Thirst

Heb ddwr, heb ddim

Welsh Proverb: ‘Water is everything’

It has taken me a while to get over the disappointment of pulling out of this walk half way through, but I am determined that it be a temporary blip, and no more. My rucksack has been on the floor of the bedroom for a couple of weeks now ready to pack again and head out, but I’ve come to terms with the realisation that I might have to put it off for a further while, initially owing to family commitments, and now owing to rain. So it’s time to look forward, and in doing so I need first to look back a little, get my house in order, finish this blog (and others).

In fact, it has been so long that my blister has had time to heal. And that is how the fourth and final day started: with a foot inspection. On prising off the compeed to assess the blister, I was slightly concerned at how large it was getting. I googled ‘should I…” and the first hit that came up (rather suspiciously) was ‘should I pop a blister?’ The online consensus was a resounding ‘no!’ but I knew from previous experience that it was just going to get bigger and bigger during the day. Isabelle knocked at the door of the tent to offer me a morning cup of tea, amazing and wonderful in itself, but because she is not only an experienced hiker but also an experienced D of E supervisor, I asked her advice. We agreed that letting the fluid drain out was probably for the best, and from the capacious campervan she supplied a wicked-looking and sterilised pen-knife for me to carry out the field surgery. Doubly wonderful. I made liberal use of an antiseptic wipe and TCP from my medical kit (super-satisfying that it’s not getting a free ride in the pack), an extra compeed on top and some padding in the form of a gel pad, and I thought I was good to go.

I was reluctant to set out. Half of me felt I should make an early start of it to beat the heat, and the other half wanted to set out with a dry tent. The prospect of more convivial conversation with Keith and Isabelle was the clincher, and only served to emphasise how very much I would like to meet these inspirational spirits again. Eventually they set off for a reunion with old friends on the Gower Peninsula, and I turned back to the job of striking the tent.

It had been a very damp night. No rain, but an awful lot of condensation, and as my friend Amanda had anticipated, it had been a chilly camp made chillier I think by my tent, mat, sleeping bag and thermals being not quite perfectly dry when I had packed them away the day before.

It took a while until the September sun had risen sufficiently above the hill down which I had descended into the village yesterday to shine properly onto the tent and warm it enough to really dry it out. I didn’t want to be carrying any extra weight in the form of water that I couldn’t drink! As the tent dried with the sleeping bag laid out on top of it, and everything else was draped over one of the pub garden tables, I tucked into a really stupendous breakfast: yoghurt, oats, chocolate chips in a pre-packaged pot, which I supplemented with a tray of raspberries and some pinenuts.

After yesterday‘s 640m of climb, I was very glad to have selected a low-level route today. The landlord of the Greyhound was kind enough to be slightly concerned about how exposed it was going to be on top of the Beacon, and offered me an extra bottle of water too take with me, but when I showed him the map, we realised that my route was going to wind through the river valleys, much more directly to the day’s end at Abbeycwmhir. I wish I had got a photograph of this lovely man! He had snowy white hair tied back in a ponytail, and the tiniest little white fluffy Sealyham terrier, still a puppy, whiffling about on the ground in the shade under the awnings in the pub yard, and trying to chew my boots. It was an example of the pet looking rather like the owner, or vice versa — and neither of them looked anything like a greyhound!

I felt I had had a lovely convivial morning — and morning it practically was by the time I did get away, just before 11 (I know, I am horrified too). I set off in an exceptionally good mood, well-watered, well-fed and well-chatted, sticking to the shady side of the street. I had extra water on board, and the low-level route meant that I would come into contact with more habitations than if I was going over the tops, so my hope was that I might be able ask for more water if I needed it. And although the sky was cloudless, there was a delicious, refreshing breeze.

I turned off the road up a track to cross the railway line at a level crossing. In the distance, I could see the Beacon the landlord had spoken of — and was mightily glad I didn’t have to tackle it. It was bare, completely without shade, and alarmingly exposed. The day was already punishingly hot.

My route delivered me instead a shady track which took me past a terribly dilapidated farmhouse, too sad to photograph, and an extraordinary tumbled-down barn with fairy lights festooned along it. I wondered whether they’d had a wedding here.

Here I turned for a very short while onto the Heart of Wales Line footpath. It must be named for the railway line I had just crossed: its sign, ironically for a footpath, is a tiny train going over a viaduct.

It would have to be a very special train indeed to transport one up the hill, which followed, nowhere near as high as the Beacon, but a pull nonetheless. I caught my breath in a scrap of shade, turned to look behind me, and was dumbfounded by the view.

At the top I stopped again, disturbing some sheep — I apologised to them for scaring them out of their patch of shade, especially since they were dressed in thick wool — just to drink in the jaw-dropping 360° panorama: Mid-Wales in all its glory.

It was a marvellous place, but one which wore its magnificence lightly. It was a sheep field, a few hedges. A gate. But even the ordinary birch trees seemed transfigured.

Before me lay the landscape I would walk for the rest of the day, a trademark complex of hills and ridges and bracken-covered hogsbacks, bare on the tops and green in the valleys. In the far smoky distance, rose the Cambrian hills that I thought at the time I would reach at the end of the day after tomorrow. They looked terrifically high, and I was glad that I felt more hill-fit today.

I regretfully left the Heart of Wales line way (little knowing that a train would sweep me home along that same railway line just 24 hours later), but I swapped it for a cycle track that I expected to be more of a visible path, but which turned out to be field after rolling field of grass and clover. One gate even had a little sign on it saying ‘public road’. What a route! I’d seen tractors turning out of the the first field — a husband and wife team, I think, transporting black-wrapped bales of silage down from the lush fields to their farm in huge tractors — but I can’t imagine even bikes having an easy time of it through the long, enriched grass.

