Gentleman Cyclist

Posted on 13 August 2010

We had an early start with wet tents and didn’t hang around. We passed through Tregaron and anyone who knows anything about Tregaron knows that there’s quite a bit of climbing to be done, whichever way you leave. We took the B4342, heading west, but there was precious little in the way of anything except remote sheep farms along that road. Several times I had to get off and push and after a while Charlotte suggested tea. She got her stove out and was Mother. We had some fig rolls as well.

We cracked on and it wasn’t all that long before we reached the A487 again and we kept up a remarkable speed for such heavily laden cyclists. We happened upon a “greasy spoon” style café and went in for a lunch of the “all day breakfast” variety and Charlotte managed to check her emails. It turned out that there was a quite significant one which required her early return to London, which was a great disappointment to me. I felt that, although we had been through some lovely countryside, the Pembrokeshire coast was going to be the icing on the cake. We headed off to the campsite at Mwnt which, although it is in Cardiganshire, I regard as being the most northerly of the lovely beaches for which the Pembroke coast is renowned.

We pitched our tents in the lee of a hedge and I went for a stroll along the footpath towards the sea. It was very spectacular but there was nowhere safe for a swim.

We decided that if the weather was pleasant, the following morning we would have a look at Mwnt beach proper, about a mile north of the camp site, right by the conical hill in the above photo.

I woke quite early and lay in my tent for a while. There was a tapping noise and my initial reaction was to wonder what Charlotte was up to in her tent. However, as my mind became more focussed I realised that the sound was coming from higher up.

I unzipped my inner tent and then the door zip in the fly sheet. I watched the oak trees near our tents and then ascertained the source of the sound: it was a greater spotted woodpecker, behaving like a tree creeper. It was patrolling the tree’s boughs looking for insects, tapping every so often to remove a flake of bark so that it could reach the creature underneath. It occurred to me that it was the first time in my life that I had seen a greater spotted woodpecker before it had seen me. They are quite easily alarmed and are most frequently seen at the top of tall trees emitting their alarm call.

During our packing up process I caught Charlotte out.

I remarked on how skilled she was with her she-wee. However, she was merely emptying her water carrier.

We made for Aberystwyth along the A487, which was fast, fairly busy and not pleasant. There was rain in the air and we had no great desire to rush on into bad weather, so we took a look around the town and then locked our bicycles by the Constitution Hill funicular railway and took it to the top of the hill where we visited the Camera Obscura and the café. Charlotte took advantage of a power point and charged her various devices.

We left Aberystwyth on the old railway path, which takes you out of the town to the south without the hindrance of traffic but we stayed on it perhaps a bit too long and Charlotte, who is more accustomed to bashing out the miles, was unhappy with the surface, even though the trip along the Ystwyth was very pretty.

It was unclear where we would camp tonight: I had a plan that perhaps some wild camping up by the Teifi Pools might be in order, but the weather was closing in and somehow being in the clouds some 1500′ above sea level whilst trying to cook our dinner didn’t have a great deal of romantic appeal about it. We headed for Bont (the local name for Pontrhydfendigaid), found a pub and had a confabulation.

We asked the landlord of the Black Lion about camp sites. There were two marked on the map, but one had become a designated site for static caravans and the other had closed down. He said we could camp in the pub garden. Not only that, he would look after our luggage if we wanted a pre-dinner unladen trip up to the Teifi pools. All this seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, so we locked our panniers away in an outer bar and off we set.

It was lovely being able to cycle unladen again and it did help a great deal, but we still seemed to take an age to ride from Bont to the pools. It’s probably not a lot more than 5 miles, but involves almost 1000′ of climbing so it took us at least an hour and when we got there our decision not to camp there seemed vindicated. It was very overcast, quite breezy and we didn’t see anywhere that was flat enough for us to pitch a couple of tents.

It took us hardly any time to get back to the pub – certainly not more than 20 minutes – and we pitched the tents in the garden and then settled down to a nice pub meal in the warm. We both ate well and I went, feeling completely knackered, to pay the bill. I was charged £50 which seemed a bit steep but I didn’t really question it until Charlotte pointed out that it was probably about £20 overpriced. When I challenged the landlord he said, feebly, that the breakdown was in the bin. I told him that I knew exactly what we’d had to which his retort was “You’re not accusing me of swindling you, are you?” I interpreted this as saying that I could challenge him if I liked but we might be turfed out of the garden at about 10.30 at night with nowhere to find a bed. He offered me coffees and large quantities of Penderyn whisky in lieu. It was not a position I enjoyed being in, so I accepted this offer but, given the quantity of whisky he allegedly gave us and my lack of hangover the following day, I’m pretty sure it was the homeopathic variety.

We packed away wet tents quite early the following morning.

I awoke at 6.30 and trespassed on the camp site’s land in order to use their facilities. For breakfast I had more porridge and a honey sandwich.

Once we’d packed up the tents we made for Barmouth and its famous old bridge of the Mawddach estuary. Although the sun was shining, the weather was not especially warm for August. This didn’t matter to Charlotte, who was showing a fair bit of leg and arm. 

