Llwyngwril to Tywyn: yarn bombs, sheep and sausage sandwiches

The next section of the walk, from Llwyngwril to Tywyn was connected by rail but given we had failed to make the connection the previous day and had ended up drinking lager beside a stream like a pair of old inebriates I was too scared to suggest we used the train. So we packed up the cars and drove in land to cross the Mawddach. It was such a stunning place and we drove over the bridge and back towards Llwyngwril.

Crossing the quaint bridge at Penmaenpool (I love that name) was slightly hair-raising as it is very narrow and I didn't fancy meeting a car coming the other way. Some time after this walk I saw our landlady and the African drumming group she was a part of on the news, drumming on this bridge, I think to raise money for Children in Need, though I may be wrong. But it proved that the African drumming group was not a figment of my overheated brain but a much-in-demand local troupe who added a fabulous tribal vibe to any event.

We parked in Llwyngwril and walking through the village, decorated with the most amazing yarn bomb creations, lifted my spirits and distracted me from my aching feet. We walked past the knitted version of the café (the Open/Ar Agor sign was a perfect knitted replica of the real thing) and a knitted church, went past the crocheted poppies at the war memorial and found the best Wales Coastal Path sign that we had yet seen on our walks.

We started the climb up quite a steep hill, huffing and puffing far to much for the start of a walk and I asked Rhian if she was sure we were on the right route. Getting onto the path can often be the most confusing part of the walk and, since the days' walks often start with a steep climb, you really don't want to get that bit wrong.

'Not sure,' she said, annoyingly less out of breath than me. 'Look, there is a post man there, let's ask him, he will know'. She shot off and I trotted after her, cursing my feet and my inability to read a map.

'Excuse me,' she said, with a winning smile, 'But is this the right way to get onto the Coastal Path?'

The Postman, who was wearing shorts and seemed to be about 12 years old, looked us both up and down as if he was a little surprised we were were out and about without a bath chair and a minder.

'Yes but its a hell of a climb!'

'Oh no', said Rhian, 'Please don't tell us that!'

'All right then,' he said, grinning, 'Its up that way, not a steep climb at all, just up that gentle slope'. With that he got back into his van and shot off, back into the village.

We looked up. Lying bastard, it was one hell of a climb and off we plodded.

'God, we must be getting old if postmen are looking young!'

'Postman Pat he was not!'

'I once worked with a bloke who looked just like Postman Pat, all the kids in school called him that and I had to pretend to be cross and tell them off, but I agreed with them deep down. I couldn't stand the Postman Pat books. When I used to read them to my kids I used to mentally read ahead and give them a shortened version. This worked fine until the kids learned to read and they found me out. '

As a dutiful parent I watched every episode of Sam Tan (Fireman Sam) with my children and I loved them even more than my kids did. We were living in South East London at the time and the brilliant and hilarious accuracy of the portrayals of people named things like Trevor Evans (surely everyone in Wales knows a Trevor Evans?) and Dilys Price, and the village of Pontypandy induced in me the sort of delicious laughter that only Welsh humour can. You only have to say the name Elvis Cridlington and I'm off.

'My kids liked Postman Pat,' I mused, 'but we all loved Fireman Sam best.'

We agreed on this one, and Helen went on to express a concern that I know we all felt when watching the exploits of Sam.

'Those kids though, Rhi. Always causing trouble. What were they called?'

'Sarah, and James. And Norman Price - remember Norman? Total delinquent. Always setting fire to things!'

'I'm surprised they didn't earn themselves ASBOs.' (Norman was a nightmare. I felt sorry for his mother.)

