United Kingdom · North Wales
Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
The highest mountains in Britain south of the Highlands, in a park you can cross in ninety minutes, with a rack railway to the summit and World Heritage slate underneath.
Snowdonia is the mountain core of north Wales: 2,000 square kilometres of glacier-cut rock, woods and lakes around Yr Wyddfa, the highest summit in Britain south of the Scottish Highlands. Britain's third national park since 1951, it now leads with the Welsh names, Eryri and Yr Wyddfa - the strongest Welsh-speaking part of the country, where Welsh is the everyday language. A ninety-minute drive crosses the whole park, so one day can hold a knife-edge ridge, a rack railway to a summit cafe, a slate cavern and a coastal castle. Betws-y-Coed is the usual base, the only village in the park with a railway station.
Suggested stay
3–5 days
Language
English
Currency
GBP
Timezone
UTC+1
Why you'll love Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
The mountains glacier-scooped hollows with black lakes, arêtes crossed on hands as much as feet, and a dozen summits over 900 metres in sight of each other. The rescue teams are the busiest in Britain.
Two ways up everything the headline summit has half a dozen graded walking paths, a mountain railway for anyone who would rather ride, and a notorious scramble for anyone who would not. It runs park-wide.
Slate the industry that roofed the Victorian world left quarry towns, stepped mountainsides, chambers under the hills and narrow-gauge railways to the sea. Now a World Heritage landscape, museums, zip lines and underground trampolines.
Wales, not England bilingual signs, place names describing the terrain, and a Welsh history in the ground - princes who held these mountains, the castles built to take them, a valley drowned in living memory.
Best time to visit
May-Oct
14-20° days
53.094° N, 3.825° W
UTC+1 · Europe/London
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Weather & when to go to Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best May-Oct
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
No month is bad, only wetter and darker: May through October is the good stretch, the rest workable. These are the wettest hills in Britain. Summer weekends and holidays fill car parks by breakfast and queue the paths; the highest trailhead car park must be booked, roadside parking there banned. Deep winter brings short days, no summit railway, and tops needing an axe, crampons and the skills to use them.
Top things to do in Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
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Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) - six paths to the roof of Wales
hiking scenic adventure 👍 PopularAt 1,085 metres it is the highest ground in Britain outside Scotland, with six graded paths: Llanberis longest and gentlest; the Pyg and Miners' Tracks shortest, from the pre-booked Pen-y-Pass car park; the Watkin steepest and loosest; Rhyd Ddu and Snowdon Ranger the quiet pair. Crib Goch is no path but an exposed grade 1 knife-edge scramble that takes lives most years. Six to seven hours return, usually in cloud.
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Snowdon Mountain Railway - the rack railway out of Llanberis
scenic history 👍 PopularOpened in 1896 and still Britain's only public rack-and-pinion railway, grinding five miles of one-in-five gradient from Llanberis to a station below the summit in an hour. It runs spring to autumn, turns back at Clogwyn early in the season or when the wind is up, some services worked by the original Swiss steam locomotives. Book well ahead; riding up and walking down the Llanberis Path takes two hours.
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Tryfan and the Glyderau - the best scrambling in Wales
hiking climbing adventure ⭐ Highly recommendedTryfan is the one Welsh mountain needing hands: the North Ridge is a grade 1 scramble finishing between Adam and Eve, twin monoliths with a gap the bold jump. Bristly Ridge climbs to the Glyder Fach plateau, a lunar mess of blocks with the Cantilever Stone jutting over the drop and Castell y Gwynt a wall of spikes. A long, rough day with real exposure and hard navigation in cloud.
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Cwm Idwal - the glacial hollow that taught Darwin about ice
hiking nature wildlife scenic ⭐ Highly recommendedAn easy loop from Ogwen Cottage into a rock-walled cirque holding Llyn Idwal, under Twll Du, the Devil's Kitchen. It became Britain's first National Nature Reserve in 1954, for arctic-alpine plants left by the ice, and Darwin walked here twice, missing the evidence of glaciation on the first visit. The eastern slabs are where British climbers learned to lead. Three kilometres round, the best short walk in the park.
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Swallow Falls (Rhaeadr Ewynnol) - the cascade on the Llugwy
nature wildlife scenic 👍 PopularA staircase of falls in a wooded gorge two miles west of Betws-y-Coed on the old Holyhead road, through a turnstile beside the road, and best after heavy rain. Its Welsh name means the foaming waterfall. A riverside path from the village takes an hour; Ty Hyll, the Ugly House, is further along; and south of the village the Conwy squeezes through the Fairy Glen and drops over Conwy Falls.
