The Cwellyn Arms is the only pub in Rhyd Ddu, a distinction its regulars don't overstate. "Best pub in Rhyd Ddu — and only pub in Rydd Ddu. Dog friendly," is how one TripAdvisor reviewer put it, and that about covers it.
It has been under the same ownership for over forty years, run now by Graham with Julie Bamber as general manager. The 40-seat restaurant has underfloor heating, a log-burning stove, and food cooked fresh on the premises from local suppliers. The menu names dishes rather than categories: slow-cooked local pork belly with red cabbage and risotto cakes, bangers and mash in Cabernet Sauvignon red onion gravy, duck breast with slow-roasted carrots and prunes, wild mushroom and smoked mozzarella lasagne. The signature dessert is the Baked Snowdon, a take on baked Alaska that one diner rated among the best they'd had. Up to nine real ales rotate through, most of them from local micro-breweries.
Two lounges have real fires, and dogs are welcome in both. Outside, the seating looks towards Snowdon, which the pub sits directly beneath. The same owners run a campsite half a mile away called Snowdon Base Camp, overlooking Llyn Cwellyn.
That's the extent of the village's provisions. There are no shops, butchers or delis; Beddgelert, four miles south, is the nearest place to buy anything.
Most people come here to walk. The Rhyd Ddu Path is the quietest of the routes up Snowdon and the least touristy, starting at the village car park, climbing gently along an old slate-quarry track, then narrowing over rock along the Bwlch Main to the summit. It carried the first official ascent of Snowdon in 1639. Just north, the Snowdon Ranger Path begins at a youth hostel on the shore of Llyn Cwellyn and is thought to be the oldest of the six classic routes up. If the mountain feels like too much, the Lôn Gwyrfai runs four and a half traffic-free miles along the valley to Beddgelert, open to walkers, cyclists and horse riders alike.
The village sits in a pass between two lakes. Llyn Cwellyn, the larger, is a 215-acre reservoir over 120 feet deep, one of the few Welsh lakes with a natural population of Arctic char — torgoch, "red belly," in Welsh — and otters are seen at its Castell Cidwm end. The smaller Llyn y Dywarchen has a genuine floating turf island, first recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188, who described shepherds watching their grazing cattle carried across the water on it. The astronomer Edmund Halley swam out to it in 1698 to confirm that it floated.
Rhyd Ddu was built to house slate quarrymen. Its station opened in 1881, and within a few years the railway company renamed it "Snowdon" to lure tourists towards the mountain; the name reverted in 1934. The Welsh Highland Railway's steam trains run through the village again now, and the Snowdon Sherpa buses stop on the A4085 outside.
The poet T. H. Parry-Williams was born here, at the schoolhouse, and became the first person to win both the Chair and the Crown at the same National Eisteddfod. His motorbike was registered KC 16.
