Sailing into 2013 - part 2 -words

I spent ten days - from my birthday till last Sunday without going on-line (except once to check the traffic news and weather before travelling over to West Wales).  I wanted to sit up and rest in what Laurie Anderson termed the information super lay-by.  I also just wanted to enjoy the company of friends and the expereince of being a tourist (and in part a tour guide) in my own culture. On the way home I scribbled the following lines on the ferry:

New Year seen in with talking, drinking, eating and visiting friends in England and Wales.

Touching base
And travelling for nine days with my best buddy (without once arguing)
Showing him the sights of London, the suburbs and West Wales beyond.
Seeing the clouds and mist there rise and fall; opening up and closing down vistas of these ancient hills
Goginan, Clarach, Aber, Borth, Cwm Einion
Ancient landscapes, also part of my history (this is where I….)
But most, importantly friends, the closest I have to family.

But first a paternal visit. My father, usually withdrawn staring into his lap

Sometimes trying to communicate, incoherently, but at least with a smile.
Passing his last days in a nursing home.
I feel I should do more, but what more is there to do?

New Year; tasting potcheen for the first time

Gathering pebbles from the beach
And snapshots of the places en route
And swapping texts with an occasional (but unavailable on this trip) lover

And pouring over OS maps, remembering past adventures

Driving roads on ancient tracks that crawl along the sides of forgotten valleys
Where water flows fast and furious from mountain to the sea
Or climb high above the tree line to the moors above, covered in cloud.

Talking about movies, books, songs, gigs seen in 2012

Rediscovering my copy of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums on a friend’s bookshelf
(Loaned to I forgot whom more than ten years ago - but always missed)
And my friends’ kids, bright and sparky, some already in Uni, some with jobs, one pregnant  

And kites in the sky
English (Welsh?) breakfasts
And waves crashing on the shore

And finally travelling home on the ‘comfy ferry’

With all these images in my head
Back to my adopted home city
Catching my breath for whatever 2013 has in store

Only sublimely inspired by Van Morrison's 'Hyndford Street'

That's me in the spotlight

.....well actually standing in the shadows at the back of a large mob. Tonight I make a surprise guest appearance on Dutch TV! It's a surprise to me. A few years ago much of west Wales was agog (that's a not so subtle word play) when Richard Gere, Sean Connery and the lovely Julie Ormroyd rode into the area to film First Knight. As a doctoral student my timetable was quite 'flexible' so I went and got myself a role as an extra in it for a couple of days. It involved hanging around for ages in a really cold slate mine outside Dolgellau dressed like, and acting the part, one of an impoverished and angry Arthurian mob. This meant wearing poorly fitting and scratchy felt clothing and having wood ash rubbed into my face and hair. It was a bit like going to Glastonbury. Except you got paid (sort of) and spent most of your time trying to get a glimpse of the fair Lady Guinievere.
Funnily enough I never watched it all the way through. Tonight I am going to tape it and find out if I really can see myself at the back of the crowd.
Oh and a bit of a spoiler. The causeway leading to Camelot is real - its part of (the former) Trawnsfynedd nuclear power station. They did some very clever graphic dubbing to transform a concrete bunker into a mythical palace.

Extreme shepherding

As an apology for a long absence here is something to lighten even the darkest of days. A colleague and reader of this blog sent me this link a few days ago. I loved it. I think these men could have a new tourist attraction on their hands.

Climb every mountain

Two months ago already. A major trip up Cader Idris. Possibly my best day in the mountains -ever. From the top we could see Snowdon, (how many miles away?Maybe 50?), the Arrans, the Arenigs, the Rhinogs, virually every mountain in mid and North wales laid out like a relief map. Twinkling below us was the sea and the resort of Tywyn Barmouth (oops). It was a popular day to be on the mountain - after a week of glorious weather there were dozens of people scrambling around. There must have been 100 people at the top when we got there. Going down we went past dozens of bags of rocks helicoptered in to restore and upgrade the path and prevent further erosion.
















The fourth picture in this sequence is courtesy of Mike Kay

The journey of a lifetime: Bangor to Aberystwyth

I must have driven this route several dozens of times - but have never seen it as beautiful, so pulsing with colour and life, as it was on this glorious September day.

First stop Porthmadog. I was planning to visit Cob Records here but had found the sister shop in Bangor on a rainy Monday morning and spent three hours (and I don't dare say how much money) stocking up on CDs - but there are many worse ways to spend a Monday morning. BTW - This is the first company I have ever given an endorsement to on my blog - (Guys - I tried to put in a link to you - but your url is link-resistant). The guys in there were wonderful. I told them that I had hardly bought any new music for three years and here's a list of the music I like. They built me a play list and got it right about 65% of the time- with most coming from their second hand selection. They sent me packing with two carrier bags full of wonderful CDs and a few free samplers for goodwill. But I digress. This is the view along the cob, on a stunning day.