We timed our arrival at the north end of the bridge perfectly, as a steam train was approaching. 

This ancient bridge is of a wooden construction and trains are limited to 10mph when they are crossing. I had been here before once or twice, but Charlotte’s acquaintance with it is due to her having ridden the arduous Bryan Chapman audax, a 600 kilometer ride from Chepstow to the Menai Bridge and back, which uses the bridge.

After Tywyn we took the Happy Valley road to Cwrt and on to Machynlleth. It was almost traffic free and very picturesque. 

We had a bit of climbing to do and earned this lovely view of the bridge near Dovey Junction station. We had lunch in Machynlleth and visited the Co-op for supplies and it was there that I spied the evocative T-shirt bearing the slogan “Save a mouse – eat a pussy”. After that we bimbled gently towards the village of Furnace, so called because there’s an ancient blast furnace there.

There was also a camp site and we decided it was for us. It was run by an elderly couple, was well tended, the loos and shower were clean and it cost only £4 per night. After I cooked my meal I was washing up under the hot tap and I’m afraid I earned our landlady’s displeasure: washing up was to be done outside under the cold tap. She looked very hurt and I felt extremely guilty.

Posted on 9 August 2010

Unusually, I was ready a good hour before I needed to leave the house, was in plenty of time for the train, I arrived at Euston only about half-an-hour after getting out at Lpoo St, Charlotte arrived quite soon after I did, and we had time for a cup of coffee whilst the public address system repeatedly issued a high-decibel announcement asking for Mr. Sands to do something-or-other before getting onto a horribly crowded train. We put the bikes where they belonged and then found some people sitting in our reserved seats and then read Charlotte’s kindling source (a copy of the Grauniad that she’d bought) in which I completed the sudoku, but the quick crossword was just too ambiguous. We ate the butties we had brought with us and not long after arrived in Chester where we had to change trains and where enormous crowds seemed to want to get onto our train. We engaged with a staff member who kindly informed us that, depending on which class of locomotive we were to be provided with, as cyclists we would naturally be expected to be left behind if the train were too crowded.

As it happened, it was a 4-coach 158 and the staff members on the train were very helpful in clearing people and luggage out of the cycle spaces. We then nattered with two old ladies form Wrexham. At Rhyl, two other cyclists joined the train, one of whom was a real tourist, as he had a Dawes Galaxy and was wearing a Clarion CC cap.

We alighted at Bangor, loaded our luggage onto the bikes and set off towards the Menai Bridge where Charlotte persuaded a passer-by to photograph us. We had just negotiated a quiet side road past Treborth Hall and near some botanical gardens and just as we were emerging onto the main road I heard a squeal and turned to see Charlotte lying in the road, still partially attached to her bike. The poor gal had had a “clipless moment” and, worse still, had a deep gash at the back of her left calf.

As luck would have it, the lady form the B & B across the road was well versed in first aid. She patched Charlotte up, stored our bikes in her garage and gave us a lift to the hospital just up the hill where Charlotte was tended by a doctor with a trolley full of sharp needly things. Eventually Charlotte emerged with five stitches covered by a piece of heavy-duty clingfilm glued firmly in place. We got a taxi back to the Treborth estate because we had seen that there was a camp site there. Charlotte chooses very well-appointed places in which to have her mishaps.

The camp site was fairly rudimentary: the loos almost worked but the cisterns filled extremely slowly. There was hardly any hot water in the taps but we were encamped by a small area of woodland and, after a sullen start because the wood was wet, I managed to prepare a very nice meal of basmati rice with fried salmon (I had cycled the mile or so to Waitrose, on Anglesey, to buy these). We slept pretty well.

I awoke around 6, lit the bush buddy and prepared porridge followed by sausage for breakfast.

The camp site cost us £5, which wasn’t too bad and we packed up and made for Llanberis, which was where we intended to camp but for Charlotte’s mishap. Thankfully she could still cycle without problem, but it seemed that her swimming would be sadly curtailed. The weather was fairly sunny, but none too warm. We stopped at Craig-y-Llyn, my sister’s former abode, for a photograph.

In Llanberis we stopped at a camping shop and I bought a small fold-up padded mat.

It was a fairly long grind up Llanberis in which Charlotte, naturally, left me well behind, but I made it to the top without dismounting. We stopped at the café for lunch – I had chilli with rice and we both had cake. The descent to Beddgelert was lovely – I topped 36mph. I could have gone faster, but with full camping gear one wonders what the bike might do. We rode through to Penrhyndeudraeth and on to Harlech for some supplies.

When we arrived at the campsite at Dyffryn Ardudwy the campsite owners wanted £17 per pitch – the same for a cycle tourist as they would charge for a Range Rover with caravan and awning. We weren’t going to support this disgraceful profiteering so we wild-camped on a flat area of grass between the camp site fence and the dunes. It was a beautiful evening, sunny and with a breeze. I found plenty of fuel for the Bush Buddy by the simple means of picking dead twigs out of the stunted trees which provided cover for our tents.