Cylchgronau Cymru

OWEN GLYNNE JONES (1867-1899) By J. LLYWELYN JONES, B.A. We faithfully read our Jones C. D. Milner: Rock for Climbing. IT is tempting to speculate what sort of mountaineer, if a mountaineer at all, Owen Glynne Jones would have become if he had spent his formative years in Wales instead of in London. Those who live among the mountains have not usually been foremost in their exploration. In the nineteenth century it was the role of the native, in Wales as well as elsewhere, to act as guide and support to the visitors. In the Alps it was the climbing clients' who were the principals, and the guides and porters engaged locally had important, but no more than supporting, roles. This was indeed not surprising-life in a mountain region is harder than in the plains, and life a century ago was for most people a great deal harder than it is nowadays. Tough and resilient, the natives of the Swiss valleys were too much taken up with gaining what was often enough only a bare living to worry about exploring mountain areas that could have no conceivable practical use. The peaks were there for all to see, and those who lived in their sight regarded them as being as unchallengeable as many of the other features, good and bad, of their own daily lives. Travellers went readily enough over high passes as occasion demanded, and smugglers moved as invisibly as they could between Switzerland and neighbouring countries along fairly well defined routes. All this sufficed, for no profit was to be gained and no social or religious purposes served by laboriously climbing a snow-capped peak, and returning by the same route. There are records in many mountain valleys of fit men walking tremendous distances, and after the onset of the railway age it needed only the arrival of the fit and enthusiastic foreigners- usually plainsmen and city dwellers-to harness the local knowledge and toughness of the Swiss to the enterprise of reaching the mountain tops.