1. Around
A road falls away down the hill we must just have climbed. Very worn tarmac, but worn smooth, not pot-holed. A stone at the edge is blanched by the white light of the sun. Deep blue sky, white clouds. The road is between dry-stone walls. Because the sun is off to the left, the wall on that side, broken by a wide farm gate, is shaded black. The other is deeply textured by the shadows of its warm stones. This could be southern Europe. Near the gate, dappled shade is cast on the road by a tree on the other side of the wall.
I try to conjure what the moment must have felt like. Twisting round to take the photo, feet flat on the road, the tubular steel crossbar of my too-big bike.
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
My friend Tom and I are cycling south out of Brecon, the town in which we have grown up. The obvious way to cycle the fifty or so miles to Cardiff is to use the Taff Trail – the obvious way, but not the best.
The Taff Trail comprises, between various points, forestry track and towpath, and my impression is that it’s quite difficult to follow. We are on road bikes with thin tyres, so the challenge was to find an alternative route that also avoided the A470, the main arterial road between North and South Wales. Tom has planned much of the route we’re to follow over the next ten days – clockwise around the Welsh coast – but today’s route is mine.
We do in fact cycle out of Brecon on the canal but only as far as Brynich lock, where we join the B4558, a marvellous cycling road and one we know well. At Talybont we turn off on to the small road that takes us over the Beacons and down to the Valleys below. The high point of the road is Torpantau, once the site of a station on the Brecon and Merthyr Railway. I am as, to quote Herman Melville, ‘a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers’. If you’re touring on a heavy old bike, and something going wrong will cause you serious difficulties, you develop a ginger approach to applying force on steep hills – just enough to maintain momentum. But on a hill this steep it’s chain-snapping strain or nothing, so I get off and push to the summit.
We’re keen at all costs to avoid the Heads of the Valleys Road, a tight broiler of a would-be motorway. So we pass under it at Pant, round one of its roundabouts at Dowlais, ride alongside it for a while, and finally pass under it again at the start of the bleak road to Bedlinog. From Bedlinog we ride along the Taff Bargoed Valley to Nelson, and from there climb up a hill between dry-stone walls, over the unfenced common, and down to Senghenydd in the Aber Valley.
After skirting around Caerphilly, we descend into Cardiff down the wooded hill through Rhiwbina (sounds like ‘blue china’), which must be the finest way to enter Wales’s capital – north to south, mountain to coast, farmland to port. The sun has been shining brilliantly all day and my forearms are glowing, pumped full of rays.
Day Two
We make a complacently late start and by lunchtime have got no further than the pretty village of St Hilary in the Vale of Glamorgan, a region of quiet beauty.
This spot has the enclosed, safe feel that’s there in the word ‘vale’. There’s no view ‘over there’; we’re among it – the glowing green of the sun through leaves, and the deep, curious green of a high hedge on the shady side of the road. I place my left foot on the ground and right hand on the saddle, twisting to look at a bench on a green triangle of grass, and to wait for Tom to take the picture. The sunlight glints on the curved surface of my rear mudguard, a day star for Tom to follow. A house to the right is white, though in fact it is probably a light shade of pink.
We go south to the coast at Llantwit Major before joining up for the first time with the National Cycle Network’s Route 4, which runs from London to Fishguard – a cyclist’s A40. We hope to pass through Fishguard in three days’ time, so want a good working relationship with Route 4, but before long we hit a Taff Trailish rocky patch. At Margam Country Park the route turns suddenly into a stone track. We have little choice but to continue. So, like two adulterers down to their last Durex Fetherlite, we put our faith in delicate rubber.
We make it back to the tarmac punctureless, but the road turns out to lead into Port Talbot’s gargantuan steelworks. We double back. We are lost, and with the evening drawing in still have twenty-five miles to go.
