A Cruel Lake
I’ve always felt my most human when surrounded by untamed wilds of nature that feel far from humanity. Somewhere amidst the mountains, lakes and moors of Snowdonia is a beautiful desolation that somehow expresses the loneliness that is fundamental to the human condition. It expresses it precisely because it exists without it; if we never existed, this landscape would still be here. As much as I love cities, they delude us. It is impossible to think of anything beyond the human world when you are staring at a wonder of human creation like St Paul’s Cathedral or the Colosseum, but take yourself out of that frame and you will see the real vulnerability of being a human.
But, for its unspoilt beauty, the most fascinating thing about Snowdonia is its spectral relationship with human civilisation. This is a very remote area where you are unlikely to encounter another person in open countryside but, especially around its few decent roads, the traces of humanity are everywhere. On a particularly bleak stretch about ten miles from Bala, I hadn’t seen a modern building for what felt like an eternity. To all intents and purposes, this was uninhabited territory: empty moors, black mountains shrouded in cloud and the odd field dotted with emaciated sheep or rampaging bulls but no people in sight, yet ghosts of human touches lay everywhere. Broken telegraph poles weakly supported a cable above a bog. A ruined stone farmhouse lay exposed on a hillside, one side crumbled into air. It looked centuries old and probably centuries dormant. Dry stone walls spilled their contents into unkempt grass. A sheet of corrugated iron embedded itself into the bank of a stream. Further up the stream, a modern canoe was stuck in the low-hanging branches of a lopsided tree. This broken landscape had murky human fingerprints all over it. I thought about the mysterious figures that left their marks on this terrain and felt a lonely shiver run through me.
In this same obscure section of bleak beauty stands a thoroughly terrifying monument to the destructiveness of humanity. Llyn Celyn is a very attractive lake. Standing a few miles away from the larger (and more well-known) Llyn Tegid, it laps up to the edges of mountains and moors, dragging itself from glossy if unspectacular country at one end to a moody, jagged mess of gorgeously wild terrain at the other. There is a dark secret: a village lies beneath this lake. The chapel, the school, the post office, the graveyard and all of the houses and farm lie submerged, drowned by the same species that built them. While there is something rather Romantic about the idea of ancient buildings being allowed to turn to ruin for future generations to find, the thought of a settlement being deliberately flooded is obscenely cruel. Worst of all, the village was inhabited at the time. Capel Celyn was a tiny, defenceless Welsh village, lying in an unspoilt valley. Liverpool City Council needed more water and, in their greed, sought permission to get it here by flooding an entire Welsh valley to create a reservoir. Despite the protestations of the villagers and almost every single Welsh MP, nobody listened. Wales was not consulted and an act of rape took place against its beautiful body. Fifty years ago, Capel Celyn was transformed from a home into an exploitable resource. It still lies there, its cemetery sealed under concrete and its ruins sealed under water. And so what seems a spot of natural beauty turns out to be a sickening example of human evil.
