Tryfan, in its own contour lines.

What the print holds

Tryfan on paper

Tryfan is lower than its neighbours and looks bigger than any of them, because it stands apart at the end of a ridge with nothing to hide behind. On the print it is a tight, narrow knot of rings in the middle of the sheet, longer from north to south than from east to west — the fin itself — with its lines packed hard against one another down the east and west faces. The default frame is only five kilometres across, the closest of any mountain here, because Tryfan is small and everything that makes it Tryfan is close to it.

North of the summit the rings run down the north ridge to the valley floor, where Llyn Ogwen appears near the top of the frame as a flat, blank shape with a single line around its shore. South of the summit the ground dips to Bwlch Tryfan and then climbs again, into the broad high ground of Glyder Fach, which fills the lower part of the sheet with wider, rounder lines. Glyder Fach is the higher of the two, at 994 metres, and its rings climb past Tryfan's — the fin wins by shape, not by height.

Twenty metres separate one line from the next here, and a heavier line marks each hundred. The summit knot is small enough that the last few rings are tiny, and the mark sits on them with the surveyed height beside it. The elevation data reads the top of the fin lower than the survey does, because a ridge that narrow falls between the points the data samples; the height on the sheet is the surveyed one.

The Carneddau begin across the valley at the top of the sheet, their slopes drawn as long, parallel lines climbing away from the lake.