A glacier-scooped mountain lake below the dark cleft of the Devil's Kitchen, and the first place in Wales to be made a nature reserve
You reach Llyn Idwal on a short walk up from the Ogwen valley, and it packs a lot of drama into a small space. The lake sits in a cwm, a rounded hollow that a glacier gouged out of the Glyderau range, with cliffs closing in on three sides. At the far end is the Devil’s Kitchen, Twll Du in Welsh, a black cleft in the rock face with a stream falling through it. In 1954 Llyn Idwal became the first national nature reserve in Wales, largely for the rare arctic-alpine plants that grow on those damp ledges.
Charles Darwin came here twice, and on his second visit in 1842 recognised that the scratched, polished rocks and heaped debris were the work of long-vanished glaciers. Climbers know the run of slabs on the eastern side, the Idwal Slabs, as a place to learn the ropes. For most people it is enough to walk the path that loops right round the water, roughly two to three miles all told, with the pointed summit of Tryfan filling the view to the east.
The usual start is the car park by Llyn Ogwen on the A5, from where it is about twenty minutes uphill to the shore. The ground gets boggy after rain, and the weather up in Cwm Idwal and Devil’s Kitchen can turn quickly, so take a waterproof and decent footwear. Going on up and over the pass by the Devil’s Kitchen is a proper mountain scramble, not a stroll.
