Nant Peris

The inn and the village without shops

The walls of the Vaynol Arms are hung with outdoor pursuit equipment from throughout the ages, which tells you most of what you need to know about who drinks here. This is a walkers' and climbers' pub, a Robinsons tied house with slate floors, open fires and a pool table. It was originally a farmhouse called Tŷ'n Llan — "the house in the church enclosure" — a name locals still use. A tenant named John Closs opened part of it as an inn around 1780, and the Closs family ran it until the 1960s. The Sunday roast comes with Welsh lamb and extra-large Yorkshire puddings, the chips are homemade and locally renowned, and dogs are welcome. It sits at the very foot of the Llanberis Pass. It closes on Mondays.

There are no shops in the hamlet. For anything beyond a pint and a roast you go the two miles down the valley to Llanberis, which has the cafés, the shops and the Snowdon Mountain Railway. Nant Peris keeps its distance from all that.

Pass paths and climbing history

What Nant Peris has instead is the mountains, close on both sides. The valley here is narrow, straight and steep-sided, hemmed between the Snowdon massif and the Glyderau ridge, with crags and boulders crowding both edges of the road. The Llanberis Path — the longest but least strenuous way up Snowdon — climbs from the valley above the village. Walkers use Nant Peris as a base for the Glyderau too: Glyder Fawr, Glyder Fach, Y Garn, Elidir Fawr. The gentler option is to walk down the pass itself from Pen-y-Pass, roughly two miles downhill beside the river. Walk it on the right, facing the traffic.

The Llanberis Pass crags above the village hold some of the most famous trad climbing routes in Britain. Dinas Cromlech, a rhyolite outcrop shaped like an open book, is where Joe Brown first climbed Cenotaph Corner in 1952, reportedly in his socks.

The old valley church

The hamlet clusters around St Peris' Church, a small grey stone building whose stonework runs back to at least the 14th century. This was the mother church of the whole valley, back when Nant Peris was itself called Llanberis — before slate mining pulled the population down to the lake and took the name with it, leaving this the old village.

A car-free mountain base

There is a large Park & Ride car park at the edge of the village, about 130 cars, and the Snowdonia Sherpa buses — S1, S2 and S5 — run from here up to Pen-y-Pass and down to Llanberis. Leave the car, take the bus, and you can spend the whole day on the mountain without moving it again. A day return is £5.50. Dogs are carried.

The sacred fish of Ffynnon Beris

About 200 yards north-east of the church is Ffynnon Beris, a healing well that once kept two sacred fish. A cure was said to be assured only if the fish appeared, and pilgrims learned to tempt them out with bread. "The Sybil of the place attends, and divines your fortune by the appearance or non-appearance of a little fish," wrote Thomas Pennant in 1778. One well-known fish died in August 1896, blind and 17 inches long, and its death was reported in the papers across Wales and England. It was buried in the garden next door and replaced that November.