Valley of the Ddols: Machynlleth to Tre Taliesin

(An outline of this day's walk was first published as a live blog Fiery Furnace)

It was a beautiful morning and we were out of the car, booted and suited in good time. After the drive to Tre Taliesin we went on to Machynlleth where the walk would start. This is part of the official Wales Coastal Path route, but it goes deep in land because of the Dyfi estuary which divides Meirionnydd and Ceridigeon. Most of the walk we would be up in the hills and forests but we would drop down into Tre'r Ddol and finish the walk in the small village of Tre Taliesin. This walk was going to knit together two sections of path and fill a gap that had been bothering us both since we ended the last Summer's walk in Machylleth.

Machynlleth is a small market town of just over 2000 people. It's history goes back to the Romans but most of the buildings these days are Victorian. It sits on both the Wales Coastal Path and the Owain Glyndwr trail, which runs in land and so it is popular with walkers. Owain Glyndwr was the last native born Prince of Wales and fought the English, during the Middle Ages. He held his parliament in the town in 1404 (possibly in the the medieval building that houses the Owain Glyndwr Centre) and so it lays claim to being the original capital of Wales.

The other building of note is that large clock tower in the town square. It was built, using funds raised by the local populous, to mark the 21th birthday of the Viscount Castlereagh who's parents were the local gentry. Which sounds like a huge suck up to me but it has left the town with a very nice clock. Maybe the kid would have preferred a pair of cufflinks.

The town had a sleepy air on a hot Sunday morning but it was quirky and I'd like to return to it with more time to explore the history.

Walking out of the town we spotted the blaze for the path and began our ascent above the valley up the Roman steps.

These may or may not have been built by the Romans, though they definitely had a camp in the area. It is more likely that they were built to access a nearby quarry but whatever the truth they have been hewn out of the rock and even, apparently, have a gutter to channel water from the fields and hills above away from the steps themselves. Ingenious.

Our t-shirts were designed for us by Emma, and we were very excited to be wearing them!

We paused for our traditional photo at the start of the walk and admired the steps, possibly trodden by druids or even by St Cybi, a 6th century Cornish chap whose father was called Salomon. Helen worships St Salomon by wearing his footwear, religiously. (I've been unfaithful this year and have ended up with very wet feet as a result. Divine punishment I feel sure.) St Cybi spent time in this area of North Wales and was even a king for a while. His mam was St Non's sister, Gwen. So he was St David's cousin. (A family thing, this Sainting business.) Well fancy that! This is becoming like one of those convoluted family trees we would get embroiled in when in conversation with my husband's grandmother who knew the minute detail of everybody's relationships to everybody else and liked to bamboozle us with them whilst assuming that we were keeping up: “Oh you remember Cybi! Lived in that monastic cell in Holyhead! Yes, you do! His mother’s sister was that woman from Pembrokeshire - Rhiannon. Of course you know who I’m talking about - they called her Non, mun. Had a boy called David! Yes Gwen married that Cornish man, funny name - what was it now? Solomon? No he’s from the Bible....” (Epic. My Aunty Margaret was just like this. Her explanations of who people were would get ever more convoluted as you denied any knowledge of the protagonists. ‘I don’t know her Aunty Marg.’ ‘Yes you do, she ran away with the milkman who only had one leg.’ And on and on it would go. In the end you would say yes, just to make it stop. I loved her. Her letters were totally without punctuation. They were like Finnigans Wake with more gossip.)

Small world, isn’t it?

Talking of the smallness of the world, as Helen and I had headed towards the steps we had seen three women in their walking boots heading in a different direction. We walked up the steps and inland along country lanes lined with hedges made of oak branches trained to intertwine horizontally - a craft that became beautifully clear as we looked closely.

The lanes led us past houses hidden behind these hedges into a world of steep sided, thickly wooded hills, with sheep grazing in fields on the valley floor. It was idyllic.

We crossed one of these fields and found ourselves at a crossroads, and the three women we had seen earlier came into view. As we often do, we found ourselves chatting to them, telling them of our walk and how lucky they were to live in such a gorgeous place, as they had said they were local.

“Where are you from?” one of them asked.

“The Rhondda, originally, “ we said.

“I am from the Rhondda too,” she said. “Treorchy - I left for uni when I was 18. 1978.”

