Wales Mountain

This is Great Britain.

Over a third of our country is made up of mountains.

And I'm off to travel through them.

I've reached the land of my ancestors - the peaks of North Wales.

Where the mountains are God's own climbing frame...

where wild ponies roam the slopes...

..and I find a novel approach to recycling.

But above all, I want to discover just how precious and fragile these landscapes really are.

What does the future hold for our wild places in the 21st century?

These are the mountains of Snowdonia.

Here, perched on a mountain called Elidir Fawr, I can see nearly every peak of Snowdonia.

These, the greatest mountains of Wales, are crammed into

a small corner of the north-west, just a few miles from the coast.

This is an ancient setting of epic struggles from myth and legend.

King Arthur fought battles here with Merlin the Magician at his side.

Dragons lived in the valleys and the lakes.

And there's even a story about how these mountains were created.

There were two giants. One was called Idris and he had a throne called Cadair Idris,

about 40 miles away, a giant mountain over there, and another was called Rhita, the beard collector.

He liked to collect rival giants' beards and make them into a hat, or later on into a lovely cloak,

and apparently one day Idris got very, very cross

and started kicking rocks in the direction of Rhita,

and that was the way that the extraordinary landscape that is Snowdonia was created.

Apart from all the beards stuff, it's surprising how close this account seems to be.

Though it did happen a little bit more slowly.

These peaks are, after all, the result of an epic battle.

They were made by collisions in the Earth's crust and explosions at the Earth's core 400 million years ago.

But today we face another battle, not between giants, but between the mountains and man.

Who exactly is going to be the winner here?

Well, I may be Welsh, but I've never encountered the Welsh mountains before.

Or any tent exactly like this, for that matter.

I want to begin with the biggest mountain - Snowdon.

It's just across the valley there, and it's home to the greatest legend of all.

Its Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa, means "burial place".

The summit is the resting place of Rhita, the beard collector.

And he was killed by King Arthur himself.

In legend, its soaring peak was built to bury him. And why not?

It's a dramatic, solid pyramid, the highest point on a crown of ridges known as the Snowdon horseshoe.

The mountain rules the region that bears its name - Snowdonia.

Its dominating presence is the major reason over eight million people

come to Snowdonia National Park every year.

But as I get to the town of Llanberis, at the foot of its northwest flank,

I begin to wonder whether it's Snowdon's stunning beauty...

or indeed any ancient legend that really draws the crowds.

Could it be instead that Snowdon is the only mountain in Britain

you don't have to walk up to get to the top?

I can't help noticing that none of you are obviously...

Look at me - I'm wearing my special mountain boots, I've got my special wet weather gear,

I've got all this spe... outer layer on,

and you're dressed as if you're going to a teashop here!

The Snowdon Railway, based on a Swiss design, has been here for over a century.

It was built in 1896 solely for the purpose of ferrying tourists to the top of the mountain.

These days, 150,000 people take the train every year.

Each journey on the steam locomotive uses a third of a ton of coal and 400 gallons of water.

For some, the railway is a scar on the mountain.

For others, it's a way of making the mountain experience accessible to everyone.

Normally the passengers are taken right to the summit,

but even this train is subject to engineering works, and today it's stopped halfway.

And there's no alternative bus service.

Even from halfway up, though,

the view is spectacular.

Looking west, I can see the dramatic foothills of Snowdon just nine miles from the Irish Sea.

Further south, the mountains in the distance guard the Llyn Peninsula.

The passengers take a moment or two to enjoy the view...

then it's everybody back on the train.

So that's it, you know,

it's about... We've only...

we've only been here for under five minutes.

It's a bit of a heavy turnaround.

You get here, five minutes later you're carted off down the mountain.

There we are. Bye-bye.

As for me, I intend to see the view from the very top.

But I'll miss being pulled up the mountain by clever engineering.

And you can see how the whole system works.

This is the rack, and the pinion is attached to the bottom of the train

and it hooks itself on like a rollercoaster, and grinds its way to the top.

And there's only been one accident, which was disconcertingly on the very day that the railway opened.

But they've never had another accident since.

If it went all the way, the train would take an hour to reach the summit.

It's going to take me longer than that to walk from the halfway point.

HELICOPTER WHIRRS

MACHINERY BANGS

Well, this is not only the noisiest mountain top I've been to so far -

but that's partly because they're demolishing the cafe here,

but also cos of the jets flying over, the helicopters, the trains coming up -

it's also, in its own way, the most crowded mountain top I've ever been to.

350,000 people climb Snowdon each year, on top of all those rail commuters.

It is Britain's most popular mountain.

When the cafe is finally rebuilt, people will be able to come for their lunch,

but today, it's just about the view.

Getting to the summit is the obvious thing, on a day like today anyway,

because you can see for miles, and miles, and miles.

