Beacons Way, day 7: Llanddeusant to Carreg Cennen

The day’s started well:  I’m travelling on one of my favourite railways, the Heart of Wales Line.  The two-carriage train is dawdling and rattling its way towards Llangadog.  The trick is to choose a seat on the left, and catch views of the coastal mudflats and Gower across the water.  At Llanelli the train reverses, but stay just where you are.  This way, you’ll take in the wind-curved, golden reeds on the Loughor estuary at Llangennech and the greener-than-green fields of the hillsides beyond Pontarddulais.

Finally we get to the Tywi valley, and at Llangadog station Mr Teilo Taxis is waiting for me, as we’d arranged, for the lift to Llanddeusant, today’s starting point.  He tells me that some tourists arrive at the station without booking, under the assumption that massed taxis will be waiting to sweep them away.  In reality, his car is the only taxi in the entire area.

Its 10.30 by the time I set out from the church at Llanddeusant.  I walk down the narrow lane to Afon Sawdde.  For the time being the sky’s overcast, a blessing after the hottest May Day on record – the BBC seems to think this is an undiluted Good Thing, not the sinister symptom of climate disaster that it probably is – and especially since there are hours of steady climbing ahead.

The verges are full of spring flowers: bluebells, stitchwort and cranesbill.  After the river the road climbs, and turns into a stone track and then a ‘holloway’, until it comes to a sudden end at a stile marking the start of the open moorland.  In the woodland back to my right I can hear a woodpecker hard at work on a tree trunk.

Now the real climbing starts.  The path isn’t clear to start with, but soon its course becomes obvious, across bare grassland towards the summit of Carreg yr Ogof ahead.  Arwel Michael maintains that this was the ‘corpse road’ taken by people accompanying the bodies of Llanddeusant people back for burial in their home parish, after they’d died while working in the newly industrialised settlements of the Swansea and Amman valleys.  It seems an astonishingly strenuous funerary practice.

Carreg yr Ogof is a flat-domed limestone outcrop.  From the trig point near the summit the next three mountains are lined up in a row.  First up is Garreg Las.  There’s a fairly obvious path, though sometimes you’re walking on trackless limestone ‘pavements’, first down and then up, towards the two Bronze Age cairns, visible afar from all sides, that crown the summit.  By now the sun is out, and the heat and sweat are up.  From time to time I need to stop, take out the water bottle, and turn round to catch what little breeze is coming from the east.  I pass a group of hardy upland ponies.

After that, the guidebook warns, it’s imperative to keep to the path on the western edge of the long limestone ridge ahead, or you’re more than likely to sprain an ankle on the random fragments of millstone grit hidden in the grass.  I obey.  (Another guidebook warning is not to use his high-level route at all in bad weather, since it’s so easy to go astray.)  Later the going gets easier, across more limestone pavements, which look like a builder’s yard, with blocks scattered around untidily.

At last the ridge descends, slowly, and comes to an end. The path follows suit.  Suddenly I realise that the guidebook (the original 2005 edition) wants me to climb to the summit of each of the next peaks, Foel Fraith and Carreg Lwyd, whereas the Ordnance Survey route, according to my app, avoids both and keeps to their northern flanks.  I consider what to do.  I think about tackling the summits, and then change my mind and follow the OS’s lead.  Presumably, there’s a good reason why the Way’s route has been changed: a history of people getting lost or suffering accidents?  I skip the additional climbing, but there’s a price to be paid.  The OS route isn’t at all obvious at times, and I’m left wading through tussocky heather, reeds and mosses while searching for a non-existent ‘true path’.  In wetter weather these lowland routes would be tougher than they are today, after weeks of dryness.

After a long gradual descent, the OS route climbs towards a big abandoned quarry, just short of the Llangadog to Brynaman road at Pen-Rhiw-wen – the only place on today’s walk where I see any people at all, two people sitting on a bench.  The lay-by lacks the ice-cream van I’d been hoping for, and I’ve no choice but to cross the road and press on westwards.  Again, the guidebook directs me to the summit of the next hill, Pen-Rhiw-ddu, and again the OS route keeps instead to its northern flank.  After a while the path skirts a long series of limestone outcrops, quarried so that they look like a series of decayed teeth.  The name for them is Banc-y-Cerrig-Pydron or, maybe, Rottenstone Row.  Rottonstone was weathered, impure limestone, crushed and used to polish the tinplate and copper products manufactured in the Swansea area.  Girls from Cwmtwrch and Cwmllynfell would lead ponies laden with the stone south over Mynydd Du.  Another strenuous mountain journey.

The route descends to a minor road, but moves off it almost straight away to follow a long grassy track across Pentir Blaencennnen, a flattish area under the hills, made white by cottongrass, before returning to the road.  I suddenly realise that, if I keep to the official Way, which takes an inexplicably roundabout route along the road to reach Carreg Cennen, I might be late for my 5.30 rendezvous with Mr Teilo Taxis.  So I take a more direct, and pleasanter way, through a wood and fields, to reach Afon Cennen and the foot of Coed y Castell.

From here it’s easy to see how the castle, high on its limestone crag and silhouetted against the evening sun, would have filled late eighteenth-century travellers in search of the ‘picturesque’ and the ‘sublime’ with the refined pleasure they came in search of.

Earlier, the lengthy, steep climb ahead through the trees to the castle would have been a delight.  But at the end of a day of climbs, and with the heat still strong, I find this final ascent a burden.  Eventually, at the top, the path emerges from the wood close to the castle, which by now is quiet and closed to visitors.  I stroll down the lane to the farm and the café, still open, and have a drink – my water ran out an hour ago – before waiting in the car park for Mr Teilo Taxis to arrive and take me to my overnight stay in Llandeilo.