Beaumaris to LlanfairPG

Having had a somewhat torrid time with a very nasty case of a cut, infected fourth toe and a very bruised third toe, plus related severe back pain which had rendered me virtually immobile and unable to wear closed shoes in the run up to this week's walking I was extremely worried that I would not be able to manage our penultimate stretch of the WCP around Anglesey. I had never felt so vulnerable and uncertain approaching such challenging walking and didn't want to find myself holding Helen back or even having to pull out of a walk part way through. Walking around Machynlleth the evening before I was due to meet Helen at LlanfairPG my toes were painful and lower back pain made life difficult. Concerned was an understatement.

I got up the next morning (Coronation Day! I had forgotten all about it!) and put on my walking boots. Astonishingly, they felt fine. My toes wiggled and there was no twinge of pain. My back didn't complain either! It was a miracle! The White Lion Hotel provided me with an excellent breakfast which I ate with unalloyed enjoyment. This was the first pain-free morning in the past four weeks.

I set off with a renewed sense of optimism and armed with plenty of paracetamol and plasters just in case. It was going to be fine! The only cloud on the horizon was when, crossing the Menai Strait, I noticed that the engine light had come on in the car and I had a mild panic attack, swerving dramatically to make the junction for LlanfairPG. What if my engine was about to seize up? What if my big end had gone again?

I pulled in at the car park for the station at LlanfairPG, let off steam by calling poor old Nick (who reassured me that it was probably going to be fine…) and then explored the outlet shop that constituted the other thing of interest, along with the very long sign, in the area. ‘Douglas Adams' advice, 'Don’t panic’ was my mantra. After all, Arthur Dent and co had tougher times to face in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and Anglesey was not a planet somewhere on the far side of Betelgeuse. They do have garages and mechanics for emergencies, for example. By the time Helen arrived and we had parked her car on the Green in Beaumaris ready for our first walk, I was feeling fairly sanguine. In spite of her driving.

While Rhian was in the White Lion, I had spent the night in Chester. The hotel I was staying in was nice enough but in an odd part of town. I was surprised to find it was directly opposite a sex shop. The shop window was full of terribly old mannequins dressed in 'saucy' outfits. The dummies are so old they had chipped faces and fingers and their synthetic wigs were askew. They looked as if they had had hard lives! The store front managed to be the oddest of combinations, racy with an air of vague desperation. The 'Naughty nurse' outfit looked as if it would be worn by someone asking you about the frequency of your bowel movements rather than offering a night of sordid, pseudomedical, sexual excess. This being the view from my window, I decided to head out and explore the town. As a result, I spent the afternoon dodging torrential down pours ducking in and out of some very upmarket shops. Chester is That Sort Of Place.

Stepping into each shop I would look around, dripping lightly on the flooring and examine the merchandise. The shop assistants would, to an etiolated woman, give me an appraising glance and quickly realise that the chance of my buying a thousand pound handbag was zero and ignore me. They were quite right. I don't have that sort of money and even if I did, I wouldn't spent it on a hand bag. For that sort of price I would expect the damn thing to levitate and follow me round. Eventually I found my way to M and S, more my sort of price bracket. While I was there I bought a King Colin the Caterpillar cake, for the next day was going to be the Coronation.

Rhian and I had booked the week many months before Charles copied us for his Big Day. Rhian had asked me if I minded missing it and being a lower case republican I snorted and said, 'Not at all, it will be a good excuse to miss it all and not look like a sour puss and grumpy face republican while being a sour puss and grumpy face republican.' My feelings about the coronation leaned towards indifference though I do like to see what the women are wearing (Shallow? Me?) and I was really looking forward to consuming King Colin, crown and all.

I breakfasted in a fantastic greasy spoon cafe in town and enjoyed a conversation with a local who told be how he was looking forward to his next trip to Spain for a holiday. He said he really enjoyed holidays now that he was our of prison. He said this as if it was the most ordinary of statements. I tried not to look surprised at this casual slice of his past and told him that I was on my way to a holiday walking the coast path. He looked shocked. I think he thought that I was crazy. I walked back to the car park behind the hotel and had to effect a 112 point turn to get out of the parking spot. This was all very stressful but I was much amused by the sat nav display.

Heading off down the northern edge of North Wales I zipped past places we had spent a few weeks walking past and eventually crossed the Menai Straits and passed into Anglesey, Ynys Mon, The Mother of Wales.

I suppose it might be helpful to explain our rather scattergun approach to walking the Wales Coast Path. There are probably as many ways to walk the WCP as there are people who do it. Some super fit people even manage to run it. While being impressed by their fitness, we both hate them. Not is a bad way, you understand, more in a, 'Jesus, I can only just walk up this hill and you are running up the bloody thing while carrying a rucksack, you bastard' envious sort of way. Some people cherry pick their favourite bits or do circular walks. Others decide to walk the whole thing and will then walk it in a sensible order, either north to south or contrariwise. Rhian and I have walked it north to south but have carved off sections randomly that don't make much geographical sense. We started in the middle, in Ceredigion, because I was familiar with the section and had walked a bit of it. So I was fairly sure that we could do it without killing ourselves. After that we picked sections almost at random. Our one logical choice was the last section, we agreed that we should keep Anglesey to the end. There was an internal logic to walking the island off Wales at the end and we had read that it was a beautiful section with a wide range of landscapes. After the quickest of stops in Llanfairpwll and we drove to Beaumaris where the day's walk would start.

