I woke to the sound of wind-buffeted rain hitting the campervan.  I put off starting as long as possible, but eventually could think of no more excuses not to start.

It was wet, hard, driving rain that stung your face, but to be fair, this is the first really wet day since I started, and even today the rain cleared towards the afternoon, with the sun breaking some setting light below the clouds.

Because of the rain, few photographs, and only one, belated, audio blog, and in many ways an uneventful day, in fact possibly the most interesting part was the taxi drive to Church Bay.

As we drove along the taxi driver said he was hoping for fine weather the following weekend as he and some friends were planning a golfing trip to Bethesda, but he couldn’t play in the rain as he didn’t have waterproof golfing clothes.  He explained how difficult it was to get clothes, but in particular waterproof clothes, when you are a large size.  The major outdoors shops stock up to 2X, but not the 4X or 5X that the taxi driver needed.

During the walk I have complained, especially on audio blog, about parts that are wet, muddy or hard to navigate.  For the hardened hiker these are normal things to expect, but the aspiration of the Wales Coast Path is, I believe, wider, to get ordinary people walking.  Imagine you are not used to walking, and then, with your family, you decide to follow a part of the Coast Path, but then you get lost or sink to your knees in mud; you may never venture out again.

Equally, if you are overweight, then walking is an excellent way to burn off some pounds and make you generally more healthy. The taxi driver wanted to do precisely that, but could not get clothes in a suitable size, so, if the day looks wet, will not walk or play golf.

In many ways the Coast Path just south of Church Bay is similar to the path north, narrow cliff-edge pathways interspersed with green trodden routes over grassy clifftops.  However, the cliffs are lower, maybe 30 feet at most, and successively lower the further south you get. Also the luxuriant tumbling flowers are less evident, maybe because the brambles are covering the cliff edges.

I was glad I’d worn boots, but the puddles were more from the rainfall, the path itself did not seem intrinsically muddy, and the cliff-edge parts of the path are high-edged with bramble and gorse, so all in all it feels a good part for a family walk, although I’d keep a hand on small children anywhere on the Coast Path.

The map says there is a fort at the southern end of Porth Trefadog, but I didn’t notice that; however, at the north end of Porth Trefadog, up dry on the headland, is the hulk of an old wide-keeled timber ship.

A little further on, at Tywyn Hir, there is a massive caravan site.  Those near the sea have timber decking, with glass sheets on the seaward side, so that they can sit and watch the sea, but protected from the worst of the elements.  I spot a chiminea on one of these timber patios.  As I walk by one caravan, a woman comes out with the most wonderful cascade of dark glistening dreadlocks, starting at a sort of top-knot and then falling down her whole back.  She goes round to the side of the caravan, opens a small timber garden store and inside, instead of a lawnmower or garden chairs, are a washing machine and tumble drier. "We call it home from home", she says.  I wonder again about these caravan communities, and recall a friend at junior school who always went on about ‘Swanage‘ where his family had a caravan. Roads were slower then, and Swanage a long way from Cardiff, so I guess they spent less time there than the modern caravan dweller, but I guess not so different 40 years on¹.

South of the caravan site, the path runs for a while on roads and lanes, with occasional stretches on the beach, albeit, with wind driven waves, at times perilously close to getting my feet wet.  At one point there is a small bouquet on the road side. There is no message, but I assume someone drowned here once and is still remembered.

In one stretch along the top of the beach at Traeth y Gribin, I walked on the sand and must have missed a crucial sign.  The path cuts round a point to follow the edge of the estuary of the Afon Alaw.  I thought the going was maybe a little tough over shingle and river mud, but it was when I realised I was, first, the wrong side of a salt marsh with muddy rivulets running through it, and then the river side of a barbed wire fence, that I became certain I should be on the landward side.

Happily I was able to get onto the path proper not too far upstream and without any serious foot wetting.  This was close to the point where the river is still tidal, but clearly more fresh than salt water as the tideline was thick with decaying grass, with very little seaweed. However, I then noticed that what I had taken for foam, or small stones amongst the sandy damp grass, was in fact thousands of small dead crabs, most barely an inch across, like pirate doubloons cast along the shore.

On the map it marks two possible routes, one crossing the Afon Alaw, and the other going inland to Llanfachraeth as, at the time the map was made, the intended river bridge had not yet been constructed.  As I came along the river, the new bridge was there, a green arc across the waters, a flock of swans having a tête-à-tecirc;te at the far side.  However, the bridge was also full of bright orange building barriers, and evidently still under construction.

Happily, as I came to it, I found the bridge was indeed open, albeit with barriers covering parts of the bridge where the safety railings had not yet been installed.  One had been blown adrift but I was able to do my Bob-the-Builder good deed of the day and put it back in position.

I was glad of the extra mile or two that the bridge saved, but a little disappointed that I didn’t get to Llanfachraeth and a short rest, food and a pint!

On the south side of the river there is no danger of getting the wrong path as it is mostly fenced on both sides, with timber staging over the (most) muddy parts. This, like the bridge, is all new and still under construction. While I complain sometimes at Anglesey‘s path signage, it is clear they are investing in the path. At one point I see a sign, ‘use it or lose it’, warning of the council’s intention to close a footpath. It may be that the path being closed is because the coastal path is creating an alternative access, or maybe a deal with the landowner, "you let us have the coastal path, and we’ll get rid of this awkward path".  The tenor of the community notice suggests the latter. Certainly the council’s own notice advertising the closure is well off the line of the path and can only be approached by clambering over old wire netting … open government?

After clearing the river estuary there is a short stretch on the beach, at the end of which a Coast Path sign points you up some steps and onto the road. If the tide is low ignore it.  Having missed the signposting before, I followed the signs, but these take you on the alternative, high-tide route along roads on the south east of the Newlands Park estate, rather than along the water’s edge.  However, both take you to the causeway linking Holy Island to the mainland of Anglesey. The causeway, like the Menai suspension bridge, is another of Telford‘s engineering achievements.

At the beginning of the causeway a sign points you to the left, across the railway and under the second (later) causeway, but this is an alternative coast route that bypasses Holyhead and Holy Island.  So if you want to ‘do’ Holy Island, ignore this and head over towards the chimney of the aluminium works.

Part way across the causeway a sluice gate allows the tidal water to flood through, and I wonder at the sheer power of tides and imagine a turbine spinning in the rushing waters.

From the causeway and further along towards Holyhead, I occasionally spot what I take to be cockle pickers, out with bucket, fork and hook, turning over seaweed, digging into the soft mud.

Beyond the causeway, the path takes you through the coastal park, set up on the unused land owned by the aluminium works.  I see notices describing a new leisure village to be constructed between the coastal path and the works.  The latter is now closed, its chimney stack no longer spewing white smoke, and a sorely missed employer in the area.  You follow along the water edge, past a memorial to a soldier, who used to be a volunteer warden, lost in the Falklands, through flower-filled woods and a tranquil pet cemetery, then across grassy fields until Holyhead port draws close.

The last landmark before getting into the port and railway station is the Skinner monument.  Climbing up some steps and a small slope gives you a panoramic view over Holyhead.  Then back at the bottom you can read about the story of John MacGregor Skinner, Captain of the Holyhead Mail packet and benefactor of the town.  He was born in New Jersey, where his father organised the Royalist militia when the American War of ‘Independence’ broke out in 1776.  His family, being on the losing side, scattered, some to Canada, and some to Britain.

It is a reminder that the American wars are somewhat misnamed.  The first war was as much a civil war between different factions within the (now) US as a war of secession from Britain.  The ‘Casus Belli‘ was partly tax avoidance, but also about preserving slavery, which Britain was moving against, and the British government‘s annoying habit of blocking the seizing of native American lands.  The second, misnamed ‘Civil War‘, was in fact the actual war of independence when the southern states attempted to leave the ostensible free federation of states and were crushed.

As I finally drew into Holyhead railway station, I was very glad of that bridge over the Afon Alaw as I arrived just half an hour before the last train back to Rhosneigr where I was camped.

1. Later in the walk I realised this must have been ‘Swanbridge‘ a camp site just a few miles west of Cardiff.[back]

The wedding reception had been held at Low Bradfield Village Hall, a few miles west of Sheffield.  Sheffield is an amazing town, the steep-sided valleys, which were once the powerhouse of countless mills that created the city, are inhospitable to housing, so, within a mile of the city centre you are in wooded nature conservation areas that extend out to the moors, and villages like Low Bradfield that feel as though you are deep in the heart of the country.  Nestled amongst hills, the only sound is the odd passing tractor, and the crack of leather on willow on the busy village cricket ground.

After the reception, we stayed at a small cottage, just behind the village store and post office, and yards from the village hall.

Village shops are often the heart of a community, and for those without cars, essential for day-to-day life, and yet over many years, they have been closing down.

One reason is that those with cars do most of their shopping in supermarkets, only using the shop for ’emergencies’.  So, while they would regard the shop as important, this is not reflected in the money spent there.  Of course the shop cannot compete in terms of price, but more importantly in the range of goods supplied.

This is precisely why, more than twenty years ago now, I began to articulate the notion of the electronic village shop, where a combination of regional picking lines and electronic stock control could enable just-in-time ordering, both of staples (just six tins of beans in the store rather than a box), but also of individual customer orders. I imagined a customer walking in in the morning, saying, "I’m cooking lasagne for dinner", and when they arrive back after work, there at the shop are all the ingredients ready for them. At the time, pre-web, pre-online ordering, this would have been complex, needing new logistics; now it would be straightforward.

Another threat has been the gradual demise of Post Office business.  The shop was often also a small post office, but the number of small post offices, both in the country and city, has declined as the overall Post Office business has shrunk.

Part of this has been the deregulation of posts, including the separation of post office counter business from Royal Mail, who deliver the mail, and also the opening up of the delivery business to other players.  This has meant that a large proportion of business posts, the posts that were easy and cheap to collect and deliver, are now sent by independent companies, whereas Royal Mail picks up the rump of individual letters from post boxes and small parcels, more complex and costly to collect and deliver.  Add to this the decline of letters with the rise of email and both Royal Mail and the Post Office are constantly under pressure.

Living on an island, the glory of the post office and Royal Mail are evident.

When we go off island we tell the post office, which is also the Royal Mail sorting office, or the postman notices, and instead of a pile of mail crammed untidily through the letter box on our return, we simply collect a neatly rubber-banded package as we come off the ferry.

When we order things through the internet, whenever possible we order from suppliers who deliver by Royal Mail.  This is because a First Class Royal Mail letter that is posted by 4pm pretty much anywhere in the UK will arrive on the noon plane on Tiree and be with us by early afternoon.  In contrast, DHL, or any of the other ‘express’ delivery methods, will end up waiting in a warehouse in Oban for days, and it may be up to a week or 10 days before we see an ‘overnight delivery’.

Furthermore, and given the extra costs and complexity from a business point of view, quite justifiably, many carriers charge extra for the privilege of delivering your week-late parcel.  The Royal Mail must lose money on every letter and parcel it delivers on Tiree, but it does so, because it is providing a universal service.

It is impossible to overstate the revolutionary importance of the Penny Post.  Before its introduction, when you sent a letter the cost was dependent on the route taken.  Each carrier along the way charged, which either had to be estimated and paid upfront, or paid by the recipient, before they knew the contents!  It was complex for the sender and receiver, but made perfect business sense, given the need for each carrier along the way to make a living.

The Penny Post did away with this, a letter cost the same no matter if it was going round the corner, to the other end of the country, the mountainous heart of mid-Wales, or even a tiny Scottish island.  But for users this meant you no longer had to worry about where your letter was going, you just posted it.  The Penny Post made communication effortless and with it simplified everyday life and, critically, commerce.

Think about the web, what it would be like if you had to separately work out the cost of each web site you visit depending on the route across national and international cables.  The Penny Post was an information revolution, which was copied across the world, but, in the UK, one we are in danger of losing.

As well as the (shrinking) postal business, one of the mainstays of small post offices was that they functioned as the ‘bank’ of the nation, where pensions and other benefits were paid.  Not only was the local post office paid for doing this service, but also it meant it brought people to the premises just when they had money, so would be likely to shop as well.

However, as a cost-saving measure, benefits and pensions have increasingly been paid directly to bank accounts. For the village shop, this is a loss of crucial business, and for the individual on a low income this means it is far harder to manage money, as it becomes ‘just numbers’, rather than physical notes in your purse.

Some years ago, on the morning radio, there were two successive government ministers talking, following two government department reports issued on the same day. One was talking about the Post Office and the ‘modernisation’ and ‘efficiency’ programme; the other about the problems of rural areas and in particular the loss of village shops.  Somehow the two never spoke to one another.

The Low Bradfield shop and post office is suffering all the problems of shrinking business, so has diversified.  As well as being a shop it is now a small café.  Along the way round Wales I have noticed a few village post offices with a table in a corner, but the Low Bradfield one has developed more into a fully fledged, but tiny, café, the ‘Postcard Café‘, and the day before, while waiting between stages of getting the hall ready for the reception, we had sat and had tea, coffee and buttered crumpet.  I recall on the far side of Lewis a community-run shop and post office that was also a café, and I think also even had petrol pumps.

The village shop and post office often acts as a social hub of rural life, and no less the corner shop in residential areas of cities. So the loss of the shop is not only a disaster for the pensioners or farm labourers who may not have their own transport, but also tends to contribute to a loss of community identity. The web of informal community connections, facilitated by the local shop, is not only important for the social life of the village, but also critical for many vulnerable people, making it possible to survive independently, instead of becoming an expensive drain on the state.

The dual function as small café is economically sensible as those who come in to buy a loaf of bread may stay for a coffee, or vice versa. However, it also strengthens the social role of the shop, not just chatting whilst collecting your pension, but staying on to continue to chat over a cup of tea.

I had not been intending to write for this day as I was off path, at the wedding of the daughter of Keith Albans, who had taken me to the MHA homes the previous Tuesday.

However, themes connected with the walk recurred during the day.

Fiona and I had stayed the night at the Strines Inn, a glorious place that has been trading since the days of the Turnpike Road across the moors, and still captures some of the spirit of the 17th century, with four-poster beds and carved wooden chests. At 8:30 there is a knock on the door and breakfast is served, with a table for two overlooking the reservoir below. The peacocks call (as they had, loudly, with the dawn chorus) and sunshine plays across gold-green grass and softly rippling water.

But the scene was not always this idyllic. On the wall of the bedroom is an original, hand-written copperplate poster, a poem remembering the great Sheffield flood of 1864, when one of the local dams burst, drowning over 200 people and leaving thousands homeless as a wall of water tore down the valley, destroying everything in its course.

I assume it is the folk memory of this incident that inspired DH Lawrence‘s ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy‘, where the gypsy gallops ahead of the rushing waters, on his full-membered stallion, and plucks the young woman, the first eponymous protagonist, into an upper storey where they ride out the waves.

Later as we stop at Malin Bridge to pick up another wedding guest from the tram I see a plaque on the wall of the Malin Bridge Inn:

The Malin Bridge Inn
was known as
The Cleakum Public House
at the time of
the Great Flood
on the night of
March 11th 1864
The Inn was occupied
by George Birby
along with his wife
&
five children
who all drowned

Thoughts of inundation have never been far from mind along the entire North Wales coast and also the first two days of the walk, whether the regular battering of high tides on struggling defences, or the tsunami in the 17th century that flowed up the Severn Estuary. Later in the day I talked to someone who had spent some years in Monmouthshire (in the days when it was ‘officially’ part of England), who told me that the devastation of the Somerset levels had been even worse than on the Welsh side, with floods extending 30 miles inland.

So much of our housing is built either on river flood plains, or on tidal flats. On the concrete promenades of North Wales, I often saw large metal doors, which could be shut to keep back exceptionally high tides, but I also heard that not infrequently this has failed over the years, with waters overtopping the sea defences and flooding homes. With climate change both raising sea levels and also making extreme weather more frequent, it is not clear how many of these defences can be maintained, or whether areas will be strategically abandoned, just as has happened with coastal erosion on the east coast of England.

Drowned valleys are also intimately part of the growth of the Welsh language movement and Welsh nationalism in the 1960s, when the drowning of a Welsh village beneath a reservoir, to serve Liverpool, created waves of protest. As a tiny child I recall the romance of hearing about the Free Wales Army on the radio, as they blew up water pipelines; but probably more significant, albeit less exciting to hear about as a six-year-old, were the peaceful protests of the nascent language movement that changed the landscape of Wales. When I had been little there were no dual-language signs, and minimal Welsh radio and television. Now, when you go through Wales, you are clearly in a nation with its own language, whether or not you speak it!

The politics of water are once again dominating many parts of the world, with both internal disputes, like those between states in Australia or the western US, and external, between countries in the former USSR, or Africa. In the Rivelin Valley running into Sheffield, the outlet of the mill race from one watermill would often flow directly into the mill pond of the next, leading to clashes if mills were redesigned, perhaps eating into the head of water of a neighbour.

My childhood images of the Free Wales Army were based purely on the romance of the name, but it was not until many years later that I fully understood some of the social and economic issues.

After my Dad died, Mum survived on a widow’s pension and half-board guests in the house: students, workmen, and theatre folk. She was marvellous at managing the small amounts of money that came in and the substantial costs of maintaining a crumbling Victorian house and a growing family. Once a year the rates bill came, what is now called ‘Council Tax‘. It was a big bill, but as we had a small income, we qualified for a large rebate, usually around 90% of the total bill, making it manageable.

However, there was an equally large bill that came once a year, the water rates, which covered provisions of water and disposal of sewerage. While this was equally large, there was no rebate and it all, in those days, had to be paid at once. As I said, my Mum was a wonderful financial planner, but no matter how well prepared, the water rates bill was always a massive impact, especially in the 1970s, a time of galloping inflation, where bills could easily rise 20–30% in a year.

Roll on the years and I am in a rented house in Bedfordshire and have to pay housing taxes myself for the first time. My water rates bill came and was about £60, but when I asked Mum I found that her water rates bill in Cardiff was £300, which doesn’t sound so much today, but, at the time, was equal to my whole take-home pay for a month.

The difference in cost is because each water authority in the UK is independent and the costs of piping water in Wales, with a dispersed population and mountains covering the heart of the country, are far higher than in flat central and southern England. However, unlike these relatively dry parts of England, water is one of Wales‘ natural resources. The valleys of Brecon and North Wales are full of reservoirs, waters flowing out to Birmingham and Liverpool, but of course not pound notes flowing in the opposite direction.

The issues in the Tryweryn valley, which incensed and inspired the Free Wales Army and Welsh Language Movement, were not just economic, but also the actual and symbolic loss of culture in the drowning of a Welsh village for English economic growth, and the fact that despite all but one Welsh MP voting against the reservoir, it was still passed at Westminster.

Moving on from the politics of water, the theme of the wedding service was very much about the married life as a journey. One of the hymns was Sydney Carter‘s ‘One more step along the world I go‘ and one of the readings from Dr Seuss, ‘Oh the places you’ll go‘. Of course the metaphor of life in general, or married life in particular, as a journey, is common, but instead of space it is the changing events of life that are passed through, emphasising that intimate connection between place and event, pathway and lifeline.

After a night in the MorphPOD I, surprisingly, wake with the alarm, not the dawn; the huge floor to ceiling window faces northward across the valley, so it only obliquely catches the morning light, but as I head across to wash, I see that the riding stables, another part of Brandy House Farm‘s activities, are already a hive of activity.

I have breakfast in the dining room, filled, like the kitchen, with interesting things: an old brass wood plane, something that I think is part of a fog horn, and a box labelled Antarctic Expedition 1904.

As I eat and he is about to leave, I meet Paddy Dixon, a photographer and outdoor writer based in Ulverston. He is doing just a short recce walk, at present, but is planning to walk the entire Wales Coast Path followed by Offa’s Dyke later in the year and write a guide book at the end. His publisher has been chiding him for not doing a Wales Coast Path guide yet, as he has previously done popular ones for other walks in the UK and elsewhere, including the South West Coast Path.

A little later two other guests arrive for breakfast before a day out riding. It was due to be windy and rainy, so they decide on a low-level route, but evidently the moors above the farm are open common grazing land, with no walls or gates, ideal for trekking and the odd gallop.

As I mention my last day’s walking and the impact of Wylfa, it transpires they both work in the nuclear industry as part of internal regulation, and gently, without being too direct, try to educate me on the safety of the industry.   Chernobyl of course was the Russians messing about, and at Three Mile Island containment was not breached … I seem to recall that the fact that the meltdown there did not break out of containment was more good luck than anything else, but maybe I misremember?

Actually I can imagine that the parts they work in are, barring major accidents or terrorist attack, relatively safe. However, the older plants due for decommissioning are in government hands and it is clear that they feel Sellafield‘s safety record is a thorn in the industry’s side. I can see how the construction and operation of a well-managed plant can be clean and safe (for the area around), but the spent fuel has to go somewhere, and eventually the plant needs to be dismantled and the thousands of tons of contaminated concrete and metal isolated for hundreds or thousands of years.

During dinner the previous night and in snippets over breakfast I learn a little more about the area. The closing of the local school has been a major blow and, as elsewhere, local shops, garages, pubs all have closed over the last 20–30 years.

The Felindre pub at the start of the track to Brandy House Farm, is The Wharf Inn. The stream here is not navigable, so I assume ‘wharf’ refers to a stop on a tramway, which, if I recall, were also called ‘wharfs’ borrowing the nautical term. The Wharf is under threat, as the current proprietor would like to do other things. However, there is a group hoping to launch it as a ‘community pub’. The logistics of this are quite complex, not so much the initial capital cost and first year or so of running, but the long-term management, when the excitement subsides and a long roll of volunteer bar staff has to be managed.

I recall in Switzerland hearing how it is not uncommon for isolated mountain communities to buy and manage local cafés that are due to close. Interestingly, recalling my MHA visit the previous Tuesday, in these Swiss villages it is the retired and semi-retired who are at the heart of these community enterprises, and I would expect the same in the UK. Maybe in coming years we will see community nightclubs run by octogenarians, I guess interspersing dance mix with swing and rock-and-roll.

Annie and Nick arrive, who are the designers of the MorphPOD. The MorphPOD is not just a camping hut, but is really designed to make the best use of a small footprint, using materials that are sympathetic to their environment as well as using local skills and materials. Nick explained how the use of local artisans is not only valuable from an environmental and cultural perspective, but also good business sense. When there is a problem, or some need for a redesign, or addition, instead of a lengthy series of email correspondence or phone calls where each side half-understands the other, he says, "I just cycle twenty minutes down the road and sort it out".

In addition, MorphPOD is part of a larger concept of an integrated booking and access system. The aim is to have a network of MorphPODs and similar huts, linked through a central booking system. As a walker, you could, before you go, or through your phone on the move, book ahead, and get an entry code. The digital door locks are a bespoke design as off-the-shelf code entry systems expect levels of electrical or network connectivity that are impractical given the locations of the pods, and anyway tend to be too fiddly for a walker with cold wet fingers (I write with feeling as, writing in retrospect, I can hear the wind and rain outside that I will soon have to go out into and start walking for the day).

I love the whole concept of the MorphPOD and its associated booking system. It is deliberately designed to be affordable, with basic, but dry facilities, which can be extended by additional services, such as linen, or food, if required, but with a low basic price. The method feels closer to the YHA than the eco-chic yurt or tepee holidays, which are often a hundred pounds per night.  The use of technology is also perfect, nothing unnecessary, just a small amount where it will make a big difference.

The MorphPOD construction also makes me think of the Noust boathouse on {Tiree}} being built by TOG Studio summer school.  They also try to use (relatively) locally sourced materials (no wood on Tiree, so ‘local’ here means west Scotland), and blend new technology and radical design with traditional forms. The boathouse roofs are inspired by the ribs of a boat, with curves like an old barn, but are constructed from laser-cut plywood with softwood infill.

Too soon I have to take my leave as I need to get up to Warrington to meet Fiona ready to go over to Sheffield for a wedding.  I drive back north, and stop very briefly in Llanymynech to get a photograph of the pub with the bar half in England and half in Wales that I’d not photographed when I was there on day 20.

No walking, just a day to catch up and seek out new experiences before setting off for a wedding in Sheffield. Starting in the Beach Hut Café at Llanfairfechan and ending up in the MorphPOD at Felindre, near Knighton … back into Offa’s Dyke territory

23rd May 2013

The only WiFi I found at Llanfairfechan is the Beach Hut, open 10am – 5pm every day except Monday … and it does a solid breakfast, and tasty lunch too 🙂

Unfortunately the hours do not fit too well with walking during the day, but when I asked in the local pub, which also does evening meals, "do you have WiFi", they said, without a hint of satire, "we’re not that modern". So, I mainly ate wonderful, spicy takeaway from the Cardamom, and had over a week with no real internet.

While I had expected connectivity to be an issue, I had not realised quite how bad it would be. Mostly I could get some email on my iPhone (O2), but virtually never any Vodafone signal for my Android phone. With a few bars of GSM on the iPhone it was possible to access some internet sites, by clicking, then going off to do something else, and, with luck, the page might have loaded 10 minutes later. I have been shocked at just how bad many specific ‘mobile’ web sites are, fitting to a small screen, but useless at low bandwidth. This included Twitter mobile – come on, how much bandwidth do you need for 140 characters?

Even on WiFi served by BT broadband, it was taking Flickr an hour to upload each day’s photos (already reduced to web resolution), and in my stress at trying to make the most of the short internet time I had, I managed to break my blog 🙁 happily, my wonderful sysadmin, who also happens to be my wife, stepped in and sorted out the mess I’d made.

So, having uploaded some of my photos, I packed up the van and left Platts Farm campsite where I’d been staying since starting the North Wales coast path 11 days before. Platts Farm is right in the middle of the village, just 10 minutes’ walk down the road to the station and the sea. Sam and Alan bought the place three years ago, I think from the NHS hospital next door, as the overgrown walled garden at the bottom end of the site still belongs to the NHS.

The farm complex is in solid grey stone and Sam and Alan are gradually working on it, turning one outbuilding into a bunkhouse, and the yard is the campsite. The campsite part is fully walled, so has some shelter and has a small number of grassed pitches over two areas, one, Afon, close to the stream that runs through the village and the other, Coed, just above the walled garden. The facilities are still basic, but clean, although, sadly, no laundry. Several old open-sided barns have picnic tables underneath, so you can sit outside even if it is raining, and the washing-up area is in another large open-sided lean-to, so it feels like the open air, but is dry.

I had been on my own there most of the weekdays, except for another Alan who was testing out a new tent for a few days before camping in it with his wife on the Isle of Man in June. However, at the weekend there were a couple of large groups, and the layout of the site makes it ideal for extended families or groups of friends.

The evening brought another kind of camping. I drove back down into Offa’s Dyke territory, to Brandy House Farm in Felindre, a few miles west of Knighton, where I would stay in a MorphPOD. The MorphPOD is a small camping pod, part of the move towards ‘glamping’, camping without fully roughing it.

The MorphPOD has an elegant design, with curved sweeping roof, and flexible internal space including beds that fold up into the sloping roof. The MorphPOD designers suggested I stay in one, and I will be seeing them the following morning to find out more of their vision.

So on to a lovely dinner cooked by Richard, in his wonderful kitchen. It is like something from a novel. There is all the miscellaneous clutter of a classic farmhouse kitchen, leather satchel on a nail, an old rusty wide-gauge model railway set in a box by the window, gaffer tape and a glorious framed rainbow, painted by one of the children when they were little. Yet within this, everything to do with cooking is very orderly, from stainless steel pans hung from black iron hooks, to a line of size graded brown teapots on a high shelf, and the biggest electric kettle I have ever seen!

Then bed in the MorphPOD, as I type now, its little LED battery light hanging from the rails that would also support the hung-back beds.

The first few hours of this day, like the end of the last day’s walking, were dominated by Wylfa. I was dropped by Cemaes harbour to continue where I’d stopped, so took a few photos of the harbour and cottages around it.

Cemaes is a lovely seaside village, with small boats in the harbour and a small sandy beach. However, just a few steps after leaving it behind Wylfa rises, the vast concrete rectangle of its containment building surrounding by smaller red-brown rectangles, I’d guess full of pipework. There is a second huge, grey rectangle, which at first I took for a second reactor and then realised is the turbine hall.

The main reactor has a wide cleared area between security fences, just like the no-go areas in prisoner-of-war films. I recall years ago a school visit to a nuclear plant on the Severn. It was also a Magnox reactor, which is an intrinsically safe design (from a blowing its top point of view), as the operators have to constantly work to stop it from shutting down … unlike a PWR reactor where the operators’ job is to stop it blowing up! The person showing us round said that his only fear for the integrity of the plant was that it sat below one of the main North Atlantic flight paths, and that a plane crash on the plant could break the containment and create what we would now think of as a Chernobyl or Fukushima disaster. "However," he said, "the chances of it landing just here are tiny." This was of course, many years before 9/11. At that point I guess the main terrorist threat would have been the IRA, but now the security is even tighter.

The reactor complex extends all the way to the sea, so the coastal path needs to skirt it landward. However, it tries to keep close to the coast for as long as possible, leading to a lollipop-shaped loop around the last headland before coming back through the same gate. At the far tip of the lollipop, as it rounds the small headland, I see, by a small shack-like building, a person standing, swathed in billowing waterproofs, head buried in a thick trapper-hat, scanning the sea with binoculars. Behind a young woman squats in the lee of the shack, a clipboard with weather-proof cover on her knees. They are employed by a company, Jacobs, to count birds; the young woman is training, but later in the summer she will be standing there, binoculars in hand.

At first I assumed that this was an environmental impact assessment for some new shore-works for the power station, but now I wonder whether it may be for a wind farm¹.

As I head back from the loop, I meet two women dressed in black waterproofs and overtrousers, who I later learn are Kim and Donna, sisters from British Columbia, walking round some of the Anglesey coastal path while their husbands visit antique shops and pubs. I will call them the ‘ladies in black’.

I follow the path inland, which crosses fields, and through open scrubland, before heading onto a thick pine wood. I keep seeing structures, like two Himalayan prayer flags on T-shaped arms, which I guess are collecting windblown dust for radiation analysis. Later I see a more complex device, like a tiny electricity substation, which says explicitly it is for Gamma Ray monitoring in case of emergency.

The path wends its way through the pine wood, before taking you up a set of slate steps, edged in non-slip roofing felt. It is as if you are ascending an Aztec pyramid, and at the top, at the place of sacrifice to the sun god, is instead a viewing area, so that you can take in Wylfa in all its glory. It is a cul-de-sac and you have to then turn round and so I wonder if this was part of the deal, "sure you can put the Coast Path through our land, so long as it goes to our view point".

From the viewpoint I notice that the ladies in black have not come back through the lollipop neck, but instead are following a tarmac path at the perimeter of the fence. It looks a far more direct and seaward path than my own. So I descend the Aztec steps and continue out of the woods into a gorse scrub area under the massive high-voltage pylons, their crackling in the damp air harmonising with the deep hum of the turbines.

The way is not totally clear, as there are multiple ways, but I am sure I am right … until I meet the ladies in black coming towards me. They had been shooed off the perimeter path, and then came to a post with two arrows both pointing towards the path I was coming from. I turn round and we go back together for a while, but then re-check maps and decide that the way they were coming from and I’d been heading for must be right. I set off at my slightly faster pace, and promise to come back to tell them if there is a problem. When I get to the end I realise the problem: coming out from the path it is obvious that one of the arrows means to join a roadway; however, coming, as they had, from the forbidden path, the arrows looked as if they are pointing the same direction.

The road leads past the Visitor Centre. I am torn. Part of me wants to get away from the nuclear power station as fast as possible, and part of me, like taking the path between A55 and railway, thinks that going in is part of the experience. The latter wins and I branch out to the Centre, and even plan to have a cup of tea in their café, but then, "No dirty footwear", the sign declares, with an image of a walking boot; walkers definitely NOT welcome here.

So, if you ever think of walking 300 miles in order to learn about the benefits of clean, modern nuclear power for Wales, to be persuaded that the benefits outweigh the dangers, to be awed by the statistics of megawatts generated, houses lit, to be intrigued by the intricacies of control rods and fuel cells … don’t bother.

I had been trying all morning to take a photograph of Wylfa that makes it look in some way romantic or beautiful, deliberately to counter my own natural reactions. I try framing with gorse, or against landscape, but none work. However, starting to pull away from the power station, there is a stand of dead fir trees. Now I am sure the dead trees are nothing to do with radiation, but I couldn’t resist a photo of Wylfa taken through the dead trees. Can I help it if the romantic photos fail and only the ghoulish and foreboding ones work?

The path once more meets the shoreline, and at the head of a tiny creek, a clapper bridge crosses a small stream with the remains of an old watermill standing guard. And then I notice that the watermill is set in a stand of gunnera. But not just gunnera: looking upstream, here is a whole garden with specimen trees and Himalayan flower bushes.

While Wylfa only finally disappears when you turn Carmel Head, the generator hum fades after a mile or so, and gradually it is possible to focus on other things.

Cemlyn is a near-mile-long shingle bar damming a stranded lake above. It turns out to be a combination of natural forces and human shaping. In the early 19th century a massive storm threw up the shingle bar, but originally this created a salt marsh area. It was only when a weir was built that the current freshwater lake was formed. However, this unnatural lake has become a haven for many birds including massive flocks of Arctic Terns. As I plod across the shifting shingle, I pass ornithologists with massive monoculars on tripods, and one man with sound recording equipment, clearly trying to capture the chattering of the colony.

Having crossed the bar I feel sufficiently far away from the nuclear plant to eat my, very belated, breakfast. In my head I know that there is unlikely to be any contamination from the plant landside, so long as it is working properly. Still I have an overwhelming sense of contagion when I am nearby … yet, oddly, I would have happily had a cup of tea in the visitor centre!

A lady picks up rubbish using one of those long-handled grabs, and I realise it is the same person who was on the beach at Cemaes earlier. She explains that she has a rota, starting each morning at Church Bay, where I’d parked the van earlier and would finish the day, followed by Cemaes and Cemlyn. She also tells me about a woman, Jackie, whom she had met a year ago. Jackie and her dog were walking the Coast Path in support of Air Ambulance, but also Jackie was eyeing up the potential for going round on a horse. Some sections are on bridleway anyway, but I certainly wouldn’t like to be astride a horse along some of the cliff paths!

The two ladies in black arrive while I am talking, and this is a pattern through the day, I overtake them while walking, but I take some diversion to see something, stop to take photos, or this time to talk. This makes clear why my normal free walking pace is three and half to four miles an hour, but my actual pace on the ground is closer to two miles an hour. I am taking over 250 photos per day, and that alone means, on average, a photo every hundred yards. At normal pace I walk a hundred yards in a minute, it is easy to see how taking a photo significantly adds to this time.

The coast is a series of rugged rocky inlets, the path mostly wide and grassy along the cliff top. To sea is the small rock of the ‘West Mouse‘ with a lighthouse on top, and further out to sea ‘The Skerries‘, with what appears to be a much larger lighthouse complex. I assume from its name that the latter extends further beneath the sea as well. Long before the lighthouses, the Royal Yacht of Charles II, the Mary, was wrecked here.

On the coast itself, a line of three structures appears. The first is a tower. It reminds me of one of the tin workings in Cornwall, and I assume it is some sort of metal smelting, or similar. However, clearly the rocks here are not as mineral rich as those elsewhere, as this was the only sign of old industry during the day. Wylfa‘s site does not require any natural minerals or ores, just stable quake-free rock, a water supply for cooling and not too many local people to reduce casualties in case of disaster.

Either side of the chimney are two other tall triangular structures, which I, at first, took to be two further whitewashed chimneys. However, as you draw closer they are tall, narrow flat white triangles with a cathedral-like stone buttress behind each, a bit like a Mesolithic film set.

I realise that these are aligned with the little Mouse lighthouse and, high on the clifftop and hillside, can be used as sighting lines for ships at sea. When I next pass the ladies in black, who overtook me while I was climbing up the hill to get sightline of markers and lighthouse, their guide book says these are known as the ‘White Ladies‘.

The path cannot hug the cliffs around the end of Carmel Head, as they are too sheer, but as it cuts off the last jutting spur, it is possible to walk along the top out to the far point and stand as far as possible at the north west tip of Anglesey main island.

It is now that Wylfa is finally left behind and Holy Island appears, with its breakwaters and chimneys, although the latter are far across the water. I did not see any ferries arrive or depart, I guess it’s still the winter timetable, with few midday sailings. However, close to hand a yacht sails round the Head.

I have been amazed at the clifftop flowers across all the Anglesey coast, with primrose-coated fields, those small tufty red-pink flowers that often grow in rocky places, but in far greater profusion, bright yellow aconite-like flowers and tiny star-shaped light blue-lavender flowers, which one of the information boards named, but I of course forgot.

However, nothing prepared me for the change as I turned Carmel Head and the final stretch of coast between there and Church Bay. We move from north-east facing cliffs to west facing, warmed by the Gulf Stream, yet protected from the worst of the cold winter winds. It is a garden. Cliffs tumble with almost unbroken carpets of flowers, their grassy tops flour dusted or maybe fairy dusted with those blue star flowers, and each rock or post fur-tipped with lichen. The rock in this area is old, 570 million years, not as old as Tiree‘s Lewisian Gneiss, but still too old for fossils, and, I assume, hard. So the clifftop field walls are made of piled packed earth. A few, those lower and closer to pebbled beaches, are neatly faced with tight packed round stones, but most are simply earth edged and make their own home for flowers and sedums.

Church Bay is the first sandy cove and safe landing place after Carmel Head. The only possible landing before then is a single shingle-filled bay, with a trapped lake behind, but the way into it would be treacherous indeed, with sharp-edged rocks either side and a huge natural arch.

Church Bay is named after the steeple of the church that rises on the hillside, but in Welsh it is Port Swtan, the port of whiting, the local catch in days when fishing was a major part of life. There is a small heritage centre, one of the remaining thatched ‘tyddyns‘, a small dwelling that was once a farm with a few acres of land, where the occupants scratched out a living from the land and sea. The centre was closed the day I was there, but walking round the outside, there is a small cottage garden, its walls topped with old kettles and other ironmongery … I’d guess not how the original owners would have decorated them, but picturesque nonetheless.

1. Update: See Laura‘s comment below – the assessment was for a new nuclear power station here to replace Wylfa, which is being decommissioned. [back]

As the day started with pouring rain, I was not disappointed to miss a day’s walking. Keith Albans picked me up and we headed to Rhos-on-Sea for breakfast at an ice cream shop and café opposite the sea front (but no ice cream with breakfast). Keith is chief chaplain at the MHA, which is one of the charities I am supporting through the walk.

Originally MHA was an acronym for ‘Methodist Homes for the Aged‘, but now, like BP and ICI, it is simply ‘MHA‘. The original name became inappropriate as, over the years, it has taken on homes and schemes that do not have Methodist roots, and residents have many denominational, non-denominational or non-religious backgrounds. However, the MHA ethos still includes a belief in spiritual as well as practical and social care, hence an active chaplaincy throughout all homes.

MHA has facilities varying from high-dependency homes for those with advanced states of dementia who can no longer live independently, to schemes to help the elderly remain in their own homes. We visited two quite different places at near opposite ends of this dimension.

The first, Adlington House, consists of apartments for fully independent living, some rented, but mostly owned by residents. However, the fees include a ‘care package’ with a full-time staffed office as well as communal lounge and bistro (also open to the public), where we later ate lunch (I had local Conwy sausage and mash!)

Chloe, the manager, welcomed us and took us to meet three of the residents. We talked a bit about the walk and why I’m doing it, and also some of the tracking technology I’m carrying in the light of the way various kinds of monitoring and tracking are being trialled for elderly people.

I recalled the story I heard once in Dundee, about an elderly lady whose children began to feel worried as she became withdrawn and confused. The problem, it turned out, was technological, not mental. There were sensors in the flat that ‘spoke’ based on rules, "Are you OK, Mrs Jones?", "Pull the cord if you need help." … In order to make them more ‘user friendly’, the automated system used words recorded by members of the family. However, the system only came into operation at night. I’m sure this was explained at some stage, but I’d guess at the same time as many other features in the accommodation. So, the lady would wake in the night, get up to go to the toilet, and start to hear the voices of her children. She thought she was getting the first signs of Alzheimer’s and hence her depression. The technology was explained again and the problem went away.

The residents had very different approaches to technology. Two were resistant to all technology, except mobile phones, but the third used Skype heavily to keep in contact with family. The common feature, as found by others when studying technology use by older people, is that it is used if it is perceived to be useful, but not for its own sake. Of course this usefulness is fast becoming necessity, and over lunch we wondered whether, in the future, there may be a need for local technology experts, like the Skype-lady, who can help others. I was also reminded of my old idea of the electronic village shop, where the shopkeeper can help customers find their way round the online world, ‘Mrs Goggins as information scientist’.

The residents of Adlington House vary from early 60s to late 80s, but are mostly, at this point, fully able to look after themselves. Over lunch we discussed some of the changes that will happen over the next five to ten years. On the one hand residents will age and care needs change, although the term ‘care’ itself is problematic; but also there will be an increasing expectation or desire for working life to extend into late 60s or 70s. Should dedicated housing schemes like this consider work as part of the support package, maybe supplying hot-desking, or perhaps attempting to create employment opportunities?

We also talked about the way this housing facility fitted into the larger MHA portfolio. MHA is a charity whose mission is to support all as they age, but it also has to be financially sustainable, not all of which can come from charitable collecting as I am doing during the walk. So, like housing associations, the rents or, in the case of leasehold apartments like those at Adlington House, purchase prices, have to reflect costs.

MHA, like similar charities and not-for-profit organisations, are faced with a tension. On the one hand they need to be financially sustainable in order to expand their provision for an ageing population; on the other they wish to maintain access for all. While some of this is helped by government in the form of housing benefits and other allowances, these benefits are also under pressure. One of the residents showed Keith and me her apartment, which included a spare room for when her children visit. If she wished to claim housing benefit, she would be penalised for having the extra room, the so-called ‘bedroom tax’.

Hopefully, charitable donations, such as those related to this walk (have you given yet?) can help ease some of this tension, but, as demand grows and state support shrinks, the need can only increase.

After lunch, we visited Coed Craig in Colwyn Bay. This is on the heavy dependency side of MHA‘s activities, catering for severe dementia. Given this, it was not appropriate to talk with residents; however, it turned out that there was a meeting in progress for MHA chaplains in the region. For a while Keith and I simply sat in while they talked about resident satisfaction surveys and values assessments, but then the discussion turned to the walk.

We talked partly about church buildings, the many I have passed that have closed, but also the churches up Offa’s Dyke that offer free refreshments to walkers, the ministry of hospitality. One of them asks me whether the walk has a spiritual dimension. I fudge a little; there is definitely a sense of pilgrimage, but where the pilgrimage of Welsh identity and the pilgrimage of personal spirituality start and stop is hard to define. But on the table of my campervan is my copy of the Methodist Hymn Book, inscribed within in my Mum‘s handwriting:

Alan John Dix
Christmas 1967
"Oh Come, Let us sing
unto the Lord"

Strangely, as a bookmark in the hymn book, I find the 1979–80 programme card of the Trinity Mathematical Society. There is no clean separation between Welshness and hymn singing (in my head I hear the rich bass tones of ‘Bread of heaven‘), between spirituality and mathematics.

But do I fudge my language, just as the simple statement of the missionary, "simply the Holy Spirit", challenged my more woolly, "happenstance or providence", when talking about the statistically improbable meetings I have had along the way? Should I be more direct in my words?

Over the years I have, on the one hand, become much more theologically ‘conservative’, in the sense that I have no doubt of the absolute, universal, and unique centrality of Jesus as saviour of all, and yet, on the other hand, much more ready to accept that there are many ways in which Jesus finds each separate person. But, in my desire to avoid offence, do I miss words that would help others in their own path to the One who welcomes all?

I expected the day to be largely about simply walking as there was only one seaside village between Amlwch and Cemaes, a day purely of natural environment and bodily effort, but instead it has been a day with so many points of encouragement from human encounters.

The path west out of Amlwch skirts inland of the chemical works. I assume the substantial council house estates were built to house the workers.  In architecture, Amlwch feels more like the housing estates you get at the edge of every city, and the estates through which I walked to and from the bus stop are so like Tang Hall in York where we lived for several years.  However, and I can’t put my finger on what it was that gave the impression, there was none of the sense of heaviness that often pervades such estates.

Out of Amlwch Port, the path is signposted up steps, but then leaves you on your own (keep as far seaward as possible), until a post points you across a recreation field; at the far side a pathway runs beside a large mud-banked ditch, along which flows a stream of foul red-brown liquid, foam patches floating or clinging to the banks.  I assume this either flows out of Parys Mountain itself, or perhaps a closer area where copper ore was dumped while waiting to be shipped to the smelting works of ‘Copperopolis‘ at Swansea.

Parys Mountain ore smelted using South Wales coal provided copper for the world.  But now Parys Mountain is left a barren lunar landscape.  So far I have not seen images, but a lady I talked to the previous day said it was definitely impressive and worth visiting, "utterly lifeless, no plants, no birds, eerie", she said.

Passing on, I cross an old railway line and a field of horses before coming back to the sea and grassy clifftop path. All through Anglesey I’ve been amazed at the range of flowers growing on the cliffs, even just above the tideline, and the sheep-grazed fields awash with pale-yellow primroses.  The rocks too are thick with lichens, some soft-edged and velvet like, some hugging close to the surface, like cracked paint, one a heart with a smiling face inside.

As the clifftop path approaches Porth Llechog, just as yesterday in the approach to Amlwch, it becomes quite boggy in places.  No problem for boots, but this day I was wearing sandals, great for the beach walking, but leaving me with mud-spa treatment for my toes. Porth Llechog is also known as Bull Bay, after a nearby cove “Pwyl y Tarw” (‘tarw’ is ‘bull’ in Welsh).  I learn this from a faded information board, which also tells you about the brickworks and china clay works that are further along the coast.  The shiny modern board, like others around Anglesey, says little apart from local by-laws and beaches where dogs are forbidden.  Why create such expensive-looking boards that say so little, especially when the information to say something more useful is already there to hand?

I was looking forward to visiting the café just across from the shore.  When I first planned the walk, Fiona collected a YouTube playlist of traditional and contemporary Welsh singing.  One particularly lovely song was Siglo dy Sail, sung by Meinir Gwilym, and the YouTube video was shot at Caffi Wendon, Benllech.  By looking at Google Street View I’d managed to work out that it was actually at the west end of Porth Llechog.

As I walk along the promenade there are houses to the left, each with well-kept gardens, but more unusual, to the right from the roadside to the cliff edge are cultivated gardens.  It is odd, I love wild things, windswept seascapes, and vegetation-invaded ruins.  Yet this suburban profusion of order, which I would dismiss or ignore in an urban setting, is somehow refreshing in this area of endless wildflower-carpeted cliff sides. Maybe it is the contrasts that appeal to me: enclaves of wilderness in the city and seams of order in the wilderness.

However, I am getting increasingly uneasy, as I look ahead, the line of buildings that I took to be where the beach café is has no notice or chairs, or any of the signs of being anything but more houses. Have I missed it somehow?

A lady is in her front garden, so I ask her, and the answer is not good.  The café has closed.  It was evidently not there long, just a year or two, but they never made a go of it. It seems surprising, the coastline is hardly scattered with eating places.  Maybe Porth Llechog is simply not on the car circuit, it has no large beach, no surf, and I guess is more retirement village than seaside town.

Sensing my disappointment, she asks, "would you like a cup of tea".

With my natural reticence, that very ‘British‘ sense of not waiting to impose even when help is offered, I almost said no, but I was the ‘walking man’, not simply Alan.

"That would be lovely, thank you."

Why is it so hard to accept an offered hand?

She took me round to a table on the back patio where her husband was doing back garden chores and a few minutes later came back with a tray of tea and biscuits.

She and her husband continue to garden as I drink my tea, and every so often chat a little. They explain the cliffside gardens.  Evidently each house owns not just their front garden, but also a strip across the road down to the sea, and they garden their patch in various ways.

The day then becomes one of almost endless cliffside walks, with one narrow inlet after another cutting into the dark cliffs, some more like wide fissures, where, I assume, some ancient intrusion or fault sliced through the solid rock.

Eventually, far ahead, I catch sight of the first of the brickworks that I had read about on the (faded) information board at Porth Llechog.  For half an hour it draws closer as I make my way round the small bay of Porth Wen.  It is a surreal picture, strange brick domes that could have come from a Star Wars set, and tall Victorian chimneys.  The footpath cuts above the works as they are closed for safety reasons.  The day has turned cloudy and my photographs are washed out, but I imagine walking amongst these ruins on a good day, the chimneys towering above, and entering under the arched Pantheon-like roofs of the old brick kilns.

On the hillside above the brickworks is winding gear that I assume brought raw materials down to the works.  The bricks themselves would have left by sea from the brickworks’ own quayside.

Beyond the brickworks more grassy hillside, cliffside paths ana rock that looked like giant pebbledash.

Between two headlands, Hell’s Mouth seems peaceful on this early summer day, a stretch of rocky coast and small inlet, but in a north-easterly there would be no shelter and no escape.  But above there is an area that is part Shangri-La, part Avalon, flat raised valley filled with shifting brown rushes between almost emerald green grasslands.

An old wartime watch point guards a headland and then, looking down into the bay of Porth Llanlleiana, there is a grassy sward and castle-like half-round walls, eroding the approach to land.

It is the second works, a much smaller set of buildings, I think ceramics rather than bricks. Ruinous walls rise from the flat grass and a chimney sits part way up the hillside.  I feel there must be some buried flue that connects building to chimney.

This area is only reachable by foot, but there are picnic tables and an abandoned child’s balloon suggest that this is close enough for family afternoon walks from Cemaes, or maybe a walk across fields from the road half a mile or so away.

The first sight of the works had been from far above and the way down a steep, but well-made, staircase cutting down the valley side; on the western side an equally steep path cuts back up the cliffside.  Passing a cushion-like hummock of primrose I climb.

Having put the old industry behind, the ground rises again up and atop a small headland, the island of the ‘Middle Mouse‘ to seaward, ahead, framed by a barbed wire fence, I catch my first glimpse of Wylfa nuclear power station.  I think of the 19th century works, now dangerous only because of the risk of falling masonry, of Parys Mountain, a dead ground still after a hundred years, but walkable on, and then the nuclear industry, how long?  A thousand years, ten thousand years, before the land will be treadable with safety? I think of the Iron Age hill forts and megalithic tombs that scatter the Anglesey landscape.  What would the landscape be like after 10,000 years of nuclear power?

I know many environmental activists have espoused nuclear power as a less bad alternative to the carbon-hungry power that is bringing global warming and inundation.  And I can see this as a temporary alternative, maybe a way to wean ourselves before creating a new way of living within our power means.  But it is simply not sustainable, the effects last too long, I imagine those 10,000 years of nuclear power, how much land would be usable?  Two hundred and fifty cordoned off Wylfa sites, death to enter?

From there on Wylfa becomes the icon of the journey, appearing and then disappearing as the path wends in and out the folds of the cliffside paths.

Directly across Cemaes Bay from Wylfa is the church at Ty’n-llan.  The concrete of the power station hangs ominously over the tombstones, and outside the graveyard walls a small bunch of artificial red carnations and a single white rose are placed.  Have they blown over the wall from one of the graves within?  But they look too well placed.  Maybe this is the last resting place of one shut out from sanctified ground: maybe a distant ancestor who committed suicide and was buried outside the graveyard walls, or maybe a young unmarried girl placing a still-born child under the turf in the deaths of night when none would see.   How is it that we manage to make so many feel excluded from the church of the one who welcomed all?

There is a short alternative route along the lane, but I take the slightly longer way around Llanbadrig Point.  ‘Llanbadrig‘ is the place or church of St Patrick, and later I learn that this is the only church dedicated to St Patrick in Wales.  It is where he came temporarily to land en route back to Ireland from Iona where he had been visiting St Columba.  He may have cast snakes from Ireland, but nothing could protect him from the storms that crash into the north Anglesey coast , and he came to ground here, although not suffering the fate of the Royal Charter. The great advantage of a vow of poverty is that you have no belt of gold to drag you into the depths.

I meet Raymond and Vinney, a railway signalman and station environmