Original subtitles

Right across our planet, there is an incredible variety of astonishing

landscapes.

One of the most beautiful anywhere in the world is

Snowdonia.

Snowdonia in North Wales is an almost miraculous haven of tranquility.

What's not to like? It's a magical place. It's like being in a fairy tale

all these trees dripping with mosses and lichens. And every time you come here,

you see a different aspect of it. It's fantastic.

It has nine mountain ranges with an extraordinary geological history.

The mountains just bring so much richness to life.

you can spend a lot of time just walking it changes your perspective of daily

life completely it has no fewer than 250 lakes it has rare

wildlife and a rich human history stretching back thousands of years

you've got the wildlife you've got the cultural history you've got so much

intermingled into this one place it's so special and it's ever changing we're

going to take you on a journey through snowdonia to admire its wonders and

discover its secrets.

Our journey begins by the Irish Sea, gliding over Cardigan Bay and along the

long, sandy beaches near Harlech.

At Morfa Harlech, Welsh for salt marsh, these beaches form a line of sand

stretching 10 kilometres along the coast.

These sand dunes are growing, constantly added to from sands blown north.

The dunes are a nature reserve.

As the sands gather, the marram grass takes hold.

This is home for an amazing array of plants and insects.

Bird life is abundant too, including the ringed plover, nesting on the beach

from March each year.

Skylarks and stonechats breed in the dunes.

Sixty metres high, on a spur of rock, sits Harlech's medieval castle.

In 1284, when the English King Edward I built Harlech Castle, it was right

beside the sea.

But the landmass is shifting.

It's going upwards.

and, over the centuries, is rising further away from the sea.

Journeying up the beaches from the castle is an estuary where the rivers

and Dewey Red meet.

Parts of this salt marsh and sandy bay can be completely submerged under water,

but with the tide out, sand and marsh stretch far out towards the sea.

The bay features villages and towns like Porthmadoc, once famous for exporting

slate.

But there's a village here unlike any other in Snowdonia.

Port Merion.

The brainchild of visionary Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams Ellis.

This town is a homage to the Italian Mediterranean.

It was his way of stating the beauty of the Snowdonian coastline.

Started in 1925, Port Merion took 50 years to complete.

Writers and artists... have flocked here, but it's most famed as the setting

the 1960s cult TV series, The Prisoner.

Travelling five kilometres northeast of Port Merion's man -made wonder, we're

dropping in on Coed Felon Reed, a much earthier Snowdonian secret.

Britain has many woods, but this is different.

Name -checked in the Mabinogion, the legendary 12th century folktale, Cowid

Felon Reed is part of a 750 -acre woodland survival story.

But it escaped destruction by the skin of its teeth.

Felled for centuries.

The chopping stopped just in time to leave us with a rich part of what is

as the Celtic rainforest.

In this patch of forest, it can rain 200 days a year.

And this damp, temperate microclimate in a gorge provides perfect conditions for

an extraordinary array of life that lives on the trees themselves.

With the woods' humidity and protection from acid rain, these trees are a

snapshot of ancient woodland from centuries ago.

And the person in charge of nursing these woods back to their full glory is

Kylie Jones -Matter.

What's not to like? It's a magical place. It's got a sort of sense of

and all these... hidden gems that you have to seek out it's like being in a

fairy tale with all these trees dripping with mosses and lichens the sound of

rushing water and around every sort of kink in the river there's a new little

vista there's just so much fascinating and every time you come here you see a

different aspect of it and there are still things to find even for people

been managing a wood for 10 years it's fantastic

Kylie's job is to help replace the conifers with trees like oaks and hazel,

which act as hosts for amazing ancient life forms.

We're coming into one of the most fascinating parts of the woods now.

The hazel here is a clue to the ancient history of this woodland.

There are species here that occur nowhere else in Wales, species of lichen

grow on the bare bark of the hazel. And there are species that have been here

since the last ice age when trees first colonised Britain.

And there's been obviously continuity in the habitat here. They're ancient

woodlands, which means they've been consistently wooded for...

a long period of time, several hundred years.

But we think these woodlands go back a really long way. If you look at the bark

of one of these hazels, you're looking at a whole encrustation of different

lichens, all kind of overlapping and butting up against one another. So what

think of as a hazel bark is a whole community of other species, and that

survived because of the continuity of the habitat in this ancient woodland.

The woods provide a home to 25 scarce mosses and liverworts, 42 rare lichens

at least one very inventive fungus.

now this is a really cool thing this unassuming black blob is a fungus called

hazel glue and it has a sneaky competitive strategy to beat other fungi

meal normally this rotten hazel stick would have fallen to the forest floor

where there would be hundreds if not thousands of other fungi wanting to

to consume it and take all its nutrients the hazel glue however

sticks these dead stems up in the canopy, grips onto them so they can't

the floor, which means it can take its leisurely time over eating up that dead

hazel and extracting all the food it needs.

So, pretty nifty strategy.

Just like in the Amazon, the plants in British forests have been used by people

for centuries.

I love this one.

This is a liverwort, this one.

called basania.

They don't have roots, and so they're really dependent on the moisture from

atmosphere. And this particular species is one that really needs an Atlantic

climate. The Celtic rainforest habitat can't regulate its own moisture, so it

needs that constant humidity.

And I always think it looks a bit zany, which is how I remember it.

Kylie's job is to manage the woodland above ground.

But in doing so, she's doing something almost more important.

There are some pretty large trees and some ancient oaks, but it's not just the

age of the trees, it's the age of the woodland itself.

So although many of the trees may be young, they're growing in a place that

woodland ecosystem, and it has been for hundreds of years.

So the big oak trees are perhaps what we see, but underneath the ground there's

a whole...

woodland network of fungi and bacteria of lichens of mosses and liverworts all

living together and forming together an ecosystem that's incredibly rare and

very precious strange though it may seem the biology of rare forest ecosystems

are now studied to see how their connectivity and systems can be applied

technology i think Ancient woodlands are a refuge for rare species

because there are so few ancient woodlands left. We would have had masses

woodland cover and now just two or three percent of the UK is covered in ancient

woodland. So these species are really clinging on in the last refuges of

suitable habitat.

I think it's why I really love doing what I do because you're protecting

last places where some of the rarest things in Wales actually live.

And you're restoring them and you're making them better and you're passing

on to future generations.

It's a great job.

With replanting and the right love and attention, in a hundred years, this

Celtic winged forest will look a little like how it did in ancient times.

Before heading for the mountains, we're going out on a limb.

It's called the Hlyn Peninsula, known as Snowdon's Arm.

Seen from space, it's a patchwork of green fields ringed almost around with a

line of yellow sand.

Criccia, with its imposing castle, guards the peninsula.

And it is thought the castle was built in the early 13th century by Llywelyn

Great, king of Gwynedd and later ruler of all Wales.

Later on, it was taken by the English, but then seized by Welsh Prince Owen

Glendower and burned to the ground. The ruins are what we see today.

It is not the only sight on the glen of military significance.

The ancient Celtic hillfort of Trier Cary is at 485 metres.

This is one of the highest hillforts in Britain.

Trier Cary, or what some have translated to Town of Giants, was built during the

Iron Age.

Up here are the remains of defences and 150 stone houses built by the Celts.

It is thought they had livestock, grew their own food and had a fresh water

spring.

The Roman invasion was the beginning of the end for many Celtic tribes, but not

this tribe.

Archaeological evidence suggests they continued to live up on this mountain

winter after winter, for another 200 years after the Romans left.

Not many people live on the Hlyn Peninsula.

and incredible wildlife rule the roost here, the westernmost tip of the flint.

But there is one person living here who knows it all very well.

Naturalist Ben Porter has been here almost his whole life, and he's studied

living environment in detail.

I think it definitely forged a much deeper connection with the landscape

you're into wildlife because you're able to understand the sort of relationships

between the species and their habitats, their landscapes, and all the

relationships and the sort of intermingling of those becomes really,

clear.

There is a real satisfaction that comes from it.

Ben's familiar with the comings and goings of over 100 species of birds that

regularly visit, including a real rarity in the British Isles.

So we've got some chuff just up ahead of us. This is quite a special species for

the Thin Peninsula, the red -billed chuff. It's a crow with a bright red

and red legs, and they forage in this sort of environment with quite short

grass, often where there's been sheep grazing and things, and they feed on.

on the larvae of beetles like dung beetles that actually exist in sort of

pats and sheep dung as well and they nest in sort of gullies and places

the cliff it's not long before ben spots more amazing

examples of the wildlife that he's now so familiar with right

now i'm looking at some small slots of guillemots that are passing through

heading north and There's been a small pod of porpoise just out there,

just now.

They often just surface a couple of times and then they'll disappear for

ten minutes and you'll just see the little rounded black backs as they sort

surface. But it's a brilliant spot for looking out to sea and seeing all sort

manner of different seabirds passing by, especially when you have a strong

onshore wind. They come quite close.

