Molehills And Peacocks

...You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.

There is the language for instance,

The soft consonants

Strange to the ear.

There are cries in the dark at night

As owls answer the moon,

And thick ambush of shadows,

Hushed at the fields' corners.

There is no present in Wales,

And no future;

There is only the past,

Brittle with relics,

Wind-bitten towers and castles

With sham ghosts;

Mouldering quarries and mines...

From Welsh Landscape by R. S. Thomas.

I've been camping on my own in Wales for just over a week.

I wanted a break from the flat, ploughed fields of the grey-skied English Midlands, and its congested roads, shopping plazas, retail parks, industrial estates. I needed to de-stress and chill out. I craved a simple life for a while, far away from computers and hypermarkets and the niggling, ever-present problems of work and society and family life. I had an overwhelming urge to take myself off to some wild countryside and blend into nature. An ancient landscape called me, a landscape of many different margins: sea and shore, mudflat and sand dune, river and estuary, cliff and heath, rock and heather, valley and hill, sheep pasture and moorland. This was the landscape of West Wales - its coastline, and its mountains rearing up just inland from the coastal rim. From the cliff path high above Llanbedrog on the Lleyn Peninsula I was soon to see these splendid mountains in a line before me, stretching in shapely profile from Snowdon and Moel Hebog in the north, through Cnicht, the Moelwyns and the Rhinogs, to the great bulk of Cadair Idris in the south.

But that comes later. First I had to drive there. On the morning of Friday 11 April I set off with maps and rucksack, warm walking clothes and camping gear. I stopped off near Llangollen for an hour and explored the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct which carries the Llangollen Canal over the River Dee and was built by Thomas Telford (see photos). The view westwards from the aqueduct was very fine.

It was late afternoon when I pitched my tent on the no-frills campsite at Dinas Farm which is situated in the stunningly beautiful valley of Cwm Bychan east of Llanbedr. A red kite soared above me. A buzzard perched watchfully in a tree. The campsite was green grass dotted with the little black mounds of molehills. Every now and again a herd of strikingly marked feral goats (black head, white body, long brown tapering horns) would stealthily appear to crop the grass. Then they would vanish just as suddenly. I pitched in the lee of an old stone wall and some windswept birch trees. There were no other campers. Apart from the bellowing of distant cattle the only sounds were some unearthly wailing cries I couldn't quite place. It was like a band of souls being tortured in hell. Einir, the campsite owner, enlightened me. " They're peacocks," she explained, rather disdainfully. "But they're not natural. Like buzzards and kites are natural." Whereupon she zoomed off on her quad bike to flatten the molehills.

It rained all night. An owl hooted, competing unsuccessfully with the peacocks. I listened to the rain pattering down on my tent and lulling me to sleep. I love sleeping outdoors and hearing all the different sounds, registering all the changing moods of the weather. I was very happy.

Grand Union

I've always enjoyed walking along canal towpaths. Let's face it, you've got to living in the Midlands. Big hills are far away, and you may only have half a day free... I've done the under-walked, pleasantly rural Grantham Canal (which winds from Nottingham 33 miles across the Vale of Belvoir in Leicestershire to Grantham in Lincs) and the only truly bad bit was at the Grantham end where hypodermic needles littered the path. I've also walked half the Chesterfield Canal (mmm... must do the Retford - Worksop section one day soon) and bits of the Trent & Mersey and the Llangollen (including the magnificent Pontcysyllte aqueduct over the river Dee). Not to mention the waterways of Venice and Amsterdam. But my big project is The Grand Union. It runs for nearly 150 miles from London to Birmingham and was engineered by William Jessop (1745-1814). You may not have heard of him as he was considerably more retiring than his self-publicizing contemporary Thomas Telford. It's one of those routes I've been walking haphazardly on-and-off for years. I've completed about one third of it (Birmingham's Gas Street Basin to Weedon in Northamptonshire) - sometimes doing "there-and-backs" (I don't mind at all retracing the same route) and sometimes using the train to return to the starting point. It was fun working out the logistics. Occasionally I even took a few hours off work in the afternoon - I used to be a 40,000 mile a year rep - to polish off another short stage in suit and posh shoes and with umbrella!!! Obsessed? Who, me? Anyhow, the guides to get are The Grand Union Canal Walk by Anthony Burton and Neil Curtis published by Aurum Press, or the one with the same title by C. Holmes published by Cicerone.