It's such an accessible mountain that it's rather inevitable that some things are left behind.

Banana skin. Likes the dank, warm places does banana skin.

Tea bag,

chewing gum,

and here a cigarette butt, cigarette butt.

Definitely the hand of man visible in this wild place.

The cafe, the railway, half a million pairs of feet -

alas there isn't a maid service to clear up after us!

Or there wasn't until recently.

Robin Kevan is also known as Rob the Rubbish.

When Rob gave up work as a social worker two years ago, he saw the light -

or at least he saw the litter - and he took on a mission to clean up Britain's mountains.

He's been doing it virtually every day since.

We put that on so that people know who this strange man is that's creeping around the mountains.

That's obviously to prevent me being run down by any articulated lorries that should be driving around here.

-Or a runaway train even.

-OK.

What a glorious day to go and search for a bit of litter.

So, erm, you know, so you're at the mountain and you're one of the few,

it seems to me, who make their journey up here with a definite purpose in mind onto Snowdon,

but what sort of things have you discovered, then?

A lot of cans...

-takeaway cartons, er...

-Sweetie wrappers.

..sweetie wrappers, and sandwich wrappers and, I mean, plastic bottles - abundant number of those.

All those health food drinks, I suppose, that people have brought.

-Absolutely, absolutely.

-Got themselves healthy and then...

-And as soon as they're empty, they go.

-Yeah.

-But most people don't.

Most people are as horrified about litter as the rest of us.

-Having said that, look at that.

-Yeah.

A couple of plastic bottles.

Well, we better move up to these ones I think.

-Just hidden away. Look!

-You never know what you're gonna find.

-No.

-Look at this.

-And full as well.

Do you think they've been left here by somebody for later?

I wouldn't have thought so.

They just got too heavy to carry up.

They've been here a long time.

They got too heavy to carry up, and somebody just thought, er, I'll just empty these.

-Just get rid of them.

-So, I mean, we talk about rubbish,

but most of it is this stuff. If there's a £10 note on the ground we'd soon pick that up,

but a plastic bottle never ever, ever goes away.

Oh, my goodness, look, a hairgrip.

We're doing very well down here.

-You leave the sheep droppings, I assume, do you?

-Yeah, we'll leave that to nature.

They're biodegradable.

Litter is thoughtless, and it ruins what Rob sees as the purity of the mountains.

But other things are sometimes left here precisely because of that purity.

This is now becoming

a more common occurrence all the time -

people scattering the ashes of a loved one on the mountain top.

Rangers say that sometimes they come up here

and it feels as if there's been a dusting of frost on the summit.

The problem is that, er, it alters the ecology because ashes are more fertile than rock,

and things start to grow, not things like these flowers,

which are plastic, and I don't want to be intrusive,

but obviously intrusiveness is at the centre of the problem.

The mountain means all things to all men, even deceased men.

Though it may sometimes feel like it, Snowdon is not actually a public memorial in the sky.

It can be a troublesome place.

I don't really like coming down a mountain, it's not just the agony of it,

somehow you're always sort of plopping, jumping down on things that crush in the back,

and all the joints are rebelling against the whole process of jerking your way down.

When you're going up, somehow you're making a route,

so you're sort of, you're hopping, you're using all your ingenuity,

and when you get to the top doing that you're positively exhausted, honestly,

so on the way down you're tired, and the grass is slippery.

The rocks, if they're wet at all, become just nightmares,

and the whole process is awful and, of course

the pack, which somehow leaned you into the mountain so you could become a sort of monkey going up,

on the way down, it just has a tendency to push you over

and make you feel as if you're like a ridiculous, ancient old man.

Mountains have a way of getting their own back.

It's on the way down that most accidents happen.

Because of the number of people who use this mountain,

there has to be a dedicated service ready to deal with accidents.

There might be a railway up the side of it, but Snowdon can still be dangerous.

The Snowdon Mountain Rescue Team get nearly 100 call-outs every year.

It's the busiest in England and Wales.

And when they're not rescuing people for real, they're practising and I am about to join them.

-Hi. Hello.

-Hello.

Hello. You're all from Llanberis.

Now I'm very bad at my Welsh pronunciation.

Llanberis, is that good enough?

-Yes.

-Good, cos I'm such a bogus Welshman.

The Llanberis Rescue Team, all volunteers, are practising getting a casualty out of a tight spot.

It's quite a common problem and it needs a lot of helping hands.

And they're looking for a dummy.

Well, I'm free. I've volunteered to be the injured climber.

And it's not just the spot which is tight.

That's for safety. If we drop you off the stretcher it'll support you.

OK, just in case you drop me off the stretcher!

It's rather comforting to be in the hands of experts.

Even if they are throwing me over the edge of a cliff.

I feel like a Beef Wellington, in fact!

OK, keep it coming.

OK, very smooth.