A little panicked, we adopt an A-to-B attitude: having identified a route on the A483 and 84, we reach Swansea and climb the monstrous Townhill. Maybe this strikes some of the pedestrians who see us as an unusual thing to do. Our panniers weigh us down and also signal that we are from elsewhere – wanderers. We carry on westwards and, as the sun is setting, cross the river Loughor (rhymes with a guttural ‘sucker’).
After dropping our stuff at the B&B, we slap up at a Hungry Horse. I enjoy the synthetic, aerated-tasting food, but wake in the night with indigestion, an unhungry and dyspeptic horse.
We set off at nine on the Millennium Coastal Path out of Llanelli, a CGI landscape of curving smoothness set out for cyclists, and so unlike the track above the steelworks. The day’s ride takes us through Kidwelly, Carmarthen, St Clears, Saundersfoot, and Tenby. It’s another full day in the saddle but pleasanter for the pleasanter route, beyond the influence of the M4 corridor.
The hostel at Manorbier has it all: friendly staff, an excellent kitchen, and beeches nearby. We talk to a couple of German fellow-hostellers and learn that ‘youth hostel’ comes originally from translating the German ‘jugendherberge’; as in ‘harbourage’, ‘lodging’.
We stand at the edge of the paving around the hostel and look out at Caldey Island, which is home to a small community of perfumer-Trappists. Our shadows grow together towards a vanishing point, because the sun is so low. My shadow wears shorter shorts. We look like characters from a cartoon in which everyone is drawn in an elongated style. I can almost hear us, earnestly praising the hostel.
Manorbier to St David’s
I make a habit of getting sunburnt in unlikely places, such as Pembrokeshire and my ankles.
We don’t ride far as the crow flies, but spend much of the day right by the sea, climbing in and out of beachside villages under a clear sky and a hot sun.
Tom and I are getting on each other’s nerves. One source of unmentioned tension is that my bike is older and heavier than his, so I can’t go as fast as he can. Once we get to the hostel – a couple of miles beyond St David’s – we go off for separate grumpy walks. I see badgers in the woods behind the hostel. Foxes are urban, rabbits complacent, and birds are everywhere. But there is something enchanting about a badger – like we’re not meant to see each other. I climb Carn Llidi for a view of Ramsey Island, which is a bit bigger than Caldey, but is uninhabited except for two RSPB wardens.
In the 5th century St Justinian, a nobleman from Brittany and a friend of St David, became a hermit here (although accompanied by his servants). Like many another hermit, he was much beset by demons, which eventually possessed the bodies of his servants who, thus rendered malevolent, cut off his head. (Brewer’s Britain and Ireland)
Emerging from the twisted, low, spiny scrub where the badgers live is like coming out above the clouds – the air contains the heat and light of the sun, even as it settles beyond the horizon.
Tom tells me that in the middle of last night a new hosteller came into the dorm. He smelt of sweet, oriental spices, wore a brown cape, carried a staff, and left again before I woke up. And, as far as I can ascertain, Tom isn’t joking. We name the unknown randomer Radagast the Brown, after Tolkien’s minor wizard.
Our respective walks last night have done us good and we set off with camaraderie restored.
At a bend in the road there are three gates, three points gathered. The middle gate is face on, square, and the other two make angles towards the sky whose warm blue is lightest at the horizon. Behind the wooden gate on the left is emptiness, a distant prospect, the field falling away out of sight. The middle gate is of thin metal bars, a couple warped so that they bow upwards in the middle. Behind that there looks like an embanked track, shade cast by thorny little trees, which maybe opens up a way along. On the right is another wooden gate, hinged on a chunky stone. The field slopes upwards, defined by a wall that is a pile of stones with bracken and long seed-covered grass stuffed under it. The grass in front of the gates is worn most closest to the road by cars passing. A shoe ground on this bald, dry patch sounds like a peppermill.
We ride in blazing heat, via Fishguard, to Poppit and the youth hostel at Poppit Sands. Despite its having all mod cons and a spectacular view of the sea, we’re the only guests. The manager kindly upgrades us from the twin room we booked to our very own dorm with a sea view.
