Bala Lake 5.11

Bala Lake is a lake in Gwynedd, Wales. The name Tegid may be related to Welsh teg, meaning "fair". It was the largest natural body of water in Wales before its level was raised by Thomas Telford to help support the flow of the Ellesmere Canal. It is 3.7mi long by 0.5mi wide, and is subject to sudden and dangerous floods. The River Dee runs through it and the waters of the lake are famously deep and clear. The town of Bala sits at its north-eastern end and the narrow gauge Bala Lake Railway runs for 3mi along the lake's south-eastern shore, and continues south-westward to the village of Llanuwchllyn (whose name means "church above the lakeFormationThe lake lies in a glacial valley which follows the Bala to Tal-y-Llyn fault line. The valley was blocked by a terminal moraine in the area of the village of Bala, thus forming the lake, which has remarkably straight and parallel sides.Origins of nameGeorge Borrow wrote of the lake in Wild Wales in 1856, "The lake has certainly not its name, which signifies 'Lake of Beauty', for nothing". In English the lake is sometimes named after the nearby town of Bala, whose name means "outlet of a lake" in Welsh. An older, now unused, English name for the lake is Pemble Mere or Pimble Mere (of which many variant spellings are recorded). The twelfth century traveller, Giraldus Cambrensis mentions it as Penmelesmere which translator Sir Richard Colt Hoare writing in 1806 records in a footnote also in the form Pymplwy meer or the 'meer of five parishes adjoining the lake'. Hoare goes on to say that it is, in modern days, better known by the name of Bala Pool.