-Nice and slowly.

-Sorry.

-OK. You all right, Griff? Nice view?

I'm well...I...to be honest...

-Are you speechless?

-Well, no, I'm not speechless, I just think...

This is the most comfortable way of coming down off the mountain.

This might look like a lot of fun, but only last night

the team spent five hours carrying a 16-stone man with a broken ankle down off the mountain opposite.

We're nearly down.

It was a remarkably smooth descent.

These are fantastic, er, you know, very comfortable, cosy berths really,

and I'm utterly restricted.

I can't move around at all.

In fact, I imagine there's probably a basement in King's Cross

where you can pay for this sort of thing to be done to you.

If I can help in any way, do let me know.

Mountain rescue isn't just a job for civilian volunteers.

The Royal Air Force is also there to help, especially when a hospital is needed quickly.

The yellow helicopters so familiar in Britain's mountains have saved countless lives.

And RAF Rescue has a particular connection to Snowdonia.

This was where it all began.

The first mountain rescue team was formed in 1943

with little more than a few pairs of boots and some borrowed rope.

During the Second World War, there was a plane crash in Snowdonia every six weeks for a year and a half,

as pilots struggled to get back to their base on Anglesey.

Crew might survive a crash and die of their injuries or cold because there was no-one to rescue them.

Well, there's no escaping for me now. As part of the exercise, the RAF Rescue helicopter

is going to winch me aboard just like they do for real around 30 times a year.

I was told to keep my eyes shut against the downdraught of the rotor blades,

so I've no idea what being rescued looks like.

But I can tell you that it felt amazingly smooth.

Mind you, I didn't have any broken limbs.

This was good weather and not a raging storm.

Quite a hairy job because the accidents, I assume, happen when conditions are bad, don't they?

People don't get lost when the weather's nice, shall we say.

People tend to call people missing when it gets dark, so we quite often get called out to search for people

in bad weather at night, which is quite tricky,

but it's a fantastic feeling when you do find that person that otherwise would have stayed out all night.

Snowdon may yet have to find new ways to cope with its half a million visitors a year.

Legendary Yr Wyddfa has not finished being a battleground between man and nature.

But nearby there are plenty of examples of thousands of years of harmonious relationship

between human beings and the mountains.

I've come to the most northerly part of Snowdonia, just a stone's throw from the Irish Sea,

to the edge of the Carneddau plateau which stretches for 77 square miles.

And I'm here to witness an unusual annual event.

The sun is shining on the mountain now, there's blue skies, a gorgeous day for a round-up.

-Good morning, everyone.

-Good morning.

I'm joining some local farmers on a kind of Welsh rodeo...

..if I manage to hang on.

These hills are home to a herd of wild Welsh Mountain Ponies.

They range completely freely.

But now they're so few in number that they are threatened by disease and inbreeding.

So once a year the farmers take them off the mountains for a bit of a check up.

Gareth Wyn Jones has been gathering up wild ponies all his life.

He knows our noisy arrival will start the round-up. But so do the ponies.

Their ears are back, erm, tails are up and off they go.

Scattered over thousands of acres are fewer than 100 pure bred Welsh Mountain Ponies.

There are only about 400 in the whole of Snowdonia,

and the farmers have taken on the job of keeping them in good health.

-They're quite small ponies?

-They are very small ponies, but they're tough.

-We're on a gorgeous day today.

-Yeah.

-You could come up here next week and be in snow up to your ankles,

-and you think there'd be no grazing, but these boys survive.

-Right. But there's no money in this for you.

-This isn't a productive farming business for you to keep these horses.

-No.

-So why do you do it?

Well, it's just a way of life.

My father has kept them, my grandfather kept them, my great-grandfather kept them,

so we can go back about nearly 300 years with keeping these ponies on the mountain.

-But the ponies themselves go back further than that?

-Oh, the ponies go back to the Celtic times.

Welsh history itself is being preserved here.

These ponies have been in these hills for 2,000 years.

They're part of this place.

The annual round-up is a way of making sure this continues.

But it does mean catching them first.

Here comes some now.

And now everywhere you look,

there are little groups of ponies. This is fantastic.

We're lucky to see any ponies at all.

Henry VIII ordered the slaughter of all nags of a small stature

because he wanted every horse in the land to be able to carry a soldier in armour.

But as you can see they're difficult to catch and this breed survived the cull...just.

There are a couple escaping down over there.

A mother and child doing a quick...

The farmers are herding the ponies into the corner of two walls,

so that they can take them down to the farm.

-Is that the lot?

-No, we've been a little bit unlucky today.

We have about three quarters of what we should've had.

-So how many have you got there?

-There's about 50 there.

-There was a thundering of hooves.

-Yeah.

When they get to a field next to the farm, they'll be checked for signs of illness.

But they look pretty feisty to me, with their uncut manes hanging in the late sunlight.