We walk the couple of miles to the village of St Dogmaels, where we have a pub supper and a couple of pints. St Dogmael was a Welsh monk of the early sixth century. I read that his feast day is 14 June – this Friday – and wonder what species of carnage is planned here in his eponymous village.
After a welcome rest day at Poppit Sands, we ride the length of Cardiganshire: we set off in drizzle for Aberaeron, where we stop for lunch and see, for the first time, the mountains of Snowdonia in the distance; then fast to Aberystwyth on the A487 and slow to Borth on the B4572, dropping down to the seafront village on a one-in-five hill.
Borth is squeezed between its superb beach and the rectilinear River Leri, which in 1863 was canalised by the builders of the Cambrian Railway. It is also – not quite so long ago – where my granny used to come on holiday when she was little. She and her family would catch the train from Birmingham and stay at one of the many guesthouses of what was then a thriving seaside resort. It is no longer thriving in the same way, of course: the hostel feels a little run down compared to those in Pembrokeshire, and we hear rumours that it might be closed.
It is said that Borth was the inspiration for Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, though I’ve been unable to find any evidence for this.
Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen.
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down.
One person who apparently did forget about Borth was Richard Beeching. Tom and I visit the unmanned station on the Cambrian line to find that the next train is for New Street, Birmingham. My granny is pleased when I tell her.
Borth itself seems canalised into strips in line with the coast. Strips to the left: seaside-Edwardian houses, narrow front gardens, pavement, parked cars, road, pavement, street lights, verge, paving, slope of the flood defence; then a wide strip that begins at my feet – the path on top of the flood wall – and disappears at a point over there at the base of the headland. Strips to the right: one wide – the beach – and one narrow, almost edged out of frame – the sea. The bench (where your clothes were stolen) is two pebble-dashed lamas looking away from the sea, linked by six stocky lengths of timber, four for sitting and two for leaning back on and inclining towards the sky.
Four estuaries lie between Borth and Criccieth. The first is the River Dovey’s, on which a ferry service once operated. A guidebook from the 1930s informed visitors that ‘a loud halloo will bring the boatman’, and indeed ‘Borth’ is Welsh for ‘(place of the) ferry’, as in ‘port’. Borth may still be ‘place of the train’ but the ferry is long gone, so Tom and I go inland to Machynlleth. Doing so edges us, unexpectedly (and absurdly), into our home ‘county’ of Powys, Wales’s eighty-mile-high amorphous blob of a local authority area. From Machynlleth we go directly back to the coast on the A493, which then goes round the estuary of the Dysynni, before following a picturesque, single-track section of the Cambrian line.
Strangers are more likely to chat to a cyclist. I think this is because a bike makes you safe – with a bike you’re harmless. An example today. We stop for a rest at a lay-by and walk down some steps to a little beach. Leaving Tom by the sea, I walk back up the steps towards our bikes. Halfway up I meet a couple of men on their way down to fish. The first man – quite fat and wearing a Network Rail polo shirt – starts chatting to me about the weather or something like that. And then before I know it he’s telling me that ‘Richard the Lionheart should have finished the job when he was over there killing the fucking Muslims.’ His friend, who I assume has heard the routine once or twice before, doesn’t hang about; and nor does mine when he reaches us on the steps and catches the gist of what is being said. The only other thing I remember my interlocutor saying is that in the 1970s he worked in Hackney for London Transport.
The third estuary can be crossed on the magnificent Barmouth Railway Bridge. Tom and I agree that ‘Barmouth’ sounds like a town in Yorkshire famous for its oatcakes. It is in fact an English corruption of ‘Abermowth’, ‘mouth of the River Mawddach’. We stop briefly at Harlech Castle, which was one of several fortifications built for Edward I to secure his conquest of North Wales.
