Does The Skirrid mountain in Wales look like a pair of buttocks?

‘What does it look like?’ the blind man asked.

‘It looks like…’

His sighted companion paused, searching for a comparison.

‘Er… buttocks.’

‘Then I’m surprised they didn’t call it the Devil’s Bike Rest,’ quipped the blind man.

The blind man was Chris McCausland, the comedian who has become better known as a celebrity dancer after winning a TV dancing contest.

The other man was Alexander Armstrong, presenter of the TV show Perfect Pub Walks, where middle-aged men go on a summer walk somewhere in the United Kingdom, talk about their problems, then stop for a drink in a pub garden.

Chris and Xander (as he seems to be known to his friends) were tackling a small hill in South Wales called The Skirrid which we were informed had a mysterious cleft that gave the peak a distinctive appearance. After the walk they visited a pub called the Skirrid Inn that is supposed to be the oldest pub in Wales.

It struck me as a bit mysterious that at no point during the show were we offered footage of this strange feature that was supposed to resemble a pair of buttocks. It was a bit of a bummer. Xander seems like a nice chap. Would he have the cheek to make a blind man the butt of his joke in this way?

Anyway, I realised that I had an easy way to solve the mystery. The Skirrid is just a short drive from our home in the Cotswolds, so one weekend earlier this year when Edita was back from Haiti, we set out west, determined to crack it.

The Skirrid is an isolated peak 5km north-east of the town of Abergavenny. I noted it a few years ago, when we drove past on our way to Sugar Loaf, the more famous peak that rises above the town in what someone must once have thought resembled a cone of sugar.

My first assumption had been that The Skirrid must have two rounded, moon-shaped peaks, but I could see by the contours on the map that it’s a single 1km north-south ridge. The map also indicated the ruins of a chapel on the summit, which would make it a holy mountain, but that wasn’t the hole we were looking for. My next thought was that there must be a strange rock formation on its summit somewhat resembling a pair of gluteus maximi.

My guidebook, the Pocket Mountains guide to the Brecon Beacons appeared to bear this out. It described a route that circled the east side of the peak before making a ascent from the north, the opposite direction from the standard tourist trail.

Its description of this back passage, so to speak, contained the following sentence:

There are three explanations for the formation of the notch at the north end of the hill.

Notch, crack, crevice, call it what you will: we were to find the explanation on the north side, and if it wasn’t explained by contours then it probably involved rocks.

(Incidentally, the explanations themselves seem unconvincing, namely: an argument between a giant and the devil, a lightning strike at the precise moment Christ was being crucified, and an earthquake. None seem likely, though the last is more plausible. More about this later.)

My conviction that we were looking for a curious rock formation was further reinforced after we arrived at the National Trust car park on the southern side of the peak. A display board at the bottom of the trail referred to several routes to the summit, one of which was a ‘scramble’ up from the north side.

‘So I guess it’s rock formation then,’ I said to Edita. ‘Perhaps we scramble up the cleft between the two buttocks.’

The main route weaved steeply up through forest on a muddy trail. After passing through a gate in a wall, we branched off the main trail to contour around the east side of the peak on the route that my guidebook described. It was a clear day and we had broad views to our right across rolling Monmouthshire farmland. To our left, the mountain rose steeply above us in a swathe of bracken-clad moorland. There were no strange rock formations on this side; I couldn’t help thinking that the slopes were as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

After circling round to the north side, we were confronted with a faint path up vertiginous grassy slopes. Edita raced up, but my progress was more laboured. Footmarks were slippery. Twice I slid, falling onto my face, and found myself crawling to regain my footing. I felt a bit of an arse. These manoeuvres were down to incompetence, though. This was a steep walk, not a scramble.

A few metres short of the summit, I crossed a broad path girdling the peak. I stopped to turn around and photograph the Black Mountains rising up on the north-west horizon. As I stood in position, the clouds parted, revealing twin shadows on the hillside beyond. I looked at the screen on my camera and did a double take. If I were standing on the stage performing in a pantomime, this was the moment the audience would be shouting, ‘behind you!’

I slowly turned around, but above me all I could see was sloping grass. There were no strange rock formations; no plausible explanation for the buttock-shaped shadow I had seen across the Black Mountains. I turned back, but the clouds had closed and the shadow was gone.

By the time I reached the top, Edita had been waiting there for a few minutes. There was an Ordnance Survey trig pillar, and many people were standing beside it taking selfies. A broad ridge led southwards with views for miles. Everyone had come up that way and nobody else had been stupid enough to take our route.

‘Where are these buttocks then?’ I said.

Edita had no answer. There were no buttocks, and if the devil was watching the he must have been creased with laughter.

