Beacons Way, day 3: Crickhowell to Llangynidr

It takes two bus journeys from home to reach today’s starting point, Crickhowell.  The T6 winds its way via Cwm Nedd, Cwm Dulais and the Usk valley to Brecon, and there I swap to the smaller X45 bus that speeds along to Crickhowell.  There are just a few fellow passengers, including a group of workers making for the modern slavery of the Amazon ‘fulfilment centre’ in Jersey Marine.

The weather couldn’t be more different from Day 2, back in September 2024, which ended with a violent thunderstorm.  It’s warm, still, and dry underfoot, rare at this time of year.  Only a few cirrus clouds interrupt the artist’s blue of the sky.  The forecast promises us sun, light winds and good visibility – all in short supply on Day 2.  What’s more, the clocks have just moved forward one hour, and the day is suddenly longer.

I start with a coffee in the basement café of Bookish, and bump into its owner, Emma, who interviewed me in a book event recently.  It’s eleven o’clock by the time I walk to the west end of the town, past the Tudor gateway Porth Mawr, and turn off the main road at the ornate Victorian drinking fountain (‘rest and refresh’).  It’s a long but gentle climb, at first past a series of modern and converted houses with good views, close-cut lawns and multiple cars.  The lane peters out and becomes a track, laid mysteriously with concrete railway sleepers, and then a path, lined with drystone walls.  Two or three women are strolling here, but they’re not going far, and for the next six or seven miles I see not a soul.

As I climb, the views multiply, south across the Usk to Llangattock (later to Tretower) and the southern hills behind, east to Sugar Loaf and Crug Hywel, visited in a gale on Day 2.  The air is clear, distant places stand sharp.  When the climbing stops, the path follows the contours of the slopes of Pen Cerrig-calch and its neighbours.  As the guidebook says, the flanks of these mountains generally yield better views than their rounded tops.

Spring is not so well sprung here as at the coast.  Buds are still waiting for warmth to erupt, on the scattered trees mistletoe has the branches to itself, and flowers are hard to spot, except for small groundlings like dog-violets.  Last year’s broken bracken lies on the slopes, giving them a tired, red tinge, and even the gorse is out of bloom.  Above, kites, ravens and a buzzard ease their way along the thermals.

I’m now moving north: Day 3 is horseshoe-shaped and doesn’t make much progress westwards (Crickhowell and Llangynidr are a mere six miles apart).  Across the valley a pillow-shaped hill appears, fawny-brown and friendlier looking than the taller mountains.  The route works its way past a couple of empty ‘blind cwms’ to the right, avoids a few isolated farms (Tŷ Mawr, Llawenau Draw) to the left, before dropping, along a tortuous lane, to Cwmdu in the valley bottom.  In the village everything is closed.  The door of the church (once in the charge of Thomas Price, ‘Carnhuanawc’) is locked, the community-owned pub won’t be open till Friday (rather long to wait), and the old café has been abandoned.  I cut my losses and eke out a single banana and KitKat on a sunny bench under the church tower.  By now it’s warm, and my water supply surely won’t last the long afternoon to come.

I cross the road and the bridge over Afon Rhiangoll, and follow the route up a quiet lane, north again, towards another ‘blind cwm’.  At last, the noise of the main road subsides, replaced by birdsong from the wooded slope to my left.  Banks of celandines line the way.  Eventually I reach a renovated farmhouse, Blaen-y-cwm-isaf, guarded by dogs, and, after another climb, Blaen-y-cwm-uchaf, a distinctly unrenovated farm, with a host of untidy outbuildings and rusting corrugated roofs.

Next comes the only really hard section of the day’s walk, a steep ascent along a grassy track to the mountain top, with another blind cwm to the right.  I’m surprised to see seven walkers coming down towards me.  They’re from an army group, they say, and their walk is just part of a strenuous multi-event exercise.  Everyone looks fitter than me, but then they are going downhill, and several decades younger.

On the way up I have to stop regularly to recover, and to admire the view east, where the long, high ‘table top’ of Waun Fach stops the horizon.  The reward, when I get to the top, is a long, quick, grassy stride south along the backbone of Cefn Moel.  After a while the land begins to steepen down to my right, opening up a distant view of Llyn Syfaddon (Llangorse Lake) – the site of a ‘crannog’ (probably one of the ‘llysoedd’ of the early kingdom of Brycheiniog), the scene of supernatural events related by Giraldus Cambrensis, and the subject of a counterfactual historical poem by the refugee radical John Thelwall.

At last the track starts to descend towards Bwlch, a village sliced cruelly in two by the busy A40.  The route avoids this road by taking a minor lane south, Darren Road, and then a footpath, to join the road down to the Coed-yr-ynys bridge over the Usk at Llangynidr.  This must be one of the handsomest bridges anywhere in Wales.  Built around 1700, it has six arches and carries a very narrow single-track road, with frequent V-shaped refuges for pedestrians, echoing the cutwaters below.

Llangynidr is a strung-out village with two or three foci, one by the bridge, another on the canal to the west, and the main village to the south.  I explore all of them in turn, despite being dehydrated (the village shop is, unsurprisingly by now, closed). Then I turn myself in at the canal-side Coach and Horses and devour a large meal, with ample fluids, to make up for the day’s fasting.

The Beacons Way planners clearly intended Day 3 as a relaxing interlude between Days 1 and 2 and the hardest of the eight stages, Day 4 (‘strenuous’, according to the National Park website).  I plan to make an early start tomorrow to tackle Pen y Fan and the other central peaks.