I'm a committee member of the Friends of St Julitta's Church in Capel Curig, one of the smallest of the old churches in Snowdonia and now disused. A group of us are in the process of restoring it and in the churchyard we discovered a number of graves going back years of people who died in accidents.

We were interested to know how many were climbing accidents. Various people researched this topic back to 1880 and gave a picture of some of the people, often from outside the area, who had died whilst mountaineering in Snowdonia and were buried here.

The mountaineering scene got going in about 1770. There's a very famous account by Pennant, who also had an illustrator with him who did some fantastic drawings which show what the area was like back then. Pennant, of course, would have had a local guide - the early tourists wouldn't have ventured onto the hills on their own without perhaps a shepherd who knew the hills well.

As those who wrote the early books popularised visiting Snowdonia, climbing became a romantic thing to do and increasing numbers of locals supplemented their normal income by being guides for part of the year.

But things really took off with the development of hotels in the area and, most importantly, with the building of roads through Snowdonia. Two hundred years ago there wasn't a single road to Capel Curig - you could only get there on foot or horseback. So tourism could only really open up with the building of the road.

The first tourists to the area were people interested in botany who came to see the rare Alpine plants in Snowdonia. Often people from Oxbridge came up for a long stay and would hold reading parties and go on expeditions into the hills. Others came to admire the views and to go fishing.

And so the real interest in mountaineering as a separate sport developed in the mid 19th century amongst those who would go to the Alps in the summer, but would come to Snowdonia in the winter to practise.

Then in the 1880s people began to discover the cliffs and rock climbing. After first wanting just to practise getting up a mountain by the most difficult route in preparation for the Alps, they quickly saw the cliffs as things to climb in themselves and rock climbing became a separate sport.

They also used the area for practice for climbing in the Himalayas. The whole of Edmund Hillary's expedition came to Helyg in the Ogwen Valley to practise and test equipment used in the 1953 Everest climb.

A previous party of Swiss climbers had failed in their attempt to climb Everest due to problems with oxygen, so Hillary's team carried out training to test new equipment at Helyg.

There are signatures of all those involved on the ceiling of the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel bar and there's an annual reunion of the 1953 party there, though the numbers are dwindling.

A few local people were involved in that expedition. John Jackson, who went on to be the chief instructor at the National Mountaineering Centre at Plas y Brenin was a reserve on the 1953 expedition and Charles Evans, who came to live in Capel Curig in the 1950s, was part of the Everest team.

We had an exhibition in the church last year about 200 years of mountaineering in Snowdonia. Lots of people who came remembered the opening of Plas y Brenin in 1953 and sent in photographs of their first camping expeditions and climbs.

The fact that they'd kept those photos for so many years showed how much coming to Snowdonia, and learning how to enjoy themselves safely in the mountains, meant to them.

A lot of people involved in mountaineering aren't local to the area, which is part of the reason why Snowdonia is a National Park - there for the nation's enjoyment.