There’s a road bridge over the fourth and final estuary, to Porthmadog, but when we get to the turning there’s a sign saying that it’s closed. To save us a seven-mile diversion, I convince Tom we should go and have a look – and when we get there the workmen kindly let us across.
The last stretch of the ride is wet and it’s a relief to reach our neat B&B. Criccieth is, apparently, an attractive seaside town, but we can neither confirm nor deny this on account of the view-cloaking weather.
We have supper in a pub and, for the first time since leaving Brecon, I hear Welsh being spoken.
It’s only twenty odd miles to the hostel near Snowdon, so we set off west to extend the ride via the Llŷn Peninsula. In heavy rain we get as far as the coastal village of Porthdinllaen. We stop at the Tŷ Coch Inn, which is only accessible on a path through a golf course (or by boat, I suppose). On its website, the Tŷ Coch calls itself ‘arguably the best pub in Wales’; and the enormous ploughmen’s lunches we enjoy – soft, warm bread and an obscene amount of delicious cheese – argue the point with force.
The last part of the ride is on a magnificent road that runs along the bottom of a steep valley. The landscape reminds me of the Lake District, grander and more sublime (in the Burkean sense) than much of Wales.
High up, the clouds are the colour of smoke from a bonfire of crackling evergreens. The road surface is consistent and unpot-holed, but made of spread crunchy peanut butter, so riding on it creates a rumbling slapping. We’re in the valley of a big half-pipe, mountains scooping off to either side, tumbled scree. Stopped on the left of the road, I am at the right angle of a stretched triangle, one line extending from me, the one on the right growing closer to it and meeting it at a bend in the road way ahead. Beyond that a mountain beneath the bonfire-smoke clouds.
There is a downside to being further north and next to a lake: as we lock our bikes behind the Snowdon Ranger hostel, next to a wringing-wet wall, we’re blitzed by midges.
Rhyd-Ddu, Caernarfonshire to Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire
The first half of the day is grim. Having avoided the A470 on day one, today we spend all morning on it in torrential rain.
The sky is road evaporated. A tree keeps its centre of gravity low and its surface thorny – protection from whatever might come up behind it. The lines and catseyes dividing the lanes mean this is no jolly bummel-ride. We’re not quite part of the modern world, but we’re moving through it. It rushes past us at intervals, always heading towards where the lane lines merge. Is perspective a Renaissance technique imposed on reality, or was it an aspect of reality waiting to be discovered? Against the grainy sky the telegraph poles have no connection.
After lunch in Dolgellau and a little more A-road, we get on to National Cycle Route 8. It takes us through the western moob of mighty Powys – Montgomeryshire – past the Clywedog Reservoir and all the way to Llanidloes.
Much of the last day of our ride is through the Cambrian Mountains, southern Britain’s largest wilderness; an area covering over ten per cent of Wales but with just a few hundred inhabitants.
The highlight for us is National Cycle Route 818, a seven-mile routelet between Llangurig and Cwmystwyth. About halfway along – at a ford over a tributary of the River Ystwyth – the road turns into a track, with just a tarmac strip running up the middle. Perhaps it was once a drove road, though if cattle have ever been driven along it, a Google Street View car has not.
One of the hills nearly gets the better of me. But this desertedness is the kind of thing we cyclists go out for. I loom over my front wheel, which has grown in thickness. My crawling pace means I must avoid any debris on the tarmac strip. Stationary between each downward push, I lack even the momentum to go over a small stone.
My drivetrain makes a high-pressured ticking, which I can feel in my feet as well as hear. But we’re at that stage in the ride when I believe that not one of the old, fallible parts of my bike will in fact fail. It’s not blind faith, it’s induction – they haven’t failed yet.
I look up at intervals, seeing our surroundings as a series of snapshots – a drover’s road through a technical wilderness. Human eyes can see just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, and right now I can see only the grey-green sliver of the sliver. But with the never-still, vibrating variation of light, I shouldn’t say ‘only’.
