Archive for 2015
Wales Coast Path, day 38: Dale from Marloes
We’re back at Musselwick Sands, this time exposed by the lower tide, and we’re joined by J for the day, on a tour of the Marloes peninsula. Still the cold wind blows, ostensibly from the west, though it’s actually turned a corner on its way here, and comes from the Arctic. The path pushes westwards […]
Wales Coast Path, day 39: Marloes from Broad Haven
This is another two-car day. I attempt to park Car 1 in Marloes outside the Lobster Pot pub. The landlord, a middle aged man with a surly look, raps on a window, then unlocks the door and shouts across to me that this is not a public car park. I explain that we’re customers, or […]
Wales Coast Path, day 40: Broad Haven from Solva
Lower Solva. A bright, cloudless morning, but with a cold, insistent northerly wind. This is where we left off two years ago, and seems the right point to resume our Pembrokeshire journey. The path leads up the Gribin, a long narrow ridge that nudges the river down on its passage from village to sea. On […]
Wales Coast Path, day 37: Dale to Dale
We’re in Dale for another week on the Pembrokeshire path, almost exactly two years after our first coastal campaign further north. Our cottage overlooks the Gann inlet, with a distant view of the Rhoscrowther oil refinery on the other side of Milford Haven. Its semiglobes, pipes and towers shine like the Emerald City at night; […]
Wales Coast Path, day 25: St Clears to Laugharne
A cloudless, still mid-April morning in a miraculous week of constant sun. We’re in St Clears, four of us, for a short and gentle stroll down afon Tâf to the sea at Laugharne, castle to castle. The castle at the southern end of St Clears is a toy one just off the road – a […]
A west African honeymoon, 1913
Our honeymoon (1980) was spent on two bicycles in north Norfolk. Laughable by today’s standards, but also, maybe, by those of a hundred years ago. My brother recently gave me a copy of a family document I’d never seen before. It’s a four page leaflet, printed in 1938 ‘on the occasion of her Silver Wedding’, […]
Wales Coast Path, day 23: Carmarthen to Llansteffan
Carmarthen town: a sunny morning at the end of a spell of hot spring weather. The three of us walk from the car park, along King Street and down Quay Street, with its blue plaques commemorating the eccentric historian George Eyre Evans and the young Egyptologist Ernest Harold Jones. Two hundred years ago Quay Street […]
Beth yw diben angladd?
Dros y gaeaf buodd Dr Angau ar grwydr trwy’r wlad yn ei glogyn du, ac yn anarferol o brysur. O fewn y pythefnos diwethaf bues i mewn tri angladd, yn Lloegr ac yng Nghymru. Byddai’r cyfanswm wedi bod yn bedwar angladd mewn tair gwlad oni bai am y ffaith bod dau’n digwydd ar yr un […]
Wales Coast Path, day 22: Ferryside to Carmarthen
We join J. at Swansea station, on the two-carriage train to Carmarthen. A British Transport Police officer paces our carriage. Maybe coastal walkers, with their clumpy boots and aggressive waterproofs, rank only just below Cardiff City fans on the BTP Travelling Troublemakers Index. But we reach Ferryside, a request stop, without challenge. It’s a cool, […]
A cold field in Croesyceiliog
i.m. Roger Cecil (1942–2015) ‘When birds come to suffer by severe frost, I find that the first that fail and die are the redwing-fieldfares, and then the song-thrushes’ (Gilbert White, 12 April 1770) In a cold field in Croesyceiliog no one saw me lie down to sleep or frost weave its lacework on […]