Here we are. They look contented enough, don't they?

My little ponies.

The ponies are just one example of a delicate natural balance.

The mountains may be vast and solid, but they shelter a fragile ecology and we can upset it very easily.

Eight miles south of the ponies' habitat is Cwm Idwal,

a huge rocky arena, deep in the heart of the Snowdonian mountains.

It too supports a delicate natural balance in miniature.

I've come here with Barbara Jones who's a botanist.

That's because these grim-looking cliffs are home to a lot of very rare mountain plants.

We're looking for the tiny species that survive against big odds.

What can we see here, Barbara?

Well, a lot of rock!

A few plants though, look.

We've got moss obviously, and what are these ones here?

That's a sedum, a stonecrop. They grow very closely to the rocks so that they can avoid being windswept,

and they can take any heat that the rock's giving them, so being small in the mountains is an advantage.

Cos that's one of the things

that I find enchanting about mountains, in a way,

is that when you make your way up, and you sort of come to the very massive places,

dominated by these huge slopes, you suddenly find that the rest of the world goes mini-mini-miniaturised.

The plants get tiny and detailed.

-It's worth getting down and crawling about.

-Oh, it certainly is.

Cwm Idwal is cold, damp and north-facing,

which makes it an ideal place to find the sort of plant that usually lives in the Arctic.

And what's this one here?

That one is purple saxifrage.

Now, that's a really special plant.

This is one of the toughest plants that you will find in Snowdonia, or even in the world.

It grows in the furthest north, in the northern end of Greenland.

And if you look closely at this plant, can you see that on the tips

of all the leaves there's a little kind of a silvery, glistening blob?

Now if you use this lens and get close in and look at that,

you'll see. Now, the idea of that is

this plant grows on lime-rich rocks but it can't take all the lime in,

so it secretes the excess lime

onto little blobs on the edge of its leaves, and these glisten and really look quite beautiful.

These rare, Arctic plants are barometers for climate change.

If they begin to disappear, it'll be a sure sign that global warming is affecting the mountain ecology,

but temperature rise isn't the only issue.

Ah, here we are, look.

This is an interesting one.

This is called mountain sorrel, and this is a real Arctic Alpine.

This is about the furthest south it grows in Britain.

The local shepherds used to put this on their sandwiches. When you taste that, it's quite a nice...

sweet taste, it's like watercress, but a bit sweeter, isn't it?

-It is.

-Mmm, it's quite nice.

But you don't want me grazing on it?

I don't want you or anyone else grazing on it because it isn't a common plant.

-You won't find it down there, and you won't find it further south than here.

-Right.

-It's an important plant.

In fact, it's not hungry people munching on the mountain flora

that's the problem, it's hungry sheep.

Sheep grazing is traditional here.

It's been traditional for hundreds of years, and sheep,

obviously, like to eat these types of plants, so they are restricted to areas that sheep can't get to.

They'd never grow down on the grassland.

No, but in a way, Barbara, the whole idea that we have of these mountains is...

we think of them as great natural places, but, in fact,

we look...as we speak...gaze

across these mountains,

we see a landscape which has been created not by man but by sheep.

By sheep, yeah. As an ecologist, I look at this and my heart sinks.

If we could get back some of that diversity... I'm not saying let's have woodland and scrub everywhere,

but if we could get some of it back,

it'd make such a difference to the landscape, the diversity, the plants, the animals.

I think it would be wonderful.

At one time most of this mountain area was covered with forest and scrub.

Now, thanks to sheep, all is grass.

This is a huge change and it's part of the traditional history of the countryside.

But men and farming are just a tiny episode in the real story of the mountains.

The man whose theory of evolution would change the way we thought about ourselves, Charles Darwin,

came to Cwm Idwal in 1831.

He and a colleague were on an expedition to investigate how old the Earth really was.

They were searching amongst the rocks here for fossils, a bit like this one here,

but Charles Darwin always called this his great mistake because so concentrated were they,

they were looking so hard at the little rocks all around them,

they failed to notice the valley itself, that the Cwm is a fantastic example of a glacial valley,

that this great...

bowl was carved out by the movement of ice.

This suggested that the surface of our planet had been here for hundreds of millions of years.

And this was at a time when many believed that the Earth itself was only 6,000 years old.

Darwin thought he'd been a bit stupid.

I suppose it's all right for Charles Darwin to call himself an idiot, but I don't think we should join in

because it was only in that period that people discovered the real history of these mountains anyway.

The rocks here are 400 million years old.

In their time, they've been higher than the Himalayas, they've been covered with ice,

they've been a desert, they've been over in Antarctica, near Fiji and then finally found their way here

and, probably to the horror of most Welshmen, they're actually drifting slightly towards England.

So when we talk about conserving nature, what nature do we mean?

