Gwella / To Get Better
Gwella is a Welsh word. It means to heal, to improve, to get better. It felt like the right name for what this is.
Rydw i wedi treulio dros ugain mlynedd yn gweithio yn y mynyddoedd.
I have spent more than twenty years working in the mountains.
As an outdoor education instructor and mountain guide, the hills were not a place I visited — they were where I worked, taught, and thought. Then, in 2018, a cerebellar stroke changed the terms.
This site documents what comes next.
The specific objective is Cyfrwy Arête — a Grade 3S★ scramble on the northern face of Cadair Idris. I climbed it before. I intend to climb it again. That intention is the spine of everything here.
But the real question is larger than one route on one mountain:
How does a senior practitioner, after life-changing health events, navigate the journey back to technical practice — and is there still a legitimate place for people like that in the mountains they spent their lives in?
That question doesn't have a tidy answer. This project is the attempt to find out.
What Gwella is:
Three things running in parallel —
A documentary film, being developed for submission to the Kendal Mountain Festival, following the journey from here to Cyfrwy Arête and everything in between.
An academic research project, grounded in the BA Hons in Contemporary Outdoor Leadership at the University of Central Lancashire, and potentially the foundation of a Year 3 dissertation.
This site — a working journal, a behind-the-scenes record, a public document of the process as it happens. Nothing is retrospective here. The mess is part of the record.
My climbing partner and fellow student Aled Oddy is central to this. So is Cadair Idris. So is the Welsh language — this project is bilingual because the mountain is in Wales, and that culture is not incidental.
I am Jameson Selby. I am 66, a stroke survivor, a mature student, and someone who woke from a dream a few weeks ago and decided that was enough reason to begin.
Mae'r daith wedi dechrau.
The journey has begun.
Sister Project
This project has a companion. A Dragon's Journey — the journal of Shan Long at herebedragons.cymru — runs alongside Gwella, documenting a sea kayaking journey around Ynys Seiriol off the coast of Anglesey, with my son Jack. Where Gwella asks hard questions about return and practice, A Dragon's Journey moves at a different pace — more wandering, less proving. They share a landscape, a language, and a person. They are not the same story.