Instantly impressed with Beaumaris, we walked along the front, chatted to the young RNLI volunteers at the lifeboat station, strolled along the jetty and watched people swimming at the small sandy beach. There was a wedding about to take place and guests in their finery were gathering at the attractive sea-front hotel. The atmosphere was just lovely and we began discussing basing ourselves in Beaumaris for our final 5 days walking of the WCP later in the year,

The path leads out of town on the main road then veers off up a very steep hill and it was at this point we both realised that we were not at our fittest. However, we sweated on upwards, passing by a golf course and club house and cutting across scrubland through bushes and trees. Lunchtime saw us on a bench overlooking the Menai Straits. Life doesn't get better than a pastie with a view. (This is why we never lose any weight. Well, that and the wine...)

And what a view it was back across the strait to Bangor! This gave us the added bonus of a gloat, since we had already walked that section in the previous year. To the left you can just see Penrhyn Castle, a NT property that the path had to skirt around, adding miles to the walk. There is a new, faster route that hugs the coast opened up now and i suppose that some day we should go and take a look at it. It must take you to the marina and then round into Bangor. You can see the pier where we finished a section getting a coffee at the end. I remember looking across the water, thinking how close Anglesey was, but a year away in the future. And now that future had arrived and we were walking the last part of the path. The path hugged the side of a ridge and reminded me a little of the field side walking we had done in Carmarthen. The grass was green and springy and the gorse was out.

Rhian, disappearing into some woodland as we walked the first part of the section. She always walks ahead of me so I get lots of chances to take photos of her marching ahead without her knowing!

Descending, we found ourselves walking through Menai Bridge and again, appreciating the rather lovely little town. We dithered about directions but found our way towards the straits, eyeing up an appealing restaurant by the boatyard. Menai Bridge Town was lovely, full of small independent shops. Rhian lingered at one, gazing in the window.

'Ohh look at that lovely lamp. I really need a lamp for my new reading nook by the fire place.'

'No you don't!' She looked most put out.

What do you mean! I've decorated and that lamp will be perfect!.'

'Rhian you want it, you don't need it. Plus its not going to fit into your day sack.'

Honestly! If looks could kill. I was only being linguistically accurate and practical. It was quite a big lamp! (I daresay she was right, but I still hanker after that lamp).

Food is usually at the forefront of our minds and we spend an inordinate amount of time discussing it, buying it and eating it. We have decided which of our mothers' cooking specialities were our favourites, when and where we have eaten our most memorable meals, what meal we would choose to eat in the advent of an earth-destroying asteroid being imminent and have played that game where you think of as many songs containing foodstuffs in their title as you can. We have ranked chocolate bars and ice cream flavours in order of deliciousness. And of course we have invented hilariously appropriately-named cocktails, as in our walk into Tenby all those years ago (well, it took our minds off the misty rain that blew in from the sea as we set off out of Freshwater East). We have planned where we are going to have our celebratory meal and drinks on the day that we complete all 870 miles of the WCP on Wednesday 30th August 2023. Eight years of walking the Wales Coastal Path will do that to you.

The path leads you under Thomas Telford's Menai Suspension Bridge, opened in 1826 and recently reopened after a scare involving "serious public safety concerns" in October 2022. You then go along the Belgian Promenade, so called because the promenade was paid for by Belgian refugees who came to the area during WW1 having been displaced by the German invasion. This is the kind of interesting nugget of information which you can pick up all along the WCP and which makes the whole thing even more enjoyable, especially if the area you are walking through is unprepossessing, and both of us love that about it. There really is nothing like walking through a landscape to help get a new perspective on it.

The weather was improving and we did a short detour out to the little church of Sant Tysilio on its island then headed on past a rugby field with a game in progress. What a pleasure it was to see the world and life back to full normality after years of Covid restrictions and worries and Helen was clearly appreciating this fully as muscular, athletic young men raced around just the other side of the fence. "I really like watching rugby," she murmured dreamily, as I pulled her arm to get her attention. Anybody who knows Helen knows that sport is one of the few things she has virtually no interest in other than the occasional Six nations match and I just had to laugh. (I feel seen.)