In fact, the whole of humanity being here is just a blip,

a blink of the eyelid, a nanosecond in the history of these mountains.

I'm sure it's because we are such a blip that we think of these mountains as timeless, and eternal.

A thought, perhaps, to meditate on.

On the banks of Lake Crafnant, six miles east of Cwm Idwal, a group of people have gathered

precisely because the mountains, for them, are ancient symbols of power.

They come from all over the world to study dru yoga.

It's a form of yoga invented and practised mainly by a religious group called the Life Foundation.

Jane Saraswati Clapham is their instructor

and she believes teaching this kind of yoga here has a special significance.

Is that because yoga, as it were, came from mountainous regions originally?

-Did it come from mountainous regions?

-It did actually.

-It did.

-From the Himalayas.

Well, time to see if it works for me.

This is like being at school where I need to stand behind somebody who does it really well...

OK, so first of all just make sure that you're standing, feet firmly on the Earth,

feeling the power coming up through the legs,

the power of the mountains coming into your hearts, feeling that inner strength coming from Snowdonia.

Right hand down to right thigh extending up.

That's beautiful. Lowering left hand down into the triangle,

sweeping back with the right hand. You're creating a mountain shape,

you look like the gorgeous range of Snowdonia mountains.

Raising up into the warrior.

That's beautiful.

That's lovely, and then gently turning the body towards the front...

extending the hands down.

Very good, brilliant.

-Do you feel full of the power of the mountains?

-Yes.

-Cool.

Well, there we are, there's nothing quite like yoga

to put you in tune with your surroundings and leave you feeling positively elastic.

Well, maybe I need a few more sessions.

I left Jane's pupils contemplating their spiritual connection

to the landscape and went on to meet someone who gets physical with it instead.

Just how close to the rock do you need to be to really feel it?

Dinorwig Quarry near Llanberis just north of Snowdon

is the haunt of Johnny Dawes, regarded as one of the finest rock climbers in this country.

His nickname is "the stone monkey".

This disused slate quarry was where he first honed his rather inhuman skills.

Do you think that in order to do this right, is it because you're...

a nutter, or because you're...

you want to push yourself until you feel danger and you might die? Was it showing off to everybody else?

I think it was... I like showing off, yeah.

But if you climb a lot on rock, you can have these moments where you feel very connected to where you are.

These slate mines, are they good?

-Do you spend your time looking for things and think, "Nobody's ever climbed that before."

-Very much so.

Even quite obscure bits of rock, after a while, you can look at it, and see which way the hold faces...

and that kind of positions your arm in your imagination...

and then you look for something that goes nicely with that

cos for each handhold there's a kind of friendly foothold. So you look for those couples.

'Johnny wanted to show me what he meant,

'by demonstrating some simple, friendly holds on a 70ft slate cliff.'

-You've climbed this rock before?

-Yeah. You pioneer new climbs,

and slate quarries are great because of all the unclimbed rocks.

You can just go like this and think there's absolutely nothing to hold on to at all, although...

-See if you can stand up on one position.

-But tell me something here before I get started.

Even if I were able, you know, like the human fly that you are, to get myself up a little bit,

I would have a reasonable amount of confidence about lifting myself off the ground, but not for very long

because where do I go with the other foot once I've got up there?

I was just looking at the same thing.

-I can't see anything.

-Yeah, the next move's a lot trickier, but probably...

-put your foot all the way across there.

-No!

-Try...

-What do I do?

-There's a hole there.

-Wait a minute, I don't think, physically, I'll be able to...

-Now stand up.

-I can't, I can't do anything at all. Mm...

'It was just crazy. I couldn't even get started!'

It gives way at the top... Use that amount of force... You've got to imagine what position the shape...

I'm gonna watch you do it, go on.

Hand hold there, and that pulls in that direction. You pull it exactly that direction.

That foothold pushes in that direction, you put those two together by making a shape with your body.

That is climbing. Before I move, I think what shape am I gonna be?

I imagine where would my leg want to go? It wants to go over there.

See what I mean?

It's miraculous.

Looking at the smooth slate wall, I'd began to believe that it was impossible for anyone to climb it,

but I sensed Johnny was going to prove me wrong.

You're not always pulling, sometimes you're pressing down,

if I lean on that and rotate I don't use any muscles.

So if I'm gonna go left...

I go right first, so I go over here and then up and over.

Cos I'm coming to a trickier bit like this...

I do the move in my head, so I know what to do.

There weren't any holds at all, you just walked up it then.

There's a bit where there isn't any footholds, yeah. Not a good place to talk.

-Sorry, don't let me interrupt you!

-It's a good challenge.

This bit's another one of these moves.

You make it look so effortless, like crawling across a table, it just happens to be vertical.

This next bit is the tricky bit.

This bit I don't really like very much, it's a bit...it's a bit painful.

He makes it look so easy, it's extraordinary to get close to the slate -

which is a wonderful, comforting sort of smooth thing - and realise how glassy it is.

You don't realise the sheer physical energy required

to put all your weight on your fingertips like that,

and that is quite a big hold.

Yeah, well, it's beyond me.

Stone monkey?

Quite honestly, I defy a monkey to do what Johnny does.

He's about as physically close to a rock as a human being can get.

But perhaps this part of the mountain needs hugging,

after the assault that we launched on it in the past.

The old slate quarry where Johnny climbs is just one of dozens

that were clawed out of the mountainsides of North Wales.

Slate is the forgotten Welsh industry,

which dominated Snowdonia for hundreds of years.

At its peak in the 1880s,

it employed 17,000 men and produced 500,000 tons of finished slate a year.

And to get that, they produced even more waste.

I used to believe that all the JCBs in the world could never threaten a mountain.

But when you come here, you realise that's not quite true.

You get a determined gang of men looking for nice bits of slate

and, after 50 years, they've managed to chomp their way through an entire mountainside, dig it all out,

hurl bits around, throw it around, build mammoth great wheelhouses, and sleds.

It's a strange business because they take pieces of slate and go,

"No, I can't make a tile out of that. This bit?

"No, no, that's no good. No, I can't do that, you see..."

So gradually they've thrown 90% of what they dug out away

and created these huge heaps of waste.

And then it all finished,

and these places are just abandoned.

What has been left behind has a compelling, awkward beauty.

And some surprising things are going on in the old buildings the quarrymen deserted.

In a disused tool shed in a slate mine in southern Snowdonia,

two entrepreneurs have built a business from an unusual recycling concept.

Hello, nice to see you.

-Les.

-Hello, Les, hi.

I've come here obviously to find out what it is that you do here.

Take me through it. Let's start with the absolute first principal here.

You're basically involved in a recycling process?

-We like to think it's the ultimate in recycling.

-Is it?

We bring sheep poo in the front

and at the end of our process there's two products.

We sell fertiliser, and we make paper.

Lawrence Toms and Les Paylor

have found a way of using undigested fibres from sheep droppings to make paper and card.

The start of the process is a little bit challenging and, apparently, requires a disguise.

This is just so the sheep don't get startled out in the fields.

-Is that one for me? Is that one size fits all?

-Yes, indeed.

Does the farmer wear a white...?

-No, but the sheep are more used to him.

-I see.

It's highly possible he's having a laugh at our expense

but he's so kind in letting us use his land that we play along and the suits can be recycled into paper too.

OK. Now, do I look sufficiently like a sheep?

-A little.

-Maah!

I think the farmer is talking poo here. This is ridiculous.

I can hardly see out of my various hoods now. I'm a hoodie.

After all, the flock might still be justifiably nervous of a giant sheep

standing on its hind legs carrying a bucket about the place.

-We're looking out for any old poo...?

-No, it's got to be fresh.

-Ah.

-Perfect.

Absolutely perfect.

Oh...here we are.

This is the stuff.

Oh...my God.

There's an element of this I don't understand, Les.

We're going to great lengths not to scare the sheep, but if we scare them a bit

-they might actually give us what we need rather more quickly.

-Yeah,

but I don't think the farmer would be too pleased.

Oh! This is fine stuff.

Very fresh, still steaming. You seem to be getting the hang of this.

I've got an edition of War And Peace already.

There they go.

We're not succeeding very much in NOT scaring them, are we?

They're going home. They've had enough of fertilising this field.

After an hour terrifying the livestock and handpicking the finest poo,

we had enough to keep production going for at least two days.

-Thank you.

-Excellent.

I'll boil that up and we'll get going.

The droppings are put in a bag and sterilised, I'm pleased to say.

Then into the wash. The waste water that comes out the other end is a powerful, concentrated fertiliser.

Once the result has been dried, it's ready to be made into paper.

We're often asked, what does it smell like?

The answer is it smells almost exactly like freshly mown hay

because that's almost exactly what it is,

and that's what it smells like.

All right...

Yes, it does, it smells very grassy.

Yes, grassy like poo, in fact.

It's made into a pulp using a secret recipe, and voila.

Lawrence and Les show me how to make a sheet of paper.

All right, so here I go. I put this down here...

..put that down here, now I take my rack

-and I put it into the water.

-That's it.

-Then I just slop this in, all around?

-You can do.

You're going to skooch it with your hands afterwards anyway.

Using your fingers in a kind of spider effect, skooch it around,

try and get it to spread as evenly as you can.

Yes. Nicely evenly distributed.

That's it.

-OK. Now we lift it...

-Tip it to one side slowly.

-Tip it to one side?

-Lay it on to the top.

-Lay it on to the top like that?

-Yes.

-Yes.

-That's not bad.

And we'll send that on to you when it's dried.