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Llanberis Pass and Clogwyn Du'r Arddu - the crucible of British climbing
climbing adventure historyThe Llanberis Pass is walled with crags, Dinas Cromlech the famous one: its right-angled Cenotaph Corner was climbed by Joe Brown in 1952, when working-class climbers from Manchester and Liverpool rewrote British rock climbing. Cloggy, on Snowdon's northern face, holds the serious routes; the slate quarries above Llanberis sharper-edged; Tremadog the wet-weather retreat. The hotel at the top of the pass trained the 1953 Everest team; their ceiling signatures remain.
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National Slate Museum, Llanberis - the Dinorwig workshops as the men left them
history culture artsThe maintenance yard of Dinorwig quarry, shut in 1969 and kept almost as found: foundry, smithy, pattern loft, locomotive shed and the largest working waterwheel in Britain. Quarrymen's houses were moved here stone by stone from Blaenau Ffestiniog and furnished for four decades, and splitting demonstrations are worth timing a visit around. A national museum of Wales, so nothing to pay at the door, on Llyn Padarn under Dolbadarn Castle.
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Llechwedd and Blaenau Ffestiniog - inside the slate mountain
history adventure culture artsBuilt of slate, on slate and under grey tips of it, left outside the park boundary because of the workings. Llechwedd runs deep-mine tours down a steep cable incline into Victorian chambers, where guides explain the bargain system, candle allowance and lung disease; the same holes now hold Zip World's zip lines and trampolines. Northwest Wales's slate landscape became World Heritage in 2021; this is the clearest place to read it.
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Zip World Penrhyn Quarry - the fastest zip line in the world
adventureA mile and a half of cable across a working slate quarry above Bethesda, flown head-first at over a hundred miles an hour above an antifreeze-coloured lake. Penrhyn was once the world's largest slate quarry and the site of the bitterest strike in British industrial history, an odd double edge: you are winched up the inclines that broke the village. Book ahead; the boiler suit takes longer than the flight.
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Beddgelert and the Aberglaslyn Pass - the Fisherman's Path through the gorge
scenic history hikingThe prettiest village in the park, grey stone where two rivers meet. Gelert's grave, a field walk downstream, marks the hound Llywelyn is said to have killed in error - a story a local publican put up in the 1790s. Below it the Glaslyn cuts the Aberglaslyn Pass, where the Fisherman's Path runs along the water through unlit tunnels, and Sygun Copper Mine is minutes back up the valley.
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Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railways - narrow gauge across the park
scenic historyTwo slate lines out of Porthmadog, on rails less than two feet apart. The Ffestiniog opened in 1836, running wagons to the harbour by gravity, horses walking back up, one of the oldest railway companies in the world. The Welsh Highland, finished in 2011, runs twenty-five miles from Caernarfon through the Aberglaslyn Pass, Britain's longest heritage railway, hauled by South African Garratts. One out, the other back, fills a day.
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Cadair Idris - the southern giant above Dolgellau
hiking scenic off beaten pathAt 893 metres, the great mountain of the park's quiet southern half: a cliff-ringed cwm holds Llyn Cau below the summit, climbed steeply by the Minffordd Path, gently by the Pony Path from Dolgellau. Legend says a night on the summit makes you a poet or a madman. The Mawddach estuary trail follows an old railway to Barmouth, and the forest holds Coed y Brenin, Britain's first purpose-built mountain-bike centre.
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Gwydir Forest and the Marin Trail - riding and walking above Betws-y-Coed
hiking adventure nature wildlifeThe forest around Betws-y-Coed is old lead and zinc mining country replanted with conifer, threaded with waymarked walks and a technical twenty-five-kilometre mountain-bike loop. Llyn Elsi, a reservoir above the village, is an hour's walk for a view over the Conwy valley to the Carneddau, and Llyn Geirionydd and Llyn Crafnant, in the next valley, are quiet enough for a swim. Reliable wet-weather ground: sheltered, low, never closed by cloud.
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Adventure Parc Snowdonia, Dolgarrog - surfing under the mountains
adventureThe world's first commercial inland surf lagoon, opened in 2015 on the site of an old aluminium works in the Conwy valley, where a plough runs the length of a freshwater lake, throwing a rideable wave every minute, graded from beginner whitewater to a head-high peak down the middle. Nothing like sea surfing, and the thing that saves a washed-out afternoon; the same site has indoor climbing and caving.