Instead I walk over the cob itself- a mile long feat of engineering. Sometime later they built a railway to bring slate down from Blaenau Ffestiniog - on what is probably one of the world's most scenic railways. When I used to live in these parts this was a privately owned toll road that used to create mega traffic jams in order to collect 5p from every passing vehicle. This was the maximum permissible amount under the charter under which the road was built- although if I were herding twenty head of cattle the fee would have been much higher. (I guess they didn't foresee the advent of HGVs in 1811). Recently the Welsh Assembly bought the owners out. It makes sense - but it's also another piece of history gone.


Then further south, through the tongue twisting villages and towns of Penrhyndeudreath, Trawnsfyndd, Dolgellau and Machynlleth to the most southerly of the three big rivers that run west out of Snowdonia and into the Irish Sea - the Dyfi estuary. Reputed as a Site of Special Pyschedelic Interest - partly because of its highly regarded mycological flora, but also because Led Zeppelin spent much of their Tolkeinesque period (Stairway to Heaven etc.) hanging out in these parts (two events that surely have no possible link). Robert Plant still owns a house (well actually half a valley) in these parts and there's another famous former inhabitant too, William (Bill) Condry who contributed to the Guardian's Country Diary for fifty years or so (and whose writing charmed me long before I ever visited the area). He died the year before I left the area- but left a legacy, having established the Yns-hir nature reserve (just to the left of this photo) and done much to establish a programme to restore Red Kites to this part of the world. Somewhere very close to where this photo was taken lies what is perhaps the most isolated railway station in the world, Dyfi Juncyion. There's no road to it, the path is rutted, full of puddles and unlit. I used to start and finish journies to EU-funded research project meetings in London, Paris, Helsinki or Valencia from here and just used to thank all the stars and all the gods (and goddesses)that I could live in such a wonderfully remote place and still be part of a broader community.


Maybe they laid him to rest here - (Tal y Bont Graveyard)

- which has extensive views across miles of bogland to the exotic seaside resort of Borth. For three years I rented a house on the seafront here. This view vibrates with memories of barbeques, sunset canoeing, skinny dipping, putting up stormboards to keep the winter seas at bay, and all the other reasons it took me seven years to write my PhD. Thank you Borth for distracting me. The experience made me poorer but richer.


So finally over the hill to Aberystwyth. She looked like this the first time I ever went over the brow of Penglais hill, for an interview to do an MSc. I saw this view, the slate roofs, the tourquoise sea and I thought "yes I could live here for a while". I went for a year and I stayed for seven. Can you blame me?

Funny thing was that one of the main reasons I signed up to the course in Aber was because they had a link with the Free University in Amsterdam to do a semester there. It was only when I started the course that I found out that that link had died. Ten years later I did get to move to Holland - now whenever I go back to, or think of, mid-Wales I feel a bit homesick.

"Don't it all seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til its gone?"

Llanberis and Betws-y-coed

This area is marked by huge slate quarries and peppered with old lead, copper, silver and gold mines. Some areas are restored, others still bear the marks of centuries of mining and quarrying.

Go up the mountain, go up to the glen

The morning after E and K's wedding (more of which later, perhaps) dawned bright and sunny. Base camp was extremely quiet - for reasons that might have had something to do with the vast amounts of champagne and wine that the guests had been plied with all the previous afternoon and evening . My walking companions to be, were in a state of dishevellement - and yesterdays talk of "doing the Carneddau" (the bigger set of mountains on the last photo posted on this blog) was rapidly being downwardly revised to going up onto the first ridge - after lunch. With my day sac packed and boots twitching in the car I wasn't in a mood for hanging around drinking coffee for three hours - so decided to strike out on my own. Its not every day (or even year) that I am in Snowdonia when the sun shines.

It's also not every day that one gets to see sheep being sheared on the mountainside. I was surprised. I thought shearing was done in spring, not autumn. But I know that there is a widespread practice of bringing the sheep off the mountains in autumn and either sending them to slaughter or to continue fattening them on the lower lying pastures of Ynys Mon. Either way you can get more sheared sheep in a trailer.

The sheep were quite surprised too. They had no time to ask what style they want. Just clamped between the teamsters' knees and given a "number one". Once released they wander about in a daze for about thirty seconds before jumping more than a metre in the air as if to say "**** me, I'm still alive"

Shearing may be hard work but the view is astounding.

And gets better the further up you go (that's the Glyders and Tryfyn in the background)


Its not as steep here as on the other massifs in Snowdon. Just a long slow slog up a seemingly endless ridge. More akin to a Scottish mountain than the steep precipitious slopes on the other side of the valley. Even the local wild horses seem to feel the strain. (That's Yr Elwyn and Carnedd Llewlyn in the back ground - the later is much higher- the second highest peak in wales )


And there's a cabin at the top to shelter in times of inclement weather - bring your own drinks though -its not a luxury, licensed Swiss style mountain hut.