Once it has been dried and pressed,

my hand-collected organic sheep droppings become stationery.

The hand-made paper is sold all over the world.

It may be a novelty item in a designer gift shop,

but the real novelty of this little organic sustainable industry

which has recently won an award, is the way that Les and Lawrence are working within the landscape,

and finding a new way to enable man to be more than just a visitor to these mountains.

But how far is it possible for people to continue to work and live here and to leave few footprints?

South of Snowdonia are the Preseli mountains, a small group of rolling hills on the coast.

Somewhere here, a man called Tony Wrench has built himself a house made from the mountains themselves.

Or nearly.

Is this the future for human life in the wilderness?

I think this is probably it.

-Hello, Tony.

-How are you doing?

-I'm lucky I found the place, I think!

-You're very well disguised, well hidden.

-Yeah.

It's got a lot of nature on it as well as around it, so, yeah.

I have to say that's the most incredible roof I've ever seen.

-It's got a grape vine in it as well!

-Yeah.

-A fruity jungle.

-It's great. I've looked at a lot of buildings,

but I've never met anybody who can eat their own roof.

Which is fantastic.

Tony and his wife Jane built their roundhouse to a Celtic design.

This is absolutely wonderful, absolutely great!

The living space is in the middle. The bedroom, bathroom and kitchen are on the outside.

Tony found all the materials, from the wooden beams to the recycled bottles strengthening the walls.

Solar power provides the electricity.

-And, and this...is this warm?

-Yeah, of course, yeah.

-Does the insulation all work here?

-Yeah, certainly.

-You've got 150 straw bales in the roof, so that's quite a lot of insulation, you know.

-Yeah.

The walls are that thick of wood

and these quite thick wool rugs on the floor, so yes, it's fine.

Pretty draught proof, yeah. Happy with it, yeah.

-You made the table yourself, you made the rugs yourself.

-Yeah.

-You made the bowls yourself?

-Yeah.

-Most of the things that grow outside, presumably, you can eat or use in some way?

-Eh...

we do use a lot, I mean...we've got a reasonable sort of vegetable garden.

We've got a very nice crop of fruit at the moment.

-You've built what is essentially a sustainable house.

-That's the idea.

To see if it's possible. Who knows if it's possible to actually live sustainably in our culture or not?

I don't even know that, so the whole thing is an experiment.

At first, it was an illegal experiment, Tony didn't have any planning permission at all.

The council wanted to pull it down, when they eventually discovered it.

A spotter plane on the lookout for illegally parked caravans

noticed it because of the sunlight reflecting off the solar panel.

But Tony demonstrated what a tiny impact they made on the landscape and the council's policy changed.

So it's feasible that you could have another dwelling over there and another one over there.

And you could use bits of farmland, or bits of mountain scene...

-bits of hidden mountain valleys to build communities here if you like.

-I think so, I'd love to see it.

For better or worse, man has left his mark on the Welsh mountains.

We live and work among them, and we use them as our playground.

Perhaps few of our wild places are truly wild any more.

Even the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, has our footprints all over it.

Over 2,000 have now tramped up that remote, once inaccessible summit.

And North Wales played a part in that story.

I'm back in Snowdonia, at the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel.

When the summit of Everest was finally reached in 1953,

this small guesthouse nestling in the shadow of Snowdon was one of the first places to be told the news.

-Good evening.

-Oh, hello.

-Mr Rhys Jones?

-Yes.

-How nice to see you.

-Thank you.

As it happens, the world's highest mountain was named after a Welshman, Sir George Everest.

He made maps of India in the mid-19th century but never set eyes on the mountain that bears his name.

But that isn't why the hotel is stuffed full of Everest memorabilia.

It's here because this was a training base for the expedition team

that climbed Everest in 1953.

They prepared for their famous attempt

on a slightly more modest peak called Tryfan, which is further down the valley.

This is the, er, the locked book. It says very firmly, not the visitors' book.

It's a sort of record of all the major events here...

..at Pen-y-Gwryd.

And here's a record of the...

the night that... Everest was conquered.

They've recorded the event here...

..and stuck pictures of Hillary and Tenzing.

And look, here's the whole expedition.

John Hunt the leader, Edmund Hillary climbed, Tenzing.

Tomorrow, I'm intending to find out what it was like to climb then,

to be one of the first people to walk on such a significant part of the planet.

Tryfan is one of the most striking mountains in Snowdonia, it's 3,002 feet high.

A great crumbling heap of volcanic rock.

It's one of ten peaks in a range to the north of Snowdon, which was carved out by glaciers.

This was where the Everest expedition team practised,

and I'm going to climb it with one of the team members, mountaineer George Band.

Aged 24, George was the youngest member of the team which conquered Everest in 1953.

Two years later, he was the first to climb the world's third highest mountain, Kangchenjunga, in Tibet.