“I am from Treorchy too! We left there for uni in 1980! What’s your name?” I was astonished.

When she told us her name, it was one that I recognised. We didn’t know each other personally but coming from a small Valleys town you tend to know the names of those who may have been a little older than you at school, and I did! We also knew some of her school friends, Yvonne, Caron and several others. We gabbled away between us about people we knew, and, lo and behold, Caryl remembered her dad talking about Helen’s dad, Idwal, who he used to work with in Polikoff’s (everybody in the Rhondda knew Idwal (and most worked in Polikoff’s) because he was legendary!). (It even happened when I was at university.)

Caryl and her friends invited us for a cup of tea, but we had to push on and we spent many minutes as we walked saying things like “Well there’s a there!” and “Duw Duw! Fancy that!” and “Well what an amazing coincidence! I bet Nick will remember her! They were the same year in school!” (He didn’t. Hopeless.).

And so, dear reader, Machynlleth became, to us, the Welsh Capital of Coincidence, though for more on this you will have to wait until Meirionydd to find out.

Gradually ascending, we turned off the tarmac road onto a forest path that led us up towards the mountain top. As there was no sign of the WCP blaze I was a little concerned that we had turned off too early, but we passed through a gate as the guide book said, and followed a fence to our left. As we did so we stood on a rocky outcrop and gasped at the view before us - steep, craggy hills, and in between the Dyfi estuary, golden sand and blue water in the hazy sunshine. It was so beautiful and unexpected we were both rendered almost speechless (yes, even Helen).(How rude! But she is being cruel but fair. I almost wept. It was just astonishing.) We stood and stared. We took photographs. This is why we walk, for moments like this.

It turned out that we had missed the correct path, and found ourselves heading towards the Llyfnant valley by way of a rickety style and a very rough mountain track. But I noted several things as we navigated our way onto the right path:

1. There had been no sense of worry or panic when we realised we were not on the correct track

2. If we had followed the road as it was marked we would not have seen that view

From this I realised that several years’ experience navigating a path that is not always obvious has given us a certain confidence and sang-froid about losing our way. I also realised that I have learned something of a life lesson - that it is ok not to know, sometimes.

One of my Facebook friends, and Nick’s cousin, Kim, posted this little poem on this same day and it struck me as very appropriate:

Thank you, Kim :-).

Eventually we descended a steep forest track and got back on the right path which took us into the Llyfnant Valley. It was steep sided with the fast flowing Afon Llyfnant at the bottom far below us. The conifers towered above us, it was stunningly beautiful and all the we could hear was the river and the crunch of our feet on the path. It became a popular tourist destination for the Victorians who were looking for respite from their modern world. And I think that we needed it even more than they did. While the forest is managed it is still a wonderful ecosystem. Trees are left where they fall if they don't block the path and we passed a tree, its roots dripping with soil like the waterfall dripping water below us. Water below us, soil beside us and the warm air in our faces we walked on towards Furnace. It was proving to be an elemental day.

There was life, green and verdant, everywhere we looked. If 'green' had been a sound and not a colour we would have been deafened. This was no ordered symphony, its was a cacophony of plant life, each plant fighting to get the best light it could under the dark trees. As well as the conifers there were ferns and lichen everywhere we looked. Even the boulders were covered, inches thick, in mosses that made the rocks look like puffy pillows. Ferns grew on decaying tree stumps. It was sumptuous and we had it all to ourselves.

Very nicely put, Hel.

Eventually the path ended at a gate and we found ourselves is a flat pasture with a very helpfully placed fallen tree where we sat and had our lunch. Rhian suggested some pain meds and fortified by paracetamol we got up and started to walk the next section.

‘Oh look Rhi, Cows!’

‘Yes, and they are the other side of the field with a fence between us.’

‘Where is your sense of adventure?’

‘As far as cows are concerned, its non-existent!’

‘Coward!’

We stopped squabbling as we started to climb the next hill, we didn't have the breath to spare. It wasn’t exactly tough, but it was a long, slow drag and we were getting tired. The path was in a dip between ferns on the up-hill side and a wall of hawthorn on the other. Every now and then we would get a gap on the down-hill side and we enjoyed the view of last year’s walk and some cooling breeze. We got to the top of Craig Caerhedryn and enjoyed a short respite of walking on the flat before we descended into another stunning forest valley. Downy was soon followed by another uppy, we crossed the Afon Melindwr (River Water Mill if you are looking for some more incidental Welsh) and climbed up to the top of Foel Fawr where there was a view indicator.

