Bala and Llyn Tegid

There is a fish in this lake that lives nowhere else in Wales. Llyn Tegid, Bala Lake, fills a glacial trough in Eryri, North Wales, three and a half miles of water between the mountains of Snowdonia and the Berwyns, and somewhere under its surface the gwyniad, a whitefish left behind when the ice retreated, is spawning where it has spawned for ten thousand years. Bala, the small grey town at its northern end, is the place the outdoor Welsh come to be on water.

The lake is the largest natural one in Wales and its fish are unique in Britain, the gwyniad and the grayling together, which is why it is protected under the Ramsar convention; there are thirteen species in all to fish for, the gwyniad excepted, and a monster called Teggie that nobody has confirmed. Anything without an engine goes on the water, paddleboards, canoes, sailing dinghies and windsurfers, a narrow-gauge steam railway runs the southern shore, and a few miles up the valley the National White Water Centre uses dam releases on the Tryweryn to run rapids all summer. The dam is Llyn Celyn, and it has a history that Wales has not forgotten: in 1965 it drowned the village of Capel Celyn, its school, chapel and farms, to supply water to Liverpool, under an Act passed without a single Welsh MP in support, and when the level drops the remains of the village show above the water. Bala itself is Welsh-speaking and steeped in the culture; Mary Jones walked twenty-six miles across the mountains to it in 1800 to buy a Welsh Bible, and the story is told at her chapel at Llanycil on the lakeshore. Arenig Fawr, the mountain on the western horizon, so absorbed a group of painters in the 1910s that the work is said to have driven them half mad.