Devil's Kitchen and Glyder Fawr

From Twll Du the route continues up onto Glyder Fawr. The plateau is a different kind of landscape — not the smooth eroded ridgeline of Pen y Fan but a chaos of vertically fractured columns. The lava cooled and contracted, splitting along internal planes, and the result is an entire summit covered in rock that looks deliberately placed and wasn't. Spike formations, three and four metres high. Narrow chasms between columns that drop into nothing. Lichen growing on every horizontal surface.

The plateau doesn't feel like a walking destination. It feels like a place the mountain decided to do something unusual.

Below, Llyn y Cwn sits in the hollow between Glyder Fawr and Y Garn — a dark tarn, the water the colour of the rock it sits on. The glaciated valley runs away to the north, the ridgelines layered in the grey May light. Tarns are visible in multiple directions from the summit: Llyn Idwal below Devil's Kitchen, Llyn y Cwn in the cwm, the distant water of Llyn Ogwen at the valley floor.

The jagged rock on the summit is lichen-covered at every surface. Yellow-grey, flat against the stone. The fractured columns have horizontal jointing visible — the same geological process that made the Cantilever Stone, just here without the dramatic overhang.

Coming down from Y Garn: the valley spreads out, the moorland brown and green below the ridgeline, the scale made clear.