We climbed up, concentrating on not falling over and so completely missed the Iron Age Hill fort of Castel y Gaer. Apparently it has stone ramparts and is quite unlike many other forts. We really were getting to be quite expert at failing to find them and this one joined the growing catalogue of 'Interesting Things on the Path We Have Failed to Find' A visit to Castell y Gaer hillfort | Aberdovey Londoner

This is Rhian looking back towards Barmouth. We stopped here for a coffee break and it gave us the chance to catch our breath and gloat at how far we had walked. When we were discussing this article I asked her about putting this photo in and she asked was it a good one. I told her that it was a nice view and picture her from the back and she said, 'That's the best view'.

Thankfully you can't see me in the picture but my blisters had driven me into wearing my walking sandals at this point and my toes were festooned with plasters. I'm a martyr to me feet. Not the most attractive thing to think about, but the tea cups are stunning and the view is good and my feet are thankfully not pictured.

Truth be told, my memories of the walk that day are hazy, though I do recall pausing for our coffee break as in the photo and gazing at the view of hills sloping down to the sea. We sat at the side of the path and discussed, in some depth, the sausage sandwiches we had had the foresight to prepare and the great anticipation with which we therefore viewed our lunch stop. Were we being spoiled by the relentlessly beautiful scenery so that sausage sandwiches were becoming more important? I like to think not.

We caught our breath while enjoying a drink and then cut through some very hilly fields. The ground was soft and studded with gorse and rushes. The farm was home to some very hardy sheep and lambs and the air was full of bleating. As we walked on we could see a fence with a gate in it and the bleating got louder and louder as we approached. As soon as we got to the gate we could see the reason why, a lamb had got separated from its mother and the fence was stopping them getting back together. We opened the gate and walked through, taking care that the sheep didn't leave the field. The mother sheep stood her ground some distance from the gate and continued to bleat. The lamb did the same on the other side and so we stood, the four of us, waiting for the lamb to get the right idea and go back to its mother. This took some time. These sheep were obviously not as cunning as Rhondda sheep. Rhondda sheep lived, like these, on the steep mountain sides and were stopped from getting down onto the floor of the valley and knocking over the dustbins by cattle grids and by God they were clever. Some of the sheep, being very clever, worked out that the drop wasn't very deep on the grid and so would walk in between the rails, looking for all the world as if they were tip toeing. The farmers realised this and made the drop deeper at which point the sheep learned to roll across! Very cunning ovines.

(I will never forget having a university friend to stay with us in Cwmparc and her total bemusement at the sheep that were wandering up the main road foraging in people's bins on rubbish collection day). (I swear that the sheep even remembered when it was bin day, which is more than I can do.)

The path continued over the hillside, past the farm house and then dropped down to the small village of Rhoslefain. The weather had begun to brighten up by now. Once we passed the village that we walked between two hills and could see the sea and the railway beside it, glinting in the sunshine.

Anticipation began to build as lunchtime approached. The fixation with sausage sandwiches was down to the fact that we had bought and cooked some rather spectacular sausages for dinner the previous evening, and as we are simple souls whose lives are less about material things and more about feeding our faces (I wanted to say souls there, but I cannot help but be truthful, rather than romantic) we couldn't bloody wait! (And walking long distances helps you to focus on Small Pleasures. Your whole world can get better by the application of a blister plaster, for example, or walking on the level after walking uphill. It is oddly life enhancing. Of course the argument could be made that this is like the positive feeling you get after you stop banging your head on a desk and maybe you shouldn't have banged your head in the first place but that would be a different thing and not at all like going on a walking holiday AT ALL. We were anticipating the sausage sandwiches in all their greasy goodness, topped with tomato sauce for me and brown sauce for her.)