It says a huge amount about this walk that this wasn't the most stunning view of the day. You can just see Aberdyfi across the other side of the estuary. We had just re-entered Ceredigeon and we were beginning to join the two counties.

Rested, we went down the hill, crossing our third river, the Afon Einion on a bridge partially made of railway sleepers and went into the Artists Valley. Supposedly Robert Plant has a house round here, and Led Zep recorded Stairway to Heaven in a studio on the other side of the valley. We checked every hedgerow for a bustle but didn't find any. The path ran above the village of Furnace, which has been the site of an iron foundry from the 1750’s. They had made iron from local ores and it was strange to realise that all the things that had made our walk so perfect, the water and the trees, had once made it a centre of industry.

The guide book then told us that we would ’lose any sense of the path on the ground’ and we didn’t fail the authors. We soon lost the path. We seemed to spend ages walking down paths and crossing small streams and I wasn’t sure that we didn’t go round in circles at least once. The last part of the day involved us walking through a forest of oak and beech, the path covered with last year’s beech nuts and acorns. It was a beautiful walk in the late afternoon sun but we were tired and wanted the walk to end. We saw some more cows but they were on the other side of a fence and even Rhian could wave at them. At this rate she would be a milkmaid yet! By now we could hear the cars on the road that we were about to join. Time was about to speed up for us. Miles would soon be passed in minutes and not hours and the crunch of leaves would be replaced by asphalt underfoot. We dropped into Tre’r-ddol and hoped that the local pub would be open but due to Covid it was closed. A mile down the road and we reached Tre Taliesin and the end of the walk. The village used to be a mining community but the mines were long gone and the village was quiet. It claims to be the last resting place of the poet Taliesin who lived in the sixth centaury and was known as the Chief of the Bards.

I was elated. I had now walked from Porthmadog to Burry Port and I could tease Rhian as she still had the section from Borth to Aberystwyth left to do. So, I had some unexpected gloating rights. We got into Rhian’s car and started the drive back to Machynlleth. Five minutes in, we had to stop as the road was full of cows.

‘They are coming to get you Rhian!’

‘Bastard things!’

‘You are obviously a Cow Whisperer. Shall I open a window?’

‘No! It will slobber all over me!’

I was so, so tempted. But she had been very understanding over the gloating to I left the window up and looked smug. I was sorely tempted to use the window control on the driver's side to wipe the smugness away with cow slobber, but I refrained. I am a saint.

'Fruit Pastille?' I asked her. Oh, if looks could kill! Those were my Fruit Pastilles she was offering me.

We had a huge sense of satisfaction at the end of this walk. We had now finished four stages of the Wales Coastal Path. With the Meirionnydd, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthen sections under out belt we were looking forward to our next challenge, the 110 miles of the Llyn Peninsula from Caernarfon to Porthmadog.

To celebrate, and because both of us were so hungry we could eat a scabby horse each, we stopped off and had our first restaurant meal since lockdown. It was a real treat to snaffle down fish and chips and fizzy pop on the quayside at Aberaeron - a fitting, very satisfying end to a great couple of days' walking.

ADDENDUM AUGUST 2020

Yay! Borth to Aberystwyth done! I have now officially walked all the way from Porthmadog to Burry Port. Nick and I travelled to Aberystwyth by car, then hopped on the train to Borth, to walk back into Aber and then stay overnight - a little post lockdown treat as well as the chance to close that annoying little gap.

Some things I have learned from this walk:

1. I must apologise profusely to the town of Borth, about which I was somewhat sneery when we passed through in July. On closer inspection it is a place full of lovely cottages and Victorian villas, it clearly has a close-knit community and so I must learn not to make snap judgements.

2. Walking with Helen Brace is like taking long and arduous bimble about the countryside with bickering, laughter and blisters. Walking with Nick is different. It is like being on a route march with Ivor the Engine. He runs at hills (‘I need the momentum’) and then puffs constantly. It does mean we make very good time though.

3. Wearing a face mask on a hot sweaty train is very hot and sweaty.

4. Nick’s mask pulled his ears forward and made him resemble an orc, bless him.