The largest natural lake in Wales, home to a rare Ice Age fish and a little steam railway along its southern shore
Llyn Tegid — llyn is Welsh for lake — is the biggest natural lake in Wales, a long sheet of water at the edge of Eryri, the national park better known in English as Snowdonia. The town of Bala sits at its northern end, which is why English speakers usually call it Bala Lake. In its depths lives the gwyniad, a whitefish stranded here since the last Ice Age and found in no other lake in Britain. Along the southern shore a narrow-gauge steam railway, the Bala Lake Railway, runs on the trackbed of an old branch line. The open water draws sailors, canoeists and windsurfers, and the shore road makes an easy circuit by bike or car.
