Yr Wyddfa, in its own contour lines.

What the print holds

Yr Wyddfa on paper

Yr Wyddfa is a hub rather than a spire: ridges leave the summit in several directions, and each is a mountain walk with its own name. At the default frame of seven kilometres that makes a star of crowded lines at the centre of the sheet, its arms running out between deep hollows.

East of the summit lies the Horseshoe. Glaslyn sits in the cwm immediately below the top, a small flat shape in a steep bowl of lines, and Llyn Llydaw lies lower and further east, longer and wider. The ridges ring them both: Garnedd Ugain and the knife-edge of Crib Goch on the northern side, the cliffs of Y Lliwedd on the southern. On the print Crib Goch is the thinnest ridge on the sheet, two lines of contours almost touching along its crest.

To the south the main ridge drops over Bwlch Main towards the neat rings of Yr Aran, which stand near the bottom of the frame as a small mountain of their own. West and north of the summit the slopes run longer and more evenly, towards Llanberis and the Snowdon Ranger path, so the western half of the print is calmer than the eastern — the same asymmetry anyone who has climbed from both sides will know.

At this frame the print draws a contour every twenty metres, every fifth one heavier. The highest heavy line on the sheet is the thousand-metre ring, and inside it only Yr Wyddfa and Garnedd Ugain reach high enough to be drawn at all.