My mate has decided to visit every aircraft crash site in the Snowdonia National Park and informs me that there are around 100 or so! Yesterday he went up Llwytmor behind Aber Falls to find the remains of a German WW2 bomber and a British plane called a Blackburn Botha (Which I'd never heard of!). As it was such a lovely day I tagged along especially as I had never taken the path to the left of Aber Falls but had always wanted to. The weather was perfect at sea level but by about 1500 feet it was starting to get pretty cold and the cloud was closing in. We saw a red kite over the falls itself and walked into the Carneddau following the stream. After a mile or so he showed me an engine of the Blackburn Botha that crashed on 28th August 1943, it crashed much higher up the mountain but the engine ended up in the river at the bottom. Four RAF crew were killed and the plane was from Hooton Park on the Wirral.
We then walked up the slope to the summit of Llwytmor, you could see no further than 20 or so metres in front of you and Foel Fras looked very foreboding with its dark pinnacles of rock in the gloom. It was a map and compass job to navigate ourselves to the crash site of the German Heinkel bomber that crashed in April 1941. The bomber had been tasked with bombing Barrow shipyard but was hit by anti aircraft fire damaging its navigational aids, lost it crashed into the mountain in low cloud. Three airman survived and one was killed. The survivors walked off the mountain and went to the first farmhouse to surrender. All three ended up in a Prisoner of War Camp in Canada! Great walk, even in tricky conditions, and on a better day would like to carry on up Foel Fras and around to Drum before dropping back into Aber, however yesterday we just retraced our route back to the Falls and the Aber valley.