St Tysilio is the eponymous saint in the place name. To give it its full, unexpurgated version, Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch. You can see the saint's name just before the gogogoch bit. And Llan in Welsh means church. The observant of you will have noticed that there are, in fact, two churches in the place name, one to St Mary, Llan Fair, and one to St Tysilio. St Tysilio was the second son of a local King who legged it from the court to become a monk. In order to avoid his family he set up a hermitage on the island in the straits which now takes his name and spent his time preaching in Anglesey. When his brother died his sister in law, Queen Gwenwynwyn (so good they named her twice) wanted to marry him and place him on the throne. He refused her and went off to start a monastery.I wanted to see if she was upset at being spurned by the saintly Tysiolo bit I can find nothing about her. In fact the only Gwenwynwyns I can find are men. Which might be why he turned her down. Welsh saints and their lives are a lively topic of interest to us and speculation is often rife about who is related to who and all the shenanigans they might have got up to. North Wales in particular provides many tales of times wreathed in mystery, history and mystical goings-on. Most of them seemed to be related to St David. I think it was a family business.

The path led along the shore line and to a bird hide where we could rest and I could pretend to be knowledgeable about the birdlife around us. Helen thinks every bird is a heron and I know that some of them are egrets - it's not often I know more about something than she does so I like to correct her when I get the chance. (I keep telling her that I'm not that sort of biologist. However I do know the difference between a shag and a cormorant though. One is fun and the other is a bird) My response to this lowering of the tone would be best summed up with a rolling-the-eyes emoji. (Side eye)

I was glad of a sit down as my lower back and my left knee were starting to ache. A couple of paracetamol and the lovely view of the straits and the Britannia Bridge came to my rescue and we were soon on our way again. Coedmor woods provided a pleasant and easy trail, with boardwalks and dappled shade.

The walk ended on the side of the Strait and then we had to get back into the village to pick up Rhian's car. As always, we got a little lost and were glad to see the station car park at LlanfairPG come into view. The last mile or so was alongside the road into the village and not too exciting, and as usual we were feeling tired. Our next mission was to pick up Helen's car, head towards Holyhead and what turned out to be the most massive Tesco either of us have ever visited to buy provisions for the week and then find our holiday cottage somewhere near Church Bay.

Something you need to understand, dear reader, is that there is a fair amount of competition in finding the best accommodation for the week. They have all been good but it irks me to admit that Rhian is better at this than I am. It naturally took us some time to locate our home for the week, in a village just uphill from lovely Church Bay. But when we did - whoa!!! We were beside ourselves. It was beautifully appointed with a view to die for and a boathouse converted into THE BEST games room I have ever encountered. And very best of all, it had a pool table! Oh the excitement!

We ate our supper and drank some fizz in the garden overlooking Holyhead and the bay, crowing with delight. And then the pool tournament that was to last us all week began. Never mind the plethora of board games and books, the playstation or the swingball. The pool table was calling...

I should explain that pool and darts are games that reach far back to our days as 17 and 18 year-olds in the Rhondda. "Mis-spent youth" some may call it, but we had an absolute blast, thank you very much.

Our Saturday evening routine went something like this:

I would wend my way the couple of miles down to the seedier end of the upper Rhondda, that nebulous area of Gelli and Ton-Pentre (I never really worked out where one started and the other finished) where Helen and our partners in crime (so to speak), Gaenor and Cheryl lived. (The only way you can tell is when you see the signage. as one runs seamlessly into the other. Of course we locals know and there was terrific competition between the Ton and Gelli Primary schools. I remember tormenting poor old Gaenor when Gelli won the sports day. We thought we were more couth than them. They used to chant, 'Ton snobs on the wall, Gelli bulldogs ate them all!', fighting talk when you were only 9!)

First stop, 6.30, just after opening time, The New Inn. Half a lager each (30p), play a round or two of pool in the largest pool room in the world, empty at this time of the evening so no men to cast disapproving glances at us as females in this very male domain.

Second stop: The Griffin, for a cheese and onion bap, half a lager (30p) and possibly darts

Third stop: The Red Cow, for darts, the juke box in the back room and lots of people we knew, half a lager 30p

Final stop: the famous back room of The Prince with the greatest juke box of them all, posters on the ceiling and the rest of the people we knew crammed in there, half a lager, 30p.

It was still legal for pubs to refuse to serve women as this was 1979-80. The law changed in 1982 following the legal case brought by solicitor Tess Gill and journalist Anna Coote. We seldom if ever dared to venture into the bar area of pubs and clubs which were very much a male preserve still. Women were expected to stay in the lounge and sip a port and lemon or some such. (My mother was very shocked when I told her that I would go to bar and buy my own drinks. She assumed that I would get a boyfriend to do it. I think she was mortified and oddly proud of me at the same time.) But I have to say, our generation tended to ignore these ridiculous old rules and regs. The tide of second-wave feminism was carrying us forward and besides, port and lemon makes me feel sick.

I once got very drunk on port and lemon and so it has joined a range of alcoholic drinks that I Dare Not Drink. Southern Comfort is another.

Anyway, here we were, two liberated women with a pool table of own, at least for a week. Granted, the step ladder to the mezzanine bedroom made for some curious shots but it was all ours and we would be brilliant all over again.