Every Easter the kids and I spend a day scouring book stores (new and old) looking for books that take our interest. One of our favourite bookstores is Ystwyth Books in Aberystwyth where we spend many hours and come away with a mountain of books. A book that caught my eye this Easter was The Lakes of Eryri by Geraint Roberts. I was particularly interested in the book as it describes many of the Lakes of Snowdonia (Eryri in Welsh) embroidering their description of for example height, area and wildlife with history, legends and local stories. As a season ticket holder with the Cambrian Angling Association I am always keen to identify alternate waters to explore in the area and this book offered such an opportunity. It also offered the opportunity to expand my knowledge of the waters I had already explored.
The book is in a plastic cover which was designed to facilitate outdoor use although I am not sure this would be likely. While the lakes are sorted alphabetically there is an attempt to group them into 10 areas with a very simplistic map to serve as a rough guide of these areas. To my mind this is one of the key deficiencies of this book. While I realise that the book includes most lakes included on the 1:25K OS maps and replicating such levels of spatial detail would not be possible, the lack of spatial location/referencing makes this book difficult to use proactively. It is fine if you know the name of the lake you wish to lookup, perhaps coming across it on an OS map, but if you want to use the book to explore new lakes it is more restrictive. Even the gridref provided is only a 4 digit reference that when you enter this into a spatial search engine, like that on the OS Maps online site, gets you to the general vicinity and not to the actual lake which I think is a real pity.
That said, the book is a fantastically rich source of information weaving natural history, folk lore and historical facts together into a wonderfully entertaining read. With respect to fishing, the presence/absence of trout is noted for most of the lakes along with an assessment of their quality and as such is an assessment of whether it would be worthwhile to hike to and fish the lake. Now the tricky bit of finding out how to go about gaining access to fish these new llyns on my “to fish” list. At £8.90 the book was well worth purchasing.
Tight Lines
Greg