The new Snowdon summit building

For those of you who have not yet had a chance to see the new Snowdon summit building, Hafod Eryri, here are a few pictures.

I must admit to having mixed feelings about the building. I still maintain that it would have been better placed inside the mountain, with non-reflective glass windows looking out over each face. There is some excellent stonework and glasswork inside and outside, with bilingual poetry featuring on each. Inside is a granite floor, which looks good for now, but I am unsure how it will look once a few hundred coca-colas have soaked into it. The building is well laid out inside, and I think that the Snowdon Mountain Railway are doing a pretty good of running the operations there. Okay, the catering is not quite like the Ritz, but within the limitations of them having to transport nearly all the water to the summit, I think that it’s more than acceptable and quite reasonably priced. There is a tape that is often played within the building, which I found got rather irritating after a few repeats – it really is a bit ‘big brother’ and a bit late to tell people that they should be carrying gloves and hat, and suchlike!

I do struggle with what has been done or not done outside the building and around the summit. It is an area with lots of ‘rubble’ that it seems has been decided is sacrosanct Snowdon stone and cannot be used or touched. Hence paths have been using imported stone, some of them large, square concrete coloured things that do not fit in. I also think that a trick has been missed in the summit area by not placing a network of smaller paths and trying to re-establish areas of mountain grass in between.

As an interesting point of note, there has been a red-legged (French) partridge living on the summit for the past 2 years. As this is not a native bird and is supposed to be timid, hates the cold, hates any altitude, then this must be a new strain or a slow learner! I have seen it scuttling round the summit area several times now, even on the busiest days.