This month Big G takes us to a curious spot on the outskirts of Llanberis, a kind of ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ sort of place:

And how - dear friends are we to precisely differentiate between winter and summer as we look through the rods of driven droplets?
Temperature - that’s it; it‘s warmer between the great showers. Warm enough for the midge eggs to hatch among the stretching fronds of bracken, so that the still air of evening is filled with tiny hunters vainly striving to make a mark and replicate themselves, just so that future generations of boulderers can be equally in awe at the ability of nature to interrupt the simple task of rock-worship to a point of the most extreme and tear-jerking frustration, as work and transport and...bracken and precipitation and warm air conspire against us.

We will not be defeated. No. Not even if we are driven to the most trivial and convenient boulders due to lack of time or spirit. And sometimes it is these boulders that shall separate us from the pack and make us feel special again, by the caress of their features, and by their setting among the natural beauty that shall raise us up again.

Go you then, to the shores of Llyn Peris, where the crested grebe calls shrill across its echo-ey kingdom and the solitary goose honks a low hollow honk in the silence.
Park at the Fish-Skin Wall car park and follow the shore back toward Beris until a broad hidden inlet leads you down to the ‘Sub’.

Weird name - Weird rock. Its perfect upper surfaces give way to smoother flanks -and here is the thing; it goes under water occasionally! Save for its rough-weathered top - it goes under when they turn on the pumps across the lake.

As you are slapping the upper slopers, as you are piano-playing the line of designer crimps that grace its smooth wall, as you are grappling with the right-hand arête, ‘they’ will be coming home from work and putting on their kettles and turning on their fifty inch tellies and putting more pies in the oven, whilst you are out here getting stronger and leaner and feeling the harsh edges and straining the fibres of your bodies as, noble savages, hunters of the uncaptured sloper.

Hold your heads high.
Especially if the water comes in!

Love, Big G

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