At the top of the climb the clouds let through a patch of friendly sun, which throws the shadow of some clumpy grass over the left-hand gully, and lightens the strip of tarmac, our thin connection to all the other roads we will ride over the next five years.
Fingers adjust from pulling the dropped handlebars upwards, against the thrusting foot, to squeezing down on the brakes to pinch the suddenly runaway wheels.
From Cwmystwyth we follow the B-road east to the Elan Valley, which was damned and flooded at the end of the nineteenth century to create four reservoirs. The aqueduct goes the same way as the Cambrian line, to Birmingham. The church, chapel, mill, farms, cottages, and fields were submerged, and the Welsh-speaking community dispersed. At the bottom of Garreg-Ddu, the last reservoir we pass before the visitors’ centre, lies Cwm Elan House. This mansion once belonged to cousins of P. B. Shelley, and, holidaying there in the spring of 1812, he wrote ‘The Retrospect’, which has been called his first poem of real imaginative complexity. As in Wordsworth’s more famous ‘Tintern Abbey’ – about fifty miles and fifteen years distant – the poet contrasts how a place seems in the present to how it seemed in the past. Shelley’s memory of the Elan Valley is of ‘coldest solitude’, but that has been converted to ‘peaceful love’ by the companionship of his wife, Harriet. He reflects on how difficult it is to pay enough attention to the present to notice it properly; to hold and analyse experience before it passes;
To trace Duration’s lone career,
To check the chariot of the year
Whose burning wheels forever sweep
The boundaries of oblivion’s deep—
To snatch from Time the monster’s jaw
The children which she just had borne,
And ere entombed within her maw
To drag them to the light of morn
And mark each feature with an eye
Of cold and fearless scrutiny[.]
Even if we cannot control what happens to us, we can affect the quality of our memories by choosing in what form to place experience in the kiln. Shelley is advocating true, high-resolution memories, even if painful, over the shapeless creations of avoidance.
Our final encounter with the A470 is, oddly, a pleasant one. A new section between Newbridge-on-Wye and Builth Wells was opened in 2011, and the abandoned stretch is now set aside for cyclists and walkers.
From Builth we are on the familiar Brecon road over the Epynt, a mountain and upland area owned by the Ministry of Defence and home to a sixteen-thousand-hectare firing range: ‘unexploded shells provide a lethal deterrent to anyone who might wish to enjoy Epynt’s delectable uplands’ (The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales).
We manage to avoid the shells.
Up on the Epynt, the sun comes out; and, just before we reach Tom’s house, his mum goes past in the car and toots the horn – an impromptu heroes’ welcome.
So why do I look grumpy in the photo that was taken of us when we got back to Brecon, standing in front of a wall next to the house Tom grew up in? He’s making an effort to smile, raising a glass of champagne. Our bikes are behind us, leaning on the wall, symmetrical, facing each other. Tom’s panniers from Amazon, not waterproof. Mine from my dad’s friend, also not. Why did I take that heavy D-lock all around Wales? We were a pair of profligates, ciphers of time and effort, not fully conscious of what was passing through us as we moved our pedals around and around.
2. Between
I love a public road: few sights there are
That please me more; such object hath had power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood, when its disappearing line,
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,
Was like a guide into eternity,
At least to things unknown and without bound.
This is Wordsworth’s description of all my favourite of the photos I’ve taken on bike rides with Tom. Ekphrasis is the Greek term: ‘a literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described’ (OED). This passage describes a class of experience rather than an example. The important part is the depth of field into which the line disappears afar off. The visible road ahead is known: you can see where you’re going. Its disappearing represents things unknown, which could be anything, including the best that things could be.
The year after Wales we cycled between John o’Groats and Land’s End. I had a new bike and, attached to it, a pair of panniers to make any cyclist feel invincible – black, waterproof, and German.
Saturday, 16 August 2014
‘That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?’