Best areas to stay in Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Betws-y-Coed
First-time visitors $$Victorian resort village in the forest
Explore hotels in Betws-y-Coed →
Llanberis
Snowdon walkers $$Climbers' town at Snowdon's foot
Explore hotels in Llanberis →
Beddgelert
Couples and quiet $$Stone village where two rivers meet
Explore hotels in Beddgelert →
Capel Curig and the Ogwen valley
Walkers and climbers $Bunkhouses under the Glyderau
Explore hotels in Capel Curig and the Ogwen valley →
Dolgellau
Southern Snowdonia $$Dark stone market town, southern park
Explore hotels in Dolgellau →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
Getting to & around Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
Getting there
Nearly everyone drives. Betws-y-Coed is on the A5 about forty minutes inland from the north Wales coast and roughly two and a half hours from Manchester, the nearest big airport. The village also has its own station on the Conwy Valley branch line, which is the only railway that runs into the park.
Flight
Manchester Airport (MAN)
Manchester is the gateway, about two and a half hours by road: the M56 west, the A55 past Chester and Conwy, then the A470 south from Llandudno Junction. Hire desks are at the terminals; a car is sensible here. Without one, the airport's own station has trains along the north Wales coast to Llandudno Junction, direct or changing at Chester, then the Conwy Valley branch to Betws-y-Coed; that works but takes most of a day. Liverpool John Lennon is closer but has no station; Birmingham and London are much further.
Train
Betws-y-Coed station
The Conwy Valley Line runs from Llandudno Junction on the coast up the river to Betws-y-Coed and on to Blaenau Ffestiniog, and it is the only railway inside the park. It is slow and there are only a handful of trains a day, but the ride up the valley is lovely and it connects at the Junction with the main coast line. The Conwy has flooded the track and closed the line for months at a time in the past, so check it is actually running before you plan around it.
Train
Llandudno Junction
The north Wales coast line is the main artery: direct trains from London Euston to Llandudno Junction and Holyhead, and frequent services from Chester, Crewe, Manchester and Liverpool. It is the change point for the branch up to Betws-y-Coed. Coming north from Cardiff and south Wales is the awkward one - there is no fast railway up the middle of the country, so the journey generally runs through England and takes far longer than the map suggests.
Coach
Llandudno, Bangor and Caernarfon
Long-distance coaches from London and the Midlands serve the coastal towns rather than the mountains, so arriving this way means a second leg inland on a local or Sherpa bus. It is the cheap way in and the slowest, and the last connection inland can be early in the evening, which strands people who booked the late coach.
Drive
The A5 through Betws-y-Coed and the Ogwen valley is Telford's old Holyhead road and the classic approach from Shrewsbury and the Midlands - narrow, scenic and slow behind a caravan. The A55 expressway along the coast is much faster from Chester and the north-west. From south Wales the A470 runs up the spine of the country and is a genuinely long drive, not a hop.
Ferry
Holyhead
The Irish Sea ferries from Dublin dock at Holyhead on Anglesey, about an hour and a half from Betws-y-Coed by road on the A55 and A470. The port has its own station on the coast line, so foot passengers can pick up the train straight off the boat.
Getting around
Car
Essential for the southern half and the trailheads. Parking is the catch: the highest Snowdon car park must be booked, roadside parking on the pass is banned and enforced, and Ogwen fills by mid-morning.
TBC
Sherpa'r Wyddfa bus
The park's bus network around Snowdon: Betws-y-Coed, Capel Curig, Pen-y-Pass, Llanberis, Beddgelert, Caernarfon and Porthmadog. It makes linear walks possible and eases the trailhead car parks. Roughly hourly in season, sparser in winter and Sundays.
TBC
Local bus
Regional operators connect the towns outside the Snowdon corridor. Usable but infrequent, they dry up in the evenings and run a reduced Sunday timetable, so check the last bus before committing to an afternoon out.
TBC
Train
The Conwy Valley Line links Llandudno Junction, Betws-y-Coed and Blaenau Ffestiniog, making the slate town an easy car-free day out. Only a handful of trains each way, so build the day around the timetable.
TBC
Walking
Villages cross in ten minutes and the good stuff starts at the edge: riverside paths, forest tracks, in places the mountain path itself. Paths are rocky, wet and steeper than they look, so wear boots.
Free
Bicycle
Serious mountain-bike country: waymarked trail centres near Betws-y-Coed and north of Dolgellau, long road climbs over the passes, hire in the same villages. The main A5 and A470 carry fast summer traffic, best avoided.
TBC
Taxi
Thin on the ground and best booked ahead, particularly in the evening. The common use is the linear walk: a taxi to the start, walk back to the car, a request drivers here know well.
TBC
Day trips from Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
Portmeirion
Half dayItalianate folly village
Clough Williams-Ellis spent fifty years, 1925 to 1975, assembling a pastel Italianate village on a wooded peninsula above the Dwyryd estuary, much of it from fragments of demolished buildings shipped in, all at the wrong scale on purpose. It is a folly, a working hotel and the set of The Prisoner. The sub-tropical woodland gardens behind are half the visit, and most people miss them.
Getting there
car | train | bus
About 50 min by car via the A470 and A487; car-free it means the Conwy Valley Line to Blaenau Ffestiniog and the Ffestiniog Railway down to Minffordd, which turns it into a full and very good day
Conwy
Half dayCastle and town walls
One of Edward I's conquest castles, built in four years from 1283, rare in keeping its town walls: three-quarters of a mile of rampart with twenty-one towers, walkable most of the way. On the quay is the smallest house in Great Britain, and Telford's 1826 suspension bridge crosses beside the railway. Llandudno, the Victorian resort with pier and Great Orme tramway, is two miles on.
Getting there
car | train | walk | bus
35 min by car down the A470, or a similar time on the Conwy Valley Line to Llandudno Junction and a ten-minute walk across the bridge
Caernarfon
Full dayEdward's imperial castle
The grandest, most political conquest castle, its polygonal towers and banded masonry copying Constantinople to say the new English prince sat in the seat of emperors. Edward's son, the first English Prince of Wales, was born here in 1284, and the investitures of 1911 and 1969 were staged in the courtyard. The walled town is Welsh-speaking, and the Welsh Highland Railway leaves from the walls.
Getting there
car | bus | train
About 1 hr by car over the pass through Llanberis, or the Sherpa bus with a change; the Welsh Highland Railway also runs there from Porthmadog
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Full daySlate mines and zip lines
The slate capital, ringed by grey tips and famously rained on, the easiest car-free day out. The deep-mine tour drops a steep cable incline into Victorian chambers, where guides explain the bargain system, candle allowance and what the dust did to the men; the same caverns hold zip lines and trampolines. The Ffestiniog Railway leaves the station, and the landscape became World Heritage in 2021.
Getting there
car | train
30 min by car over the Crimea Pass on the A470, or about 30 min on the Conwy Valley Line, which terminates there
Anglesey (Ynys Môn)
Full dayIsland coast and beaches
A flat, farmed island with a coast path right round. South Stack's cliffs are loud with nesting seabirds in early summer; Newborough's dunes lead to Llanddwyn Island and the best view of the range; Beaumaris has an unfinished Edwardian castle and Victorian gaol; the village with Britain's longest name is on the railway platform. Telford's 1826 chain bridge and Stephenson's Britannia Bridge carry you over.
Getting there
car | train
About 1 hr 15 by car over the Britannia Bridge; the coast railway crosses to Bangor and Holyhead if you would rather not drive
Llŷn Peninsula
1-2 daysWild Welsh coast
The long arm of land reaching south-west from the mountains, an area of outstanding natural beauty and one of the strongest Welsh-speaking corners of the country: sailing and surf beaches at Abersoch, a pub on the sand at Porthdinllaen reached on foot, the old pilgrims' route to Bardsey Island at the tip, and a fraction of the mountain crowds. Worth a night, not a dash.
Getting there
car | train
1 hr 30 by car to Abersoch and longer to the tip; public transport reaches Pwllheli on the Cambrian Coast line and gets thin after that
A little history of Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
These mountains were a fortress before they were a park. The princes of Gwynedd held the high ground through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, running their kingdom from small castles at the mouths of the passes; their strength was the terrain, and Anglesey's grain fed them while armies struggled to reach them. It ended in 1282 with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd's killing, and Edward I ringed the mountains with enormous castles garrisoned from the sea, not built among them. Owain Glyndŵr's rising a century later took some back for a few years, and the mountains stayed the last redoubt of a language and legal culture England spent centuries trying to absorb.
The nineteenth century turned the rock into money. Slate from the quarries above Bethesda and Llanberis and the mines under Blaenau Ffestiniog roofed the industrial world, and narrow-gauge railways were cut into the hillsides to reach the harbours. The work was brutal, the politics bitter: the Penrhyn lock-out of 1900 to 1903, the longest industrial dispute in British history, split families for a generation. Those railways brought tourists, painters made Betws-y-Coed a resort, and a rack railway was driven up the highest mountain in 1896. The industry died back, the park was designated in 1951, and the quarries, inclines and mine chambers are now World Heritage, visited rather than worked.
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native Prince of Wales, is killed and Edward I's conquest of Gwynedd follows; work starts on Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech castles, the ring of stone that pins the mountains from the coast.
Telford drives the Holyhead road through the Ogwen and Llugwy valleys, the cast-iron Waterloo Bridge at Betws-y-Coed carrying the year of the battle across its span; the Ffestiniog Railway opens to run slate down to the harbour at Porthmadog by gravity.
The Conwy Valley Line reaches Betws-y-Coed; the painters who had been coming since the 1840s are followed by hotels, and the village becomes a resort.
The Snowdon Mountain Railway opens from Llanberis; a carriage derails on the opening day and a passenger who jumps is killed.
The Penrhyn lock-out, the longest industrial dispute in British history, divides Bethesda for three years and breaks the quarry's power.
Snowdonia is designated Britain's third national park, after the Peak District and the Lake District.
The village of Capel Celyn is drowned under a reservoir to supply Liverpool with water; the slogan Cofiwch Dryweryn, remember Tryweryn, is still painted on walls across Wales.
Dinorwig quarry closes and its workshops are kept intact as the National Slate Museum; the slate landscape of northwest Wales is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The park authority adopts the Welsh names first: Eryri for the park, Yr Wyddfa for the mountain.
Know before you go
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Dialing
+44
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FAQs about Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
▸ How many days do you need in Snowdonia?
Three days is the sensible minimum: one big mountain day, one on the scrambling ridges or an easier walk if that is not your thing, and one for slate, castles and a narrow-gauge railway. Five lets you take the weather as it comes rather than forcing a summit into the one dry window, and gives you the southern half of the park around Cadair Idris, which most visitors never see. Anything less than two nights and you will spend most of it driving.
▸ Which path should I take up Yr Wyddfa?
The Llanberis Path is easiest and least steep, but longest and busiest. The Pyg and Miners' Tracks are shortest, starting high at Pen-y-Pass, whose car park must be booked ahead. The Watkin is the most beautiful and hardest, from sea level onto loose ground. Crib Goch is not a walking route - an exposed grade 1 knife-edge scramble where people die every year, so do not drift onto it from the Pyg Track by accident.
▸ Do I need a car?
For the park as a whole, effectively yes. The exception is the Snowdon corridor: based in Betws-y-Coed or Llanberis you can do a great deal on the Sherpa buses and the Conwy Valley train, and the buses actually make the best walks easier, because you can go up one path and down another instead of looping back to a car. Everywhere else - the southern park, the coast, the quieter valleys - the buses are too infrequent to build days around.
▸ What do I have to book in advance?
Parking at the highest Snowdon trailhead has to be pre-booked and roadside parking nearby is banned and enforced, so that one is not optional. The summit railway, the zip lines and the mine tours all sell out in season. Beds in the small mountain villages go months ahead for summer and holiday weekends, and Beddgelert and Capel Curig have very few of them. Everything else can be decided on the day.
▸ Is Snowdonia worth visiting in winter?
Yes, with caveats. The hills are empty, winter light is the best of the year, and the long nights pay off in an International Dark Sky Reserve, designated in 2015. But daylight is short, the summit railway does not run, some attractions close or cut hours, and the tops become full winter mountaineering, with snow, ice and cornices that need an axe, crampons and the experience to judge them. Low-level walks stay open to everybody.
▸ How wet is it, really?
Wet. Some of the rainiest ground in Britain, and the high crags catch several times what the coast gets, so plan for rain in any month and treat a dry week as a gift. That means waterproofs and boots that will be soaked, not a rain jacket, and a plan B each day: the slate caverns, museums, forest trails, the surf lagoon and low-level river walks all work in weather that has cleared the tops.
▸ Where should I stay for climbing Snowdon specifically?
Llanberis, on the north-west side. The gentlest path starts in the village, the rack railway leaves from it, and the bus up to the high trailhead runs from the same street, so you can walk the mountain without moving the car all day. Capel Curig and the Ogwen valley are the choice if you want the scrambling ridges instead, and Betws-y-Coed is the compromise: about forty minutes from the trailheads, but with far more beds, food and wet-weather options.
▸ Is Welsh actually spoken here?
Yes, more than anywhere else in the country - this is the heartland, and in the inland villages you will hear it in the shop, the pub and the primary school playground. Everyone also speaks English and nobody expects a visitor to have Welsh, but a few words go a long way, and learning what the elements of the place names mean turns the map into a description of the terrain: llyn is a lake, cwm a valley head, bwlch a pass, mynydd a mountain, afon a river.
▸ What should I take onto the hills?
Waterproof jacket and trousers, boots with ankle support and grip, warm layers even in summer, food, a headtorch, and a paper map and compass with the ability to use them - there is no mobile signal on most of the high ground and cloud comes down fast enough to erase a path you were following. Check the mountain forecast rather than the town one; the summits are routinely many degrees colder with a wind that turns a pleasant valley day into a serious one.
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