George is now 77 and has been climbing for most of those years.

The very first mountain he climbed on his own was this one, Tryfan.

When did you think, I can do this and I'd like to sort of become a leader

in this game, as it were?

It's like almost any sport. If you play tennis and you do rather well,

you join a club, you play for the county, and then you think,

-"Could I qualify for Wimbledon?"

-Yeah.

-It's the same sort of thing.

It hadn't escaped my attention that Tryfan is a little bit smaller than Everest

more than 26,000 feet smaller, in fact.

But the Everest team didn't come here for altitude training.

They came to practise climbing with oxygen masks,

which were going to be crucial to their success, and which they'd never worn before.

With the mask, you couldn't really see where you wanted to put your feet so easily,

and this was something just to get used to.

We never thought of it as actually training for Everest...

Because you were all experienced climbers and you weren't gonna learn how to climb.

No. Every holiday we ever had, we went to the mountains, so it was just natural.

-This was an exercise really in getting together as a team.

-Yeah.

-It was... Well, nowadays they all talk about... What are the sort of phrases?

-Bonding?

Bonding, yeah. Cos half the chaps I didn't know, you see, I knew them by reputation.

Preparation was everything.

George's team knew that the Swiss and the French were planning expeditions to Everest as well.

The best-prepared team stood the best chance.

And the Queen's coronation was coming up.

This led a certain urgency to a very British ambition.

So were you prepared when you did it for the explosion of patriotic fervour?

Eh...well, that was funny. When we were packing all the gear in the ambassador's garden in Kathmandu,

he was saying, "Where's the flag that you're gonna wave on top?" We said, "Flag?" And he said, "A Union Jack."

"We never thought of bringing one." And he said, "I'll let you have the one off my Rolls Royce."

And he gave that to John Hunt, and it was indeed the one which Tenzing attached to his ice axe -

the flags of the United Nations, flag of India, flag of Nepal and the Union Jack.

-Only the best as well, a Rolls Royce flag I'm pleased to see.

-Of course!

We had a bit further to go before reaching our summit.

There's something about Tryfan's rocks that demands you clamber all over them.

This is known as the Cannon.

Fantastic.

Perhaps because it needed some balls.

It was getting cold, even in my modern gear.

It made me wonder what it must have been like to climb in rather colder conditions, half a century ago.

You weren't in the old hobnail boots and tweed jackets?

I mean, how advanced was your kit?

Well, I...I don't have my, my Everest boots with me.

I lent them to a chap to go climbing in the Himalaya and, very sadly, he never came back.

But I've got, er...here just from interest...

the anorak and trousers that I actually used on Everest.

Outwardly, it looks pretty much the same,

but it was actually... I've been using it for house painting...

You've been using the Everest...?! This should be in a museum!

It has been in a mu... In and out, you know...

so got to get it back occasionally, but I think my piece de resistance...

We all know about the string vests that people used to wear,

but maybe you've never seen a pair of string long johns.

-How's that now?

-I just am honoured to see these.

What happened to string vest engineering? I wore a string vest as a child.

How terrific.

I feel also, actually, very privileged to be able to lay...

the string long johns that went up Everest on me. If it weren't so cold I'd strip down, and put them on.

Nowadays, when so many people climb with the latest hi-tech gear, it's easy to forget

that George and his team were doing something for the first time.

There were no paths, no litter...

none of the human impact, which is now part of nearly every mountain experience.

But here on Tryfan, where there are no well-worn paths to the top,

it manages to feel like a first time for me.

-How are you doing, Griff?

-OK.

-Oh...fantastic.

-I hope.

-To the manor born.

-A little bit of a quiver in my voice there, "I'm perfectly all right!"

Help!

This is God's climbing frame this.

-Yeah.

-Extraordinary.

-That's good.

-Slow down, George, I'm 52.

Trying to keep up with a man 25 years my senior!

Isn't there a more complicated route than this we could take?

It took three hours to haul ourselves up the face of Tryfan. And worth it.

We finally reached our goal - the two natural stone obelisks called Adam and Eve that mark the summit.

-Now, people do clamber up them, don't they?

-Do they really?

Are you gonna do it? Well done.

Not so much Adam and Eve as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I think.

Well done.

No...well, that's praise indeed, if I may say so, George. Thank you.

Tryfan was an immensely enjoyable mountain to climb.

And it was all the more enjoyable for being so unspoiled.

It's just a mass of solid rock not even a sheep can change, and you'd never get a railway up it.

These are mountains which have taken millions of years to form.

They'll take millions of years to erode.

This epic struggle continues in nature,

but we've joined that battle too in the very short time that we've been here.

The things we leave may be as tiny as a cigarette butt,

but taken year on year, bit by bit, they're erosion too.

The mountains may look huge,

but really they're very fragile.

They demand our respect.