Sometimes charging up a pointy mountain of rock and scaring myself silly is all I want to do. Other times I need peace and quiet and chance to recharge – this bank holiday was the latter. Knowing Snowdonia was going to be busy and having an urge to visit somewhere I’d never been, I headed to the Berwyn Mountains in mid-Wales.
More like rolling hills of peat bogs and open grass land the Berwyns at 832m remind me of Skiddaw or the Howgill Fells. Open, vast and crucially – quiet. I saw three people all day. Bliss.
As you can imagine I was grateful it had been dry or this much peat would have been a boggy walk! I took the direct route straight up the front of Cadair Berwyn, which involved a diversion to get to the top of Moel Sych before heading for the trig point of Berwyn.
The route from Berwyn to Cadair Bronwen is clearly boggy at times as much of it has been boarded. I usually hate to see man’s mark on a landscape, but at times it is a gift. I’ve spent enough time bog trotting to know that boards can be a godsend in wet conditions. This part of the route is also a permissive path across a SSSI so if nothing else the boards are protecting the rare habitats in this area from erosion.
From Cadair Bronwen I headed across to Tomle to head across the fell tops and back to my car. Just before Tomle top at the fence line there is a very impressive boundary stone between Powys and Gwynedd.
The moors across the tops here are less well trodden despite them still counting as summits in their own rights – and reaching the end at Mynydd Tarw, a mere 681m high there is an impressively large cairn (considering few people clearly walk across this top).
Man’s impact on the landscape is clear here as the large woodland, a useful feature marked on my ageing map, is currently being felled for timber.
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