Lying in the heart of the Snowdonia National Park, Cwm Idwal is one of the most accessible and spectacular post-glacial landscapes in Wales. A bowl shaped hollow, sculpted by ice, cradling Llyn Idwal a beautiful lake of cold clear water.
This was the very first National Nature Reserve in Wales, recognised as one of the best demonstrations of glacial processes and the habitat of rare Arctic/Alpine plants. In 1831 Charles Darwin visited the Cwm and discovered that the rocks held the fossils of tiny sea creatures and plants, possibly one of the many clues which would eventually lead to his ideas about natural selection and the publication of his masterpiece ‘On the origin of species’. 10 years later Darwin once again visited Cwm Idwal and this time he began to understand the origins of the Cwm. The scoured rocks, erratic boulders, the lake and moraines, all spoke to him of a landscape once carved by ice.
A place rich in folk law, legend suggests that the lake was named after Idwal the son of the 12th century Welsh prince Owain Gwynedd. Idwal was a ‘beautiful and scholarly youth’, certainly not a warrior, and so while away at war Owain entrusted the care of his son to his brother Nefydd Hardd. Nefydd was apparently a jealous man, his own son Rhun was witless and lacking any talent. One day when walking along the lakeside with the boys, Nefydd pushed the young Idwal into the lake and laughed as he drowned. The devastated Prince Owain banished Nefydd from Gwynedd and named the lake after his son. The birds which had inhabited the lake fled in sorrow and to this day legend has it that the birds will never fly over the lake.
Whatever the truth, Cwm Idwal is a wonderful place, a place of light and deep shadows, constantly moving and changing, a powerful place of extreme weather, sometimes it is possible to experience the worst and best of all seasons in a single day. A photographer's paradise, never dull and lifeless, always brimming with elusive challenge.
Purple saxifrage is one of the delights of early springtime in the Cwm. Its flowering follows the melting winter snow, usually mid-January in Snowdonia but later on the cold north westerly facing slopes of Cwm Idwal
Vibrant purple cushions of tiny blossoms, cling in small cascades to the rock faces, these Arctic/Alpines are relicts of earlier times, the ice age, when vast glaciers once flowed through Snowdonia. Purple saxifrage grows further north than any other flowering plant, and found at 4,505 meters in the Swiss Alps, it is also the highest flowering plant in Europe. Can it survive global climate change or will it retreat even further northwards and be lost to Wales? Only time will tell.