There was a marvellous view of Sugar Loaf to the west and the rest of the Black Mountains further north, including the ridge of Chwarel y Fan, the highest point in Monmouthshire, that we had explored a couple of years earlier.

As we descended the summit ridge, we could see Abergavenny in the plains below, and the flat top of Coety Mountain hiding the South Wales Valleys beyond. We walked The Skirrid’s entire length, examining every possible cleft and rock outcrop to see if any of them resembled haunches. The answer was no.

We were back at the National Trust car park by 11.30. We had some time to kill before the Skirrid Inn opened, a few miles to the north in the village of Llanvihangel Crucorney (yeah, I know, the people who named these places had too much time on their hands). We drove slowly around the west side of the mountain looking for buttocks, but there were none.

On the plus side, the Skirrid Inn was a marvellous old stone fortress of a place. We sat on oak tables beside the fire and read about its history. The pub dated back to the 11th century. A room on the upper storey was once a courthouse. Sentences were carried out in situ, and some 180 people are reputed to have been hung from the pub’s beams. Unsurprisingly, some of the rooms are now said to be haunted.

Meanwhile, I was still haunted by Alexander Armstrong and his pair of buttocks. I learned from the National Trust website that the name Skirrid is derived from Ysgyryd, the Welsh word for ‘to shake or tremble’. The Ordnance Survey map even marks the peak as Ysgyryd Fawr.

‘It’s easy to see where this name came from, with the massive landslide on the hill’s northern tip,’ the website went on to say.

Was it? I’d just been up the bleeding northern tip, and all I could say was ‘what massive landslide?’. I’d seen no massive landslide any more than I’d seen buttocks.

The article went on to say that the landslide was formed when Jack o’ Kent, a local giant who is believed to be responsible for a number of geographical features in the Herefordshire and Monmouthshire area, had a wager with the devil.

Jack o’ Kent’s relationship with Satan can be likened to Road Runner’s with Wile E Coyote. The pair entered into a number of bargains that Jack o’ Kent wriggled out of by means of a series of tricks. He bet the devil that Sugar Loaf was higher than the nearby Malvern Hills (don’t we all have bets like this). When the devil realised he’d been had, he tried to carry some soil from Sugar Loaf over to the Malverns to make them higher. But he was clumsy and dropped the soil next to The Skirrid, leaving a mound at its northern end for posterity.

Clearly the article on the National Trust website couldn’t be trusted, but just in case there was a grain of truth in it, on our way home we decided to take a back road up The Skirrid’s western flank. From a farm gateway, we spotted a small wooded knoll on the mountain’s north-west corner jutting upwards like the bones of the lower spine. It formed a tiny notch in the otherwise descending slope about 100m below the summit.

If this was the cleft that we’d been searching for then to say I was disappointed would be something of an understatement. The notch was little more than a boil to a buttock. If Xander Armstrong’s look like this then, frankly, he needs to see a doctor.

My visit felt incomplete, so I returned to The Skirrid a few weeks later after Edita had returned to Haiti. This time I decided to skirt the mountain’s western side to view this mound at close quarters. It was a more pleasant walk than the route we’d take around the eastern flank, wending through peaceful woodlands alive with bluebells.

I emerged from woodland about 500m south of the cleft. As I approached, I could see that the mound to my left rose about 20m above the cleft and was crowned by pine trees, in contrast to the mixed woodland that I’d traversed. The cleft was like no rectum I have ever seen. It was wide enough to sail a ship through (though it would obviously need water).

To my right, I could see that The Skirrid’s summit was guarded by sheer cliffs, in contrast to the grassy slopes on the eastern side. These cliffs were easily explained by the piles of boulders jumbled beneath. There have clearly been many landslides here over the years, some quite recently. Only the one that had formed the tree-lined mound could have happened as long ago as the Lord’s crucifixion.

I took a trail leading up through the boulder fields to join The Skirrid’s north-west ridge. I looked back across the mound to Sugar Loaf and the Black Mountains beyond. It was a far more interesting route to the one we’d take two months earlier, but frankly, they make a bit too much of the mountain’s cloven appearance. The mound and the cleft are far from obvious. It had taken me two visits and much exploration to find them, and once again I’d been the only person on that route up the backside. All those people coming up the main trail wouldn’t even notice it was there. These myths and legends are a lot of old coccyx, I thought to myself.

I arrived on the summit under sunny skies. An elderly couple were eating a picnic on a bank of bracken and a group of younger people were crowded around the trig pillar. I tried to take a summit selfie without their faces in it.

It was a nice walk; I was glad to have come here twice and I’m sure I will come again. But pair of buttocks, my arse.

You can see for yourself by visiting my Skirrid Flickr album.