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Here's Mud in Your Eye ( and Your Ears, and Your Hair, and Your Nose...) Greetings from the quaint Welsh village of Llanwrtyd Wells, renowned for its fine ales, warm hospitality, and one of the oddest athletic endeavors on Planet Earth: floundering through noxious rural ooze! TIM BROOKES reports on the illustrious—if slightly smelly—history and modern-day mayhem of a certifiably insane sport called bog snorkeling. By Tim Brookes
"Bloody hell, that's cold," Green says. Mid-Wales is never tropical, and even on a partly sunny day in late August, the stagnant water is at shriveling temperature. "The little spheres trying to retreat into the body, are they?" inquires Mark Bradburn helpfully. Green, 66, is innkeeper in the village of Llanwrtyd Wells in the county of Powys. Silver-haired, medium height, he has the perpetually bemused look of a man who has just misplaced his glasses. Bradburn, a local builder, is some 25 years younger, short, dark, cheerful, and built like a pink brick. They and I are in a soggy field at the end of a dirt track barely wide enough for two sheep to pass, on the slopes of beautiful bare green hills called the Eppynt Mountains. A fox bounds away toward a cluster of wind-bent trees; above us a Welsh hawk, a long-tailed red kite, swoops cleanly across the sky. Bradburn hands Green a tree saw, and Green begins to hack away at the roots of the thick clumps of sedge, five feet long and slimy with algae, that have encroached into the bog over the past year. Bradburn and I, each with one foot on the bank, the other thigh-deep in slime, haul them out and throw them over the barbed-wire fence that runs down one side of the trench, where they land with soggy thumps. Bubbles rise all around Green as he works, giving off a smell like a cross between stale beer and farts. "That's methane," he says mildly. "Pity it's all getting released now, really. Maybe it'll have built up again by Monday." Monday, August 28, is the day when 57 people from all over the world will converge on the bog, which is locally known as Waen Rhydd (pronounced, roughly, "Wine Wreath"), in Llanwrtyd Wells ("Thlan-oor-tid"), to compete in the 15th World Bog Snorkelling Championships. And Green, as the sport's visionary, custodian, impresario, and general Master of the Bog, would like the trench to be as smelly, slimy, and unappealing as possible for the big race. All sports require a degree of lunacy, but bog snorkeling demands a doctorate in it. At least, this is the general explanation for why people have paid a £5 entry fee to take turns putting on mask, snorkel, wetsuit, and fins, descending into the frigid bog water, propelling themselves 60 yards through the muck to the far end of the ditch, turning, and thrashing back—ideally in two minutes or less. The fastest will receive a very small trophy and £40; the slowest will get £5 and a handshake; and everyone will take home a pile of laundry that will have to go three times through the washer. When I inquire about health concerns, Green points out that upland bogs are acidic enough to kill most bacteria. The water, despite the floating green muck, is safe for swimming—as long as there aren't any dead sheep lying around—and no snorkeler to date has gotten sick. Bradburn claims that the bog has trout and chub, although contestants are more likely to encounter harmless but evil-looking water scorpions. One of these already clings to the start post: a flat, black customer with pincers and a whiplike tail. "They live off bog snorkelers," Bradburn says, straight-faced, as he drives the white wooden stake into the bottom of the bog with a sledgehammer. "This is their one meal of the year." Bryn Davis, headmaster of the Llanwrtyd Wells elementary school, arrives just when most of the hard work is finished, and is good-naturedly jeered by his friends. He is tall, thin, energetic, with a salt-and-pepper beard—a lovely man, as the Welsh say, with the slightly fanatical Welsh way of looking as if he could talk all night about Welsh history, Welsh rugby, and Welsh male choirs. Davis and I go to the starting line with soil rakes and begin skimming off the floating grass, weeds, and clumps of nasty-looking green scum. Warming to his task, Bryn sets about telling me the history of bog snorkeling, which turns out to be closely connected to the history of Llanwrtyd Wells, for neither would exist without the water of these hills.
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