Eventually one can look back down at what's been achieved.


It's at this point that the hill fog starts to drift across the top of the upper ridge (behind me). The path is faint - barely waymarked with cairns and as the fog takes a grip I realise it's time to do a quick refresher on the principles of walking on a compass bearing. The fog only shrouds the top 200 foot or so of the mountain. But enough to make it feel like an adventure and enough to preclude a side trip out to Yr Elwyn (the largest peak here that I have not climbed). There's people up here with eght year old kids who don't have a map and compass or know how to use them - that's scary!!!! In the dips between Foel Grach and Carnedd Llewlyn and then Carnedd Dafydd the views come back again - but the very high level walking is done in mist. I share wedding cake with unknown fellow walkers on top of Llewelyn (I'd packed portions for four) - seen, as ever, in mist and then follow the far more visible path round to Dafydd. Tramping betwen the lichen covered boulders and outcrops of quartz and feeling more alone and yet more connected than I have done in months. On the peak of Carnedd Dafydd I look at the time and take stock of the state of my legs and decide not continue onto to Pen-yr-Ole Wen but to cut a direct track back to Bethesda on the narrow incline of the Cwm - a strategy that leads me to discovering some interesting vegetation - of a rather deep and quacmatic nature. Back in the village well before sunset- but back in the B&B I wish I had chosen one with a lift. Man, I could barely walk up the stairs.

Memories and mountains - I – arriving

It was only on the third day of my trip to Wales that I realized that I have been going and coming back (t)here for twenty-five years. I’d been trekking in the Himalayas the year before the first time I discovered Wales (the last great adventure in my gap five years) but had never realised that there was so much wild countryside on my own doorstep. The first college I went to after my gap period wasn’t particularly academically prestigious but was very conveniently located for Snowdonia (although this wasn’t a conscious selection criteria). Some friends there had access to a mountain hut by Llyn Gwynant – in the shadow of, and in with easy access to - the Snowdon massif. When the clouds were down on the mountains there was lovely walking and opportunities for rock climbing along the cliffs that skirt the lake. After my first visit I was hooked and went back five times or so that year: sometimes by car (the easy option), sometimes taking the train to Betws y Coed and hitchhiking in the last ten miles (which meant carrying in all my supplies). I must have done Snowdon from four or five different routes – the Gladstone Path from (so named because Gladstone made a speech to the slate miners from a rock above Bethania), the miners’ track, the pig track, the full horseshoe. I was impressed when I learnt that the first team to climb Everest trained the winter before on Snowdon and stayed at the Pen-y-Gwryd hotel at the top of Llanberis Pass. I was bemused when we found the hotel closed on Sundays (chapel was still highly influential and the ban on Sunday licensing was still in force). And I was frightened when the ground shook under my feet with the strongest earthquake tremor felt in the UK in decades. The night before the sheep in the field had ran around the pen surrounding the hut like crazy - as if the end of the world was nigh – and knowing that there was a nuclear power station twenty miles down the road I was also worried when I felt the tremors.

Many summers have passed since then, many mountains have been climbed, many lakes swum in, many abandoned quarries - once the site of hard physical labour and exploitation – discovered because of an impromptu, and often illegal, rave. As I turn off the M6 to avoid the traffic jams north of Keele and wend my way cross-country across Cheshire towards the A55, I have this feeling that I’m going home. Circling south of Chester the Clwydian range (the first mountain range and effective border between England and Wales) comes into view and beyond there’s sunshine. Leaving behind the clouds and torrential downpours that have dogged my journey up the M40, M42, M5 and M6 I head into a beautiful sunset. If I knew the words I would burst into a rendition of “Land of my fathers.”

In the picture

Life imitates blog! For three days I have been living in the frame of the photo below. Staying in a B&B just to the right of the pier (OK behind the trees) and yesterday climbing that big range of mountains to the left of the photo - the Carneddau - which have the second highest mountain in England and Wales (Carnedd Llewelyn) and the longest stretch of 3000'+ walking in England and Wales. The first time I have been walking up mountains for two years - and the first time in more than ten that I have climbed to the top of one. That felt good - though my legs are ina state of total shock.
Today the cloud level is low and my legs need to recover. But Bangor has a branch of Cob records - and I have already been in and dropped £120 catching up on missed music. That's three of my wishes (loosely translated) ticked off in as many days!

Take me home country roads

This one is especially for Rudi. Bangor Pier and the Carneddau taken from the moorings at the Gazelle on the other side of the Menai Straits, late on a summer's evening. Its been my screen saver for two years and I haven't got bored with it yet.