But come summer, you'll be in a really good chance of seeing rissos dolphins,

which is a real speciality of the sort of North Wales coast, the Slim

Brilliant for them, a quite scarce species of cetacean. And they'll feed on

squid, cuttlefish and octopus on the seabed.

Amazing cetaceans.

Ben's teenage years were spent on the family farm just three kilometres away

from the tip of the Llyn.

It's just two and a half by one kilometre wide and is called Bardsley

Unes En Clí in Welsh.

And he knows the visitors there very well.

Particularly on Unessentially, which is a really unique place for wildlife,

there's a specific species called the Manx Shearwater, which is a sort of

-sized seabird that only comes ashore at night, and it fills the air with this

really weird call that sailors used to think was sort of a haunted spirit of

island.

But they're incredible seabirds. They winter off South America, and they only

come to a scattering of islands around the UK to breed.

And so that is one of them, and essentially it's one of those places

,000 pairs that breed there. So you're talking a lot of birds.

And that is a really special experience to be able to see those, and you won't

get that anywhere else in North Wales.

The end of the Lynn may belong to the wildlife and farms, but for hundreds of

years people have made their mark here.

in many ways there's so many different layers of history around this area but

this is quite uh it's quite a significant point in that the pilgrims

um as far as i believe went from sort of hollywell and ended here or even on the

island this is the sort of the the westernmost point where pilgrims would

and look out to unessentially before potentially getting a boat out to the

island But beyond that, there's going to be... There's Bronze Age settlements

around these hillsides and Iron Age and there's Neolithic remnants in some

places as well. You know, it goes back, you know, hundreds and hundreds of

years.

Away from the coast...

Snowdonia is also a land of lakes, 250 of them, visible from space

as black holes in the landscape.

The largest natural lake is Bala Lake, Llyn Tegid in Welsh.

The name comes from Tegid Foyle, the husband of Cerriwen, the enchantress in

Mabinogion folk tales.

Like most of Snowdonia's lakes, it was formed during the Lappite Age.

But this lake is different.

At 6 kilometres long and 43 metres deep, it sits on the Bala Fault Line,

a deep earth fracture.

The lake's a haven for birds, too.

Visitors like the black -throated diver and the green sandpiper.

And it's a breeding ground for the great crested grebe.

Having explored the natural wonders of the Hlyn Peninsula and dipped into

Ballard's Lake, the next leg of our journey takes us into the heart of

Snowdonia.

It's time to leave the lowlands and start climbing.

We're going to the mountain ranges of Snowdonia.

The power of this dramatic and magical landscape is a huge draw to outsiders.

Every year, ten million people come to pay homage to its grandeur. Many will

climb Snowdon and other mountains.

It wasn't always that way.

Back in 1188, famous adventurer Gerard of Wales, as he travelled around looking

for recruits for the Crusades, gazed fearfully at the mountains and said, The

mountains of snow seem to rear their lofty summits even to the clouds when

viewed from the opposite coast from Anglesey.

Yes, he'd heard tales of Snowdonia's eagle perching on a stone, waiting to

on the bodies of dead men.

Fearing the worst, Gerald went around the mountains.

He dared not go through them.

Seen from above, the contours of the tightly packed mountains appear as a

of brown amid green farmland that surrounds it.

Mount Snowdon gets the glory.

But many climbers prefer a lesser -known peak.

It's thought the name Trevan comes from the phrase three stones in ancient

Welsh.

Trevan's story starts 450 million years ago with the clashing of the oceanic and

continental plates deep below the Earth's surface.

As they crunch together...

immense energy -propelled volcanic rock upwards to form the basis of Snowdonian

mountains like Trevan.

Trevan was originally five times higher than it is today, but 250 million

years of weathering and recent glaciation has reduced it.

At about 900 metres, it is by no means the highest.

Even so, climbing it can be a big challenge.

Scaling Trevan can be close to an obsession for some.

That includes mountain leader, rescue volunteer and Trevan expert, Paul Terry.

This is a mountain that just excites me.

There's something...

really unique about it in the place in this valley and its place in snowdonia

because there's not another mountain that's just so immediately accessible as

serious mountain but if you climb the east face there that's currently

completely covered in ice and snow you can be in proper mountaineering terrain

there are roots on there that extend up to about 200 meters that you can climb

on a rope that you would imagine could be anywhere in the alps or even other

mountain areas in the world but this is just a big lump of rock that is it's

aggressive it's dramatic but also it's really beautiful and there isn't another

mountain like it in this area

Then people come to climb it because they get a real sense of achievement. If

they can get to the top of this mountain, then they've done something.

The mountains just bring so much richness to life.

And if you get a chance to come out here, you can spend a lot of time just

walking. It changes your perspective of daily life completely.

Paul Terry's love affair with Trevan began when he came to study at Bangor

University just north of the mountains.

I started climbing this mountain about 20 years ago and back then I really

wasn't a very experienced hill walker and it's the obvious choice of the

mountain when you get into this valley you see it and it just draws you in. I

remember walking up there with a really good friend of mine early on in my

walking days and just feeling this most incredible sense of adventure because up

there everything changes. There's nothing like it is down in the valley.

There was a time that I climbed it in these conditions at night.

It was such an intense experience being up there, not being able to see anything

around you except for the snow and the rocks, and the silence as well which

comes when you have everything coated with snow and ice.

It just makes for such an incredible adventure. I think that's what makes

mountain so exciting.

Paul's walked and climbed up Trevan day and night, winter and summer, and by

many different routes to the summit.

What people really love about this mountain is the North Ridge, and the

Ridge is starting down in the meadows below and moving up from 300 metres up

900 metres on the summit.

The amazing thing is it's right next to a road and you can get straight onto

there. The only problem is that brings people here and the expectation that

might be able to climb it and quite often they come unstuck and end up

calling for a little bit of help.

there's another group of accomplished climbers in these parts.

A species with thousands of years of mountain experience.

Snowdonia's extraordinary wild goat.

Known as primitive, it's believed that some of a direct line of descent to

introduced here by Neolithic farmers 5 ,000 years ago.

They were kept for milk, meat, hair, and horn.

Even 200 years ago, numerous herds of wild goats roamed this landscape.

Now, there are only about 1 ,000 individuals.

Today, these goats are free to eat the grasses on high slopes, something the

less nimble sheep would be unwise to try.

Just a short walk from the challenge of Trevan is one of the other great

features of the Ogwen Valley.

The Welsh word Cwm means valley.

It became the first Welsh nature reserve over 60 years ago and has been ranked

among Britain's ten greatest natural wonders.

This is Cwm Ydwel, and this is one of the most amazing geological areas of

Snowdonia and of the UK, and it's really significant.

in terms of the history of geology, because it's an absolutely incredible

and mishmash of different geological histories.

This used to be an ocean floor, then covered over with different generations

volcanic eruptive material.

It just got folded and melted and exploded until we get what is probably

the most amazing mountain sceneries in the UK.

It's also a landscape of groundbreaking geological discovery.

Charles Darwin came to Combe -et -Val twice.

Here in 1831, he realized that the boulders around the lake containing

of marine seashells were once part of an ancient ocean deep below.

And the boulders, therefore, must have been raised to the surface by huge

in the Earth's crust.

Returning to Idval years later, Darwin realized for the first time that the

entire landscape must also have been sculpted by giant glaciers.

These boulders here, particularly...

In this grouping where you've got two massive ones that have been cleaved

are what's known as erratics.

And what's really interesting about this is that 10 ,000 years ago, about the

last ice age that we had, this whole valley, this cumb, was filled with ice

bottom to top, and it's just left now with a shallow lake.

And boulders like this were dragged off the mountainside and dragged off the

cliff and scooped up by the glacier either in the ice or under the ice.

and then left here once the ice disappeared.

Paul's growing fascination with the geology has fueled his passion to keep

walking and climbing Snowdonia.

It's dramatic, it's beautiful, and a really amazing route is actually walking

from this really lovely glacial lake, Thin Idwell.

and walking up the rock fall in the back corner and coming out over the top onto

a plateau and for me it's really reminiscent of the kind of features that

see in the lord of the rings films really dramatic and incredible scenery

before

going to mount snowden itself we're traveling north to the spectacular Abba

Falls.

In the Karnaval Mountains, one of Snowdonia's nine mountain ranges is Abba

Falls, known as Haredavao.

Here, the avant -goc, or river -goc, plunges 37 meters into the valley below.

It's a haven for nature, too.

The spray from the falls creates perfect conditions for plants like wild

angelica.

Looking up, peregrine falcons and ravens can be seen floating above.

Around 4 ,000 years ago in Neolithic times, some of the first farmers in

Snowdonia were here.

There are over 1 ,000 farms in Snowdonia.

The hilly terrain suits one animal above others.

There are more than 3

million of them here.

The best Welsh mountain sheep are hardy and good mothers.

Their lambs have adapted to survive the harsh weather.

Sheep are partly responsible for the way Snowdonia looks.

Without grazing, the lower mountain slopes will be covered in forest.

Travelling just seven kilometres west of Trevann and the Ogden Valley, we arrive

at a mountain called Elidavar.

Here are the dramatic remains of human interaction with the natural landscape.

This was the second largest slate quarry in Britain and it was called Dinorvik.

It's believed the name means Fort of the Ordoviches.

a Celtic tribe.

The slate mine here is big enough to appear as a little slate gray zone when

seen from space.

Once, 3 ,000 men were employed at this site, producing tens of thousands of

of slate each year.

But the quarry closed 50 years ago.

It wasn't the end of the story for Elodea, which will be put to use in

way entirely.

There are two lakes here, one high on the mountain, one at the base, and the

interior of the mountain is hollowed out, cavernous after hundreds of years

quarrying.

All this makes perfect conditions for a power station using water from the high

lake to drive turbines in the caverns as the water drops to the lower lake.

Out of the old technology comes the new.

Hill fort, slate quarry and now power station. And all in one

mountain.

Across the valley and just eight kilometers south of Elodea is Mount

itself.

Despite the human visitors, the mountain and its surrounds provides a home to

some incredible rare species of flora and fauna.

You might see the Ring Oozle around here.

a rare white -collared blackbird that is staging a comeback.

And, if you look carefully on Mount Snowdon, you can find a delicate flower

blooming in May and June, otherwise found far away in the Alps.

The beautiful Snowdon lily has a foothold.

With its peak at 1 ,085 meters, Snowdon is the highest mountain in England and

Wales.

In Welsh, Snowdon was once called Urbit Vyvar, the Great Tomb, or

Caernathacar, the Cairn of the Giant.

All these names speak of a land steeped in history and legends.

And Snowdon, like Halidafar, is a mountain that's had its uses.

Copper ore was found in Snowdon and mining began around the early 1800s.

Once mined, getting the copper out of the mountains was expensive and

Paths were built for the miners.

And 100 years after the mines closed, these paths are still used today by most

of the 500 ,000 people each year headed for Snowdon Summit.

Two paths start at the same place, Penny Pass.

One of the most popular is still called the Miner's Track.

Another harder route, also a miner's route, is the Pig Track.

But the Watkin Path, which opened nearly 130 years ago, is the first designated

footpath in Britain.

There's an easier way to the top of Snowdon.

The train.

Near the ruins of Dolberdan Castle is the village of Cranberry.

Board a train here and you can reach the top of Mount Snowdon one hour later.

In Snowdonia, in the industrial era, narrow -gauge railways exploded.

The Snowdon Mountain Railway was completed in 1896.

It catered for those Victorians who didn't want the struggle of walking to

summit.

There are majestic views as the Swiss -built engines heave their way up nearly

eight kilometres to the top.

And along the route are reminders of the epic volcanic story of Snowdonia's

beginnings.

Still popular today, every year in the summer months, over 100 ,000 people

the summit this way.

But there's one person who you won't find taking the mountain railway.

Author Paul Gannon has spent half a century getting to know Snowdon

inside and out.

You know, what I really love about getting up high in these mountains is

views you get looking down on the world below you and observing the nature, the

shape of the mountains and all the things you can see. When we were down

everything looked so big. From up here, everything looked so small.

You feel as if you're on top of the world. It's fantastic.

I think it's because I have studied the geology that I find the shape so

interesting to understand what on earth made these mountains, what on earth made

them the shapes they are. So incredible.

And how on earth did these billions upon billions of tons of rock get thrust up

from the ground to a kilometre or two kilometres or more above sea level?

We really want to know why and how that happened.

On the summit of Snowdon, literally just below the summit cairn, you can find

fossils of sea creatures, brachiopods, that were living in the sea 450 million

years ago when the volcanic eruptions took place that created all these rocks.

So, 450 million years ago, the summit of Snowdon...

now a kilometre above sea level, was actually below sea level.

Features in the Snowdonian landscape called sink lines show that the rocks

simply folded up at extreme heat.

But these extraordinary temperatures are not possible anywhere near the Earth's

surface.

So what tells us, in fact, the summit of Snowdon, during its lifetime, has been

drawn down to at least 12 kilometres below the surface and now brought back

to a kilometre above the surface?

And Snowdonia's dramatic landscape has proved irresistible to Paul, who has

lived here for a quarter of a century.

Having come from the flatlands of England...

There's something completely different about being in the mountains than there

is about being in the areas where the land is all flat.

And I dare I say a little tedious.

One thing you can say is there's nothing tedious about this landscape.

Mount Snowdon is a story of epic change over many.

And it's a story about how the Welsh people have lived in and used this

and rugged landscape for centuries.

One thing's for sure.

Snowdonia will always be one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.