The next section of the walk was rather nondescript. The path was flat and easy to follow, even we couldn't get lost on this bit but we started to pass odd ruined buildings on both sides of the route. It was quite bleak and a little eerie. The buildings were part of the Tonfanau army camp which was used during WW2 for missile firing practice. At the end of the war it was used for training boys aged between 15 and 17½ as future senior non-commissioned officers from a variety of arms of the British army. After that it became an outward bound camp for a little while but eventually it closed. It was re-opened in 1972 when it became a resettlement camp for Ugandan Asians who had fled persecution at the hands of Idi Amin's regime. Figures vary for the number of people housed here, from a thousand to sixth thousand, but large numbers lived on the site up to six months before they found homes in other parts of the UK. The camp had been closed for 4 years prior to this and must have been in a poor state of repair and the camp was made up of Nissan Huts which wouldn't have been that comfortable even when new. The refugees must have thought that they had come to a freezing cold End of the World. The local residents worked with the WI to provide clothing, toys and entertainments but it must have been a tough experience to have left the warmth of Africa for the cold of the North Wales winter.

Apologies for the little digression. When we were in what is now called year 6 in primary school, top juniors, we had several new pupils joined Treorchy Juniors. One of them was a Sikh girl whose family had left Uganda to escape Amin. She introduced all of us to a glimpse of a world outside the valley, and she taught me a great deal about racism, and about the wider world. She didn't do this deliberately, of course. It was by osmosis. She was great fun, a little bit naughty and rebellious and also very beautiful and classy. One day she invited me round to their rather posh house ( family of doctors and business people). We were 16 at the time and so we gossiped and talked pop music, boys and fashion. She slid open her wardrobe doors to show me her array of saris and salwar kameez. It was a dazzling array of incredible colours, fabrics and embroidery. Gorgeous is the word. I had never seen anything like it. She let me try one on. I couldn't imagine why she wanted to wear anything else. I looked at myself in the mirror and there stood a pale, pasty, lardy coloured teenager wrapped in fabulous orange silk. Of course she wanted to wear platforms, flares and western fashion. The difficulty of fitting in to two cultures was made absolutely apparent to me. She was a real breath of fresh air and our friendship profoundly affected me, though I didn't realize it at the time. (She was just lovely and probably had to put up with a lot of casual ignorance. We had simply never met anyone from a different culture to us. I remember her swapping pakoras for ham and pickle sandwiches at lunch time and she showed us how to roll out chapattis in Home Economics classes. It was like a vision from another world, magical. On some levels she was from another world and she very much helped to enliven ours.)

We looked around for somewhere to sit for lunch but all we could find were the benches on the railway station and we perched on them while we ate our sandwiches. The sausages were juicy and tasted wonderful. Plus we had earned them, flogging up that hill. Time passed as we rested our feet and the only excitement was watching some fishermen manipulating their enormously large rods into the back of their cars. I started to snigger childishly but Rhian treated me to some side eye and stopped and started to behave myself. (Can't take her anywhere).

The next two miles or so into Tywyn were rather dull. We were walking beside the train line, which was on an embankment. This meant that while we could hear the sea, we couldn't actually see the sea and the only excitement was the Pont Tonfanau which has been finished in 2018. A search of the internet informs me that it is a 'Tubular vierendeel bow-string truss bridge providing bridleway route over the Afon Dysyni.' I will have to admit that none of this makes much sense to me and I wouldn't know what a vierendeel bow-string truss was if you hit me round the head with it but it gave us easy access across the tidal lagoon at Broad Water. It cost £850,000 to build and was funded by the Welsh European Funding Office. We passed some water treatment works and the rise in numbers of other people using the path tipped us off that we were getting close to the end of the walk. The path was now along a narrow, largely unused road and it was getting hot and dusty. I was looking forward to a cold drink in Tywyn and a sit down.

The bridge was lovely to walk over. Bringing us closer to Tywyn there were more people and it was very warm. We were tired, and crossed the railway line to reach the promenade that led us, eventually to the main seafront and the car. My first impressions of Tywyn were not great but as usual, I was to be proved wrong.

We jumped in my car and set off back to Llwyngwril and Barmouth. I had learned, finally, how to play Spotify through the car system and so we set off, not to the usual refrain of the ghost of Abilene, but to a selection of great songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GAylAoRR2A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew7Zkkucos8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDxzQJaA228