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Outside Magazine August 2001
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Here's Mud in Your Eye (cont.)

Sixty Yards of pure slime: the Waen Rhydd bog on race day
LIKE ALL VENERABLE British inventions, bog snorkeling sprang from a range of diverse influences, chief among them good ale and bad weather. The year was 1976, and Gordon Green, then a production manager at a London ice-cream factory, decided to give up city life and move with his wife and three children to a more pastoral existence in Wales. He bought the Neuadd (that's "Nigh-ath") Arms, a square, stone Victorian hotel with 20 rooms in Llanwrtyd Wells, and set about fashioning himself an innkeeper. It didn't take him long to realize that the town, with a faltering farming economy, was pretty dead. (The damp Welsh uplands offer poor grazing, forestry and sheep-farming are in decline, and the soil is too acidic for much to grow.) Tourism seemed to be the answer. But what would attract people to a remote area that has its own rugged beauty, typically Welsh weather, and not much else?

Green happened upon the answer one evening four years later, in the Neuadd Arms, when he was arguing over a drink with some farmers about the relative strengths and speeds of man and horse. They decided to put the question to the test, and six months later the first modern Man vs. Horse cross-country footrace was born. (Today, the annual May marathon is so popular that a London bookie offers £22,000 to the man who beats a horse over the length of the 22-mile course; so far none has, though last year the winning runner came within a minute and a half of the slowest steed.) After that, there was no stopping Green. He continued to invent sports, the weirder the better: the Real Ale Ramble (a two-day trek with ale at every checkpoint), Mountain Bike Bog Leaping (a 20-mile cross-country race), and half a dozen more.

Easily the oddest of the lot was bog snorkeling. One night in 1985 a couple of English transplants named Iris and Royston Shrigley were enjoying a pint in the Neuadd Arms, and the conversation got around to their new home. It needed work, Iris said, "but not as much as the garden. That's only fit for bog snorkeling."

The phrase stuck in Green's mind until a few months later, when Canadian Club whiskey sponsored a contest of eccentric ways to raise money for local charities. On a whim, Green proposed bog snorkeling, which didn't take home first prize (according to Davis, someone sitting in a bath of baked beans in Birmingham won) but did garner a case of whiskey and a pile of T-shirts. This was enough to persuade Green, a good student of history, to turn his strange idea into stranger reality: A once-booming town renowned for its wells would be reborn from those very waters.

Legend has it that in 1732 a pastor in the area, one Theophilus Evans, fell ill with scurvy. He went to the nearby hamlet of Llanwrtyd, where he'd heard there was a sulfur spring called Ffynnon Ddrewllwyd (Welsh for "stinking well") that was supposed to have curative powers but smelled awful enough to make even a sick man think twice. Seeing a frog jump in, though, the good reverend decided the water couldn't be too toxic, drank it, and was cured. During the Victorian spa boom of the 1890s, a rail line was built up from South Wales, and it wasn't unusual to see hundreds of people swarm off the train and line the path to the well. This continued, more or less, until the 1940s, when the National Health Service was established to provide free medicine for all. The Welsh no longer needed healing waters, and within a few years Llanwrtyd Wells became a virtual ghost town.

Then, in August 1985, the World Bog Snorkelling Championships were born. In its first year, the event drew 20 competitors at £5 per entry; proceeds were donated to the Llanwrtyd Wells Community Center. Since then it has been held every August Bank Holiday—the British equivalent of Labor Day—and has grown steadily in numbers and renown. It has been broadcast on the BBC and countless evening news programs around the world, and has attracted the sponsorship of Ben & Jerry's UK, which kicks in free ice cream—Phish Food is the flavor of the day—as well as the trophy and helpful wooden distance markers. When Manchester submitted a proposal to host the 2000 Summer Olympics, Green wrote to the organizing committee to suggest bog snorkeling as an event. "P'raps that's why they didn't get the bid," he says wistfully.

And though the sport has retained its primitive glory, its effect on Llanwrtyd Wells has been nothing short of radical. The town of 600-plus now boasts nearly two dozen inns and B&Bs, thanks to this odd vein of tourism. Snorkelers and spectators, only too delighted to have an excuse to spend a weekend hoisting pints in the Welsh countryside, arrive in droves from all over the British Isles and Europe. "There wasn't much else here," explains former mayor Lesley Keates. "It's no good saying, 'Come here and sunbathe.' I think without the games Green organizes, this town wouldn't be here."


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