Saturday 26 October 2019
I never did get around to writing up this trip at the time. This is being written nearly two years after the event, so will only be fairly brief notes of the weekend.
Vince and Jack came to mine on the Friday afternoon and we travelled in my car to the Wynnstay Arms in Llanbrynmair. I cannot remember what the journey was like, but we were probably delayed; we always are.
As per the forecast, the weather was pretty grim when we awoke on Saturday morning. What we had planned to do escapes me, but we abandoned any thoughts of high summits and decided to head south into the beautiful Elan Valley for a fairly low level walk. A car journey of some 35 miles taking around about an hour.
It was just before 11 o’clock when we began walking, firstly a kilometre of road walking before heading up a track/path towards Cefn Bach. I think we were probably just making up the walk as we went along. We headed for various spot heights on the map that had no distinguishing features - so it turned into an exercise in micro-navigation using compass and pace counting in the rain and mist.
Retracing our steps back to the track, we continued on it for a further 500m or so before striking off left to the 495m spot height on Lan wen. Back on the track we continued just a bit further to meet a bridle path which we followed back down to the road and then to the car parked at Pont ar Elan.
As forecast, the weather began to clear as we descended. We sat down to eat our lunch at the picnic area where we had parked the car and were treated to the spectacular sight of a merlin chasing after a meadow pipit over the river in front of us. The meadow pipit got away. What an ending to what turned out to be a fun day despite the weather.
More photos here
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