of heather merged into one swathe of red, an ocean of moorland surrounding us on all sides. We had only been there half an hour or more when, suddenly, in the distance I saw a shape. It was a bird, soft and ethereal, floating down like a spirit across the landscape, but it was so far away that I couldn’t tell what it was. The binoculars were almost useless at this level of light, and I could do nothing but stare at the bird, willing it into a shape that I could recognise. Finally it drifted closer, searching for something in the heather, and I realised what it was. Certainly not a hen harrier, but another species that is so associated with sharing its habitat that the two birds are known for harassing each other into dropping their prey, a behaviour known as kleptoparasitism.

  It was a short-eared owl, gliding low across the heather, his talons almost brushing the tips of the foliage, wings spread wide and yellow eyes focused on the ground beneath him. Even in the half-light, I recognised his bulbous head and dark stripe on each wing flashing as he soared past and away again, off across the moor. After a few metres he landed and disappeared, before erupting again out of the heather a few moments later, back to his hunt, scouring through the undergrowth for something alive. Under only the light of the night sky, he was hauntingly pale, a ghostly vision across the moor like a creature from a Welsh folk tale.

  I love folk tales. I remembered hearing about the cyhyraeth, a hideous spectre from Welsh mythology whose name literally means ‘flesh-wraith’. With withered arms, rotten teeth, tangled hair and corpse-like features, she is thought to roam the Welsh wilderness at night, approaching the window of a person about to die and calling their name before releasing a disembodied moaning sound three times as a warning that their life is coming to an end. She is sometimes conflated with the myth of the Gwrach y Rhibyn, another banshee-like figure who shrieks into the night: Fy mhlentyn! Fy mhlentyn bach! meaning ‘My child! My little child!’ Legend claims that she haunts P
ennard Castle, a twelfth-century ruin overlooking the sea and built in one night by a sorcerer trying to escape the invading Normans. The Gwrach y Rhibyn wanders the castle grounds at night, dragging her rotting body through the ruins, cursing anyone who dares sleep within its walls.

  Another myth that haunts the Welsh wilderness is that of the Tylwyth Teg, a race of fairy folk that lived in forests and caves near running water. Some of these fairies were benevolent; others were cruel and cunning, thought to have ugly and contorted bodies and faces. One story tells of how the Tylwyth Teg harboured an obsession with blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies, and stole them from their homes in exchange for a changeling baby. At first these appeared identical to the stolen child, but as they grew they became shrivelled, bad-tempered and nasty. When one woman’s child was stolen she sought the help of a magician, who instructed her to do three things. First, she was to remove the top of a raw egg and start stirring the contents, which made the changeling mutter in an otherworldly tongue. Next, she had to go to a crossroads at midnight during a full moon, in order to spy on the changeling taking part in a secret fairy gathering and confirm he was not her real son. Lastly, she was to buy a black hen and, without plucking it first, roast it over an open fire. When the last feather dropped off, the changeling disappeared and her son was returned, safe and well.

  I don’t usually believe in ghost stories, but standing there on the edge of the moor, watching the short-eared owl circle in silence over the heather and grass, it was easy to imagine changeling children and spectral, rotting figures staggering down the track towards us. It was an eerie place, and far removed from the towns and cities that surrounded it. After some time, the owl disappeared over the heather, away to new territories where it would continue hunting for prey. Then it was entirely dark – no lilac light of dusk to cast a faded glow over the landscape – just blackness, and from the door of the camper van we could see nothing at all. Even the stars and moon were out of sight, hidden by a blanket of cloud that had settled over every inch of sky several hours ago and refused to move. There was nothing at all to look at but darkness, yet I could still feel the presence of the moorland stretched out in front of me. I could hear the insects murmuring in the long grass, a light wind sweeping over the rocks and up to the mountain on the horizon, and the thought of what might be waiting in the shadows lifted the hairs on my arms. I shivered. The bright lights of modernity hadn’t yet penetrated Snowdonia, and in their isolation, away from the rest of the world, the inhabitants had conjured up their own truths and histories, their own interpretations of the human experience and what lay beyond it.