travel
St Illtud’s Walk, day 7: Resolfen to Afan Argoed
Another nine-mile walk over hills between valleys, this time Cwm Nedd and Cwm Afan. It’s too complex and time-consuming today to take buses, our favoured means of transport, so C and I are reduced to the two-car trick, leaving one at our destination, the Afan Argoed Visitor Centre, and taking the other, via Pontrhydyfen and […]
On shoelaces
We like to think that, even if our politics and economics show few signs of movement towards improvement, we live in an age of continuous technological refinement. Digital inventors now deliver tools like artificial intelligence that dazzle us, jaded though we are by constant stream of wonders. But back in the analogue world some of […]
Glyndŵr’s Way, day 11: Meifod to Welshpool
The negatives: rain has fallen overnight; the morning’s cloudy and windy, and it feels colder than ever; our boots are still damp inside. The positives: Eleri has fed us well over two days, to counter the hunger caused by long walking; we’re back in the fine village of Meifod; there are not too many miles […]
Glyndŵr’s Way, day 10: Pont Llogel to Meifod
Eleri delivers us by car back from Meifod to Pont Llogel, for us to make the journey in the other direction, much more slowly, and by a different route. There’s a change in the weather today: it’s cooler, rain’s spotting in the strong breeze, and we spend a lot of time through the day pulling […]
Glyndŵr’s Way, day 9: Llangadfan to Pont Llogel
We’ve had a comfortable time in the Cann Office Hotel, but it’s time to set off again, without the sun this morning, and move north from Llangadfan. We turn down a lane next to Pontgadfan, the chapel converted by Eleri Mills that I saw yesterday. By chance Eleri passes us in her car on the […]
Glyndŵr’s Way, day 8: Llanbrynmair to Llangadfan
Since Wales is hilly, and since its villages are very seldom sited on hilltops, it follows that walks away from them tend to begin with a long climb. This morning is no exception. After breakfast in the village shop – our host Mr M. runs a shop and café as well as a B&B – […]
Glyndŵr’s Way, day 7: Machynlleth to Llanbrynmair
It’s been a year since we finished the southern half of Glyndŵr’s Way, and here we are, C1, C2 and I, back in Machynlleth to start on the sixty miles of the northern half. Ca has kindly given us a lift from Swansea to Machynlleth, so we’ve time on the way up for a coffee […]
Ar y Ffordd Ddu
Nôl yn Nolgellau am ddeuddydd o gerdded ar Gader Idris. Ond mae ’na broblem. Er bod diwedd mis Mai, ar gyfartaledd, yn un o’r cyfnodau sychaf yn y flwyddyn, dyw hi ddim yn dilyn na fydd hi’n bwrw glaw o gwbl. Ac eleni, wrth gwrs, yw Blwyddyn y Glaw, a dyma ni yn nesáu at […]
St Illtud’s Walk: day 6: Y Creunant to Resolfen
We’ve now erased the dark memory of Day 5, back in November, and today the daylight hours are reassuringly long. So C and I feel up to tackling another inter-valley stage of the Walk, from Y Creunant to Resolfen. We should have done this as the coda to the last stage, but exhaustion and fading […]
Six Ways
When I was a small boy there were certain places outside Hoylandswaine, the village where we lived, that I always thought of as my own, special spaces. They were nowhere in particular – a corner where two roads met, or a pondside, or a patch in the woodland that spread from the bottom of our […]