To my right on the nothern side of one of the typically steep valleys rose Beacon Hill and Pool Hill (with the Glyndwr Way as well as the Heart of Wales line running along the tops), and, high up near the summits, the source of the River Lugg that I had been following intermittently since the first day of my walk. I bid the lovely river a silent farewell and turned again west.

I stopped for lunch (hummus and carrot sticks, left over from last night and still cool in the cavernous depths of my rucksack) feeling rather sheepish that I had not even done 6 km yet. But it was so beguiling up here, and I wanted to stay awhile. I did, however, gingerly remove my sock to see what the state of the blister was (shocking, in a word!) but in doing so made a discovery that I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed before: the orthotic (the eye-wateringly expensive custom-made orthotic) was too narrow for my shoe. This would explain the blisters forming stubbornly under my heel, because it didn’t fit snuggly into the cup, which itself didn’t fit snuggly into the shoe. Well, well well.

In the meantime, however, I needed to walk on it. I put on another compeed and hoisted my rucksack on my back again. It was 1pm now, really hot and I hadn’t got very far at all. I began to think that I ought to start conserving water. The tops kept unrolling, view after view under cloudless skies, punctuated by gnarled hawthorns which might once have been part of hedges on either side of an ancient trackway which seemed to have been there since time immemorial.

It was very hot with little breeze to provide relief. At last the track wound off the tops of the hot hills and into a shaded valley by the river Aran. It was damp and decidedly cooler in the tunnel under the trees and for a kilometre or so there was honest-to-goodness mud underfoot — a welcome relief.

It was with mixed feelings that I came out of the shade of the tunnel and out of the shade of the tree-lined section of road which followed it into the full-on heat which not only beat down from above but also reflected back at me off the tarmac. This was not pleasant, but I had emerged onto one of the small patchwork areas of unfenced, unimproved common land which some time in the past had been separated off from the larger SSSI of Maenlienydd to the south. It was starkly different to the lush improved agricultural land I had been walking through up to this point, and stunningly lovely.

The heath was studded bright with gorse in bloom, and low-growing heather which is burned regularly to encourage the new growth which red grouse need. Other birds which favour this quiet heathland habitat are ring ouzels, whinchats and redstarts — none of which I would have recognised, but in any case they were nowhere to be seen in the unseasonably baking afternoon.

And then it was out onto the road again, and I was feeling it quite hard going now, hot as it was, with too little water and blisters which necessitated going uphill on tiptoe. I distracted myself with the audiobook of Maggie O’Ferrell’s Hamnet, so compellingly written and read that the miles fell underfoot. I was also distracted by the generally lovely views: I crossed the river Ithon, the extraordinarily meandering tributary of the Wye, and turned off the road onto to an unmetalled track lined on either side with ancient, twisted oaks.

I wound around the side of the hilly lump of Beddugre Hill and looked out over yet more rolling hills, sparsely-scattered farms, copses of grown-out hazel hedges, and fields of placidly-grazing cows.

I was constantly grateful not to be walking on the tops. It was just simply too hot now, at four o’clock. It was bad enough when there was no shade on this low-level track.

Instead I dropped further down now into one on those wooded valleys which I can imagine not having changed for centuries. The imagined Tudor world of Hamnet the audiobook had plunged me into seemed very apposite for this landscape.

I was very close to the day’s end now. One little wood to go, and on I went, rapt by the story of Shakespeare’s wife and children in Stratford and by the pretty woodland, in which I found a small buzzard feather which I picked up to go with the woodpecker feather for my mother’s hat. I dropped it somehow; it was gone from my hip belt pocket by the end of the day, so I was glad I had taken a photo.

It was so entrancing that I took my eyes off the map and let the story and an increasingly dwindling path lead me

a kilometre up a wooded valley instead of down to the road. It was admittedly beautiful — really beautiful, with seedling trees of bright larches and spruce making the most of the light afforded by an old quarry —

— but I was infuriated with myself. It was very hot, and I was tired, and thirsty. I simply wheeled around and retrod my steps back to the piles of timber I’d been so interested in photographing that I missed the signpost just out of shot, taking me off to the left.

Half an hour later I was in Abbeycwmhir, a tiny but apparently thriving community which holds steadfastly to the ruins of a vast Cistercian abbey dating from 1143 and the largest in Wales. It was never completed, but even so its nave was larger than those of Canterbury and Salisbury. There is virtually nothing left of it now but the bases of the nave walls; it was burned almost to the ground by Owain Glyndwr, in 1401. Instead there is a Victorian church in the Neo-Byzantine style.

Everything remained unvisited because I was so tired and had been walking for six and a half hours. I had come only 22km, and had beem moving for just over five hours, but I had needed so many stops and pauses that it had extended the reasonable distance into something that felt very unreasonable. Where was my B&B? On the other side of the village. Of course. I trudged through it to my B&B, laughing grimly to myself when I saw the steep slope of the drive and the grand steps up to the house. No matter. I was here. I tiptoed up both, took my boots off and rang the bell.

I think I had incipient heat exhaustion. No matter how much water I drank I didn’t feel it was touching the sides of my thirst. I had a headache. I was deeply concerned about being able to carry enough water for the next day which was to be all uphill and out onto the Cambrian moutains – the so-called ‘Desert of Wales’. It was time to reconsider. After a bath to soak the aches out of my muscles, I started researching taxis and trains to get me back home. I would have to wait for my blister to heal and for the weather to cool down a bit. So frustrating — but as the Welsh proverb says, ‘Water is everything’. And as the English proverb says, ‘Better safe than sorry’.