Tag: walking
Offa’s Dyke Path, day 1: Sedbury Cliffs to Chepstow
A couple of ancient carriages, probably scheduled to be replaced by Transport for Wales in the year 2030, rattle their way into Chepstow Station. One of the few adverts inside is for a useful sounding firm called Simple Cremations. As we get out it’s raining hard, and C and I dive into the station café […]
Steel mountain
For an early May walk the three of us are back here in Port Talbot, a town much in the news lately. First things first: coffee and serious cakes in a popular café, Selections, as fuel for a steep ascent. As always in Port Talbot, smiles and friendliness greet us. Then we wander across the […]
Walking with windmills
The Heart of Wales line train leaves me at the station in Ammanford. It’s still, sunny, and warm, the second day of summer time, with an extra hour of daylight walking. My plan is to cross Mynydd y Betws and Mynydd y Gwair and drop down the Lliw valley to Gowerton, completing the Gower Way. […]
Up the Ely river
Where we start happens to be in south Cardiff, but could be anywhere in the world in 2019. Apartments are stacked in Duplo’d piles, each block with a ‘concierge’ and a primary colour. Sheds, with metal roofs shaped in shallow arcs, are home to companies that shelter behind opaque titles, usually including the word ‘global’. […]
Wales Coast Path, day 13: Swansea to Mumbles
This may be Day 13 in the geographical series, but chronologically it’s number 95 – Sunday 9 September 2018, and the very last stage of our Wales Coast Path journey. We‘ve left our ‘home stretch’, one of the flattest in the whole course of the Path, till last. It’s a route – along the track […]
Wales Coast Path, day 79: Church Bay from Valley
Just the two of us today, to finish our circuit of Anglesey. We get up early, plant one car at Church Bay and drive the other to Valley. No cloud and drizzle this morning, just a balmy breeze and powerful sunshine. For once I can’t avoid wearing my socially disastrous reversible sun hat. There’s no […]
Wales Coast Path, day 78: Cemaes from Church Bay
The driver of the Lewis-y-Llan 62 bus to Holyhead needs nerves of steel. She takes the three of us at a good pace on the main road from Cemaes as far as Llanrhuddiad, and then turns off to Rhyd-wyn, down a long single track road with no passing places. Meeting another vehicle would be difficult. […]
Wales Coast Path, day 77: Porth Amlwch to Cemaes
Have we made a mistake? After a month of the driest, hottest weather since the summer of 1976, C and I chosen today to start our final, three-day campaign of the Wales Coast Path, from Porth Amlwch to Valley, on a less than tropical day. It’s dark, drizzly and clouds are so low that Cadair […]
To Soweto by way of the Plough & Harrow
Of all the Great Causes we pursued back in our days of hope in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was only one that came to an unambiguously good end: the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. Wales was blessed with one of the most active Anti-Apartheid Movement organisations anywhere, and the cause united […]
The sore feet of Ursula Martin
When I first heard about what Ursula Martin had done I found it hard to believe. Over a period of seventeen months she set out to walk 3,300 miles around Wales – in the end she walked 3,700 – including all the recognized long distance paths and other, river-long walks, she devised herself. Now she’s […]
