Here's a tale of two men and a watch. An English reverend sets out to climb Snowdon on a misty September morning. But his name does not appear in the visitors' book at the summit. His carpet bag and greatcoat remain uncollected in his lodgings in Llanberis. There are two odd reports of sightings . . . and silence.
Searches yield no trace. In June of the following year, his remains are found. It emerges that his knapsack had been discovered a month previously; a man who says he came across it also submits the reverend's watch to the authorities. The timepiece has no rust; remarkable, considering that it had supposedly lain out on a mountainside for the winter.
The man is reprimanded by the coroner for having failed to report discovery of the belongings earlier. Over the years, the man's accounts of how he came across the watch vary. Then, 14 years later, he too disappears, having been out guiding two visitors to Snowdon's summit. The gravestone says he died, "pursuing his favourite vocation", taking with him the truth about the fate of the English reverend, his "fellow sleeper".
A simple story, and one told far better by Jim Perrin, masterful writer, journalist, climber and lover of the Welsh landscape, who wrote this book to accompany the recent six-part BBC television series of the same name. The series, which was broadcast in Welsh and English, was presented as a celebration of the richness, history, culture, texture and beauty of Snowdonia. Narration is by the actor, Anthony Hopkins, who wrote the foreword to Perrin's text.
It is a text that sings: of myths and legend, of art and artists, of climbs and climbers, and of the people who live their lives in the mountains and valleys just 99 minutes by fast ferry across the Irish Sea.
People like Sam Roberts, national park warden, who has been to Everest three times, most recently on a fruitless attempt to paraglide from the top. People like Nesta Wyn Jones, farmer of 555 hilly acres, shepherdess to 500 breeding ewes, and one of the nation's finest modern poets. And people like Ioan Bowen Rees, author of The Mountains of Wales, the cheap edition of which costs £185.
Commenting on the misconception that the Welsh are ignorant of their own hills - hills vividly photographed for this book by Ray Woods - Rees says it is "a matter of class". The early mountaineers who could afford to travel to Snowdonia "didn't concern themselves with the activities of a lower class and the language in which they were expressed", and "assumed pre-eminence for their own achievements", he says.
Perrin strikes no such pose, though he could well afford to. Author of several collections of essays, and of an award-winning biography, Menlove, Perrin has blood ties to Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh homeland. His aesthetic sense extends to every wood splinter, every stream ripple, every blade of grass. His knowledge is breathtaking, encyclopaedic.
Snowdon abounds in more myth and legend than perhaps any other British hill, he tell us, citing Merlin's appearance as a wizard and the last battle between King Arthur and Mordred as examples. Both legends are rooted in a precise physical context and both predate French and English chivalric counterparts.
He relates folk tales which precede even Arthurian material, such as that of the fairy woman who rises out of Llyn Du'r Arddu (Black Lake of the Black Height) on Snowdon's northern face. She marries a mortal, offers a dowry of cattle, and is struck by iron three times unwittingly. On the third blow, she returns to the lake. It is a story that has parallels, and is said to reflect the conflict between Bronze Age settlers and Iron Age infiltrators.
There is so much more, including some of Perrin's own experiences in the hills, experiences made all the more magical by the keystrokes on his lyrical laptop (if that is what he uses). Let this book fall open at any page, and you will not be disappointed; and will probably be scanning timetables for the next ferry to Holyhead.
Lorna Siggins is a staff reporter with The Irish Times