Completing Central Wales

Fri 20 Oct 2017

A year since our last hill walking trip, Vince, Jack and I were looking forward to a weekend in the mountains. Today was our travelling day to our base at The Wynnstay Arms in Llanbrynmair. As it was the start of half-term week, Vince and Jack were going on to Helen’s parents in Stafford after our trip, so we journeyed in separate cars. The school holiday resulted in the motorways being very busy so our journeys took much longer than expected. My satnav avoided the heavily congested motorways (apart from a short section of the M5), but took me right through the centre of Cheltenham at rush hour! Vince and Jack had an horrendous journey from Kent on the motorways. I arrived around 19:45, Vince and Jack about an hour later.

We had already planned what we intended to do this weekend – Cadair Idris. Vince and I first did Cadair together in July 2004, but that was before we discovered Nuttall’s and we did not bag all the two-thousand foot summits on that trip. This was going to be our opportunity to correct this, and on Sunday, to do the two summits west of Cadair Idris to complete all the hills in the range.

Well, that was the plan, but as the weekend approached we all knew that it was not going to happen – Storm Brian was approaching from the Atlantic and 50mph winds, gusting to 70mph, were forecast. Cadair Idris with its paths close to cliffs was not a place to be in these conditions.

So, over a couple of pints in the bar we decided to drive south to New Radnor and ascend the three hills in the Radnor Forest that we needed to complete the Central Wales group. The forecast was still awful, but at least they were grassy, rounded hills so no chance of being blown over cliffs!

Sat 21 Oct 2017

Vince volunteered to drive us down to New Radnor (my new car had been rear-ended travelling to work on Thursday morning, so was a little poorly). It took about an hour to get there. We parked up under the Cornewall-Lewis Memorial.

Initially the weather was not too bad; the sun even tried to appear at times, but as we got higher and more exposed the wind increased. On Bache Hill, our first summit, it was difficult to stand, and trying to hold cameras still to take photos was all but impossible. From Bache Hill we could just see the radio mast on Black Mixen, 2km distant and our next objective.

Route finding to Black Mixen presented no difficulties as firstly we had fences to follow, and then a rough track. The wind blowing from the south-west, our left, made walking in a straight line very difficult though. We entered the compound of the radio mast and ate our lunch sheltered behind a building. The wind was making a horrendous noise as it blew through the structure of the radio mast.

Again, route finding to our next summit was straightforward, with forest edges and fences to follow. Much of the forest had been clear-felled but the edges were still obvious. We took a bearing from a bend in the fence and headed off towards the summit. Thankfully Great Rhos has a trig pillar marking its summit, otherwise it would have been tricky to find the highest point on this typically Welsh flat-topped, grassy summit plateau.

As we descended south we took a precautionary GPS fix as we had not found the track that we we wanted for our descent. Once we knew our exact position we soon located the path, which turned out to offer a delightful  descent to Harley Dingle and then on to our start point in New Radnor.

More photos

Summit	Height (m)	Status
Bache Hill	610	Hewitt, Nuttall
Black Mixen	650	Hewitt, Nuttall
Great Rhos	660	Hewitt, Marilyn, Nuttall