The Chair of the Giant

There is a mountain in the south of Gwynedd that will, if you spend the night on its summit, do one of three things to you:

It will make you a poet.

It will make you mad.

Or you will not return at all.

This is not a modern health and safety warning. This is the oldest story they tell about Cadair Idris, and they have been telling it long enough that nobody remembers when they started. The Welsh have a word, hiraeth, for a longing so deep it has no object, a homesickness for somewhere you have never been. Cadair Idris is where hiraeth lives. It is not a comfortable mountain. It is a thinking mountain, a mountain that asks questions and does not always wait for answers. I am going to climb itagain, in style.

Let us start with the name, because the name is where everything begins.

Cadair means chair. Seat. Throne. But dig a little deeper into the Welsh root and something else surfaces: ca, to keep, to hold. The Chair of Idris is also the Place of Control: the seat from which the astronomer-giant held the heavens in view, mapped them, understood the relationship between the sky above and the land beneath. A cadair is not merely a place to sit. It is a place from which everything can be seen.

Idris — this is where it gets interesting.

The giant Idris ap Gwyddno is one of the three great astronomers of Welsh legend, a figure so vast that he used the mountain as his observatory, sitting in the hollow of the northern cwm to chart the stars above Gwynedd. The legends describe a man of impossible learning: poet, astronomer, philosopher, geographer; who understood the relationship between the heavens and the land beneath them with a precision that modern researchers are only beginning to take seriously.

But Idris has another identity, one that surfaces when you follow the thread far enough back through the apocryphal literature. Idris is Enoch.

Enoch appears briefly in Genesis, seven generations from Adam, father of Methuselah, a man about whom the text says something it says about almost nobody else: he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. No death. No burial. Simply gone. The rabbinical and apocryphal traditions elaborate extensively on what happened next: Enoch became Metatron, the scribe of heaven, the keeper of the celestial records, the one who walks the boundary between the human and the divine. The keeper, in other words, of the star maps.

Hugh Evans, astrophysicist, aeronautical engineer, obsessive researcher, has spent thousands of hours mapping what he believes is the largest ancient site on Earth. The Star Maps of Gwynedd cover over two thousand square miles, incorporating thousands of named stone circles, cairns, standing stones, mountains, rivers, sacred sites and holy springs across the northwest quarter of Wales. For context: the greater Stonehenge area covers two hundred square miles. The Egyptian sites from Giza to Luxor cover roughly four hundred. Gwynedd dwarfs them all if Evans is right.

At the centre of this system: Cadair Idris. The constellation mapped onto the mountain’s spectacular ridge is Ursa Major - The Plough, the most recognisable star pattern in the northern sky, its bright stars corresponding to the soaring peaks running west along the ridge. The Bear sits upon the Chair.

Across the water, on the northern side of the Mawddach estuary, the ancient rough country of the Rhinogydd maps to Draco — the dragon that never sets, winding along its ridge, the constellation that circles the celestial pole without ever dipping below the horizon. In the age when these maps were laid down, before Polaris took over the job, Draco was the fixed point around which the heavens revolved. Every ancient astronomer from Babylon to Britain used it as their reference. The Mawddach runs between them. One of the most dramatic estuaries in Britain; running east-west, the light on it at certain times of day being almost hallucinatory, separating the Bear from the Dragon, Cadair from the Rhinogydd, Ursa Major from Draco. I have walked beside that estuary hundreds of times. I did not know I was walking the boundary between constellations.

The connection between Idris and Enoch is not Evans’ invention; it surfaces in the Book of Enoch itself, which places the location where Enoch received instruction from the angel Uriel to chart the heavens in Gwynedd, at the latitude of Cadair Idris, approximately five thousand years before the common era. Ancient British mythology confirms it independently. The traditions converged on the same mountain from different directions and different centuries and arrived at the same answer.

This is how ideas travel. Not through a single unbroken line of transmission, but through convergence. The same truth arriving from different directions because the landscape itself holds the evidence.

I live twenty miles north of Cadair Idris. I have walked past it and around it and on it for thirty years. I thought I knew what it was.

There is a tradition in Daoist thought, and I find myself returning to it constantly; of the correspondence between the human body and the landscape, between the small world and the large one. The mountain is not a metaphor for the self. The mountain is a self, in the same way that the self is a landscape. You do not conquer a mountain in this understanding. You enter into a relationship with it. I had a stroke in 2018. A cerebellar stroke - the cerebellum handles balance and coordination and the automatic skills that your body learns so deeply they stop feeling like skills at all. The things you do without thinking. The things a mountain guide does without thinking. I am going to climb Cadair Idris. Specifically, I am going to climb Cyfrwy Arete: a Grade 3S* scramble on the northern face, technical, committing, the kind of ground that asks everything of you and gives everything back. I dreamed it a few weeks ago and woke with the question still present: could I?

The Chair of the Astronomer. The Seat of Control. The place where the Bear sits above the estuary and the Dragon winds along the ridge opposite, and the water runs between them catching the light. I am not a mystic. I am a mountain leader with a stroke history, a degree in progress, a climbing partner named Aled who said yes enthusiastically, and a habit of reading widely and finding that the world becomes more interesting the more carefully you look at it, not less.

Both of these things are true at the same time. The mountain does not care which one leads.

It simply waits.

This article was researched and drafted collaboratively with Claude

(Anthropic). The ideas, the geography, and the story are Jameson Selby’s.

The writing was shaped together.

The full story of the attempt on Cyfrwy Arete — the training, the preparation, the academic project running alongside it — lives at Gwella. Here Be Dragons is where the wider world gets reported from: the water, the practice, the books, the dragons. Both sites are part of the same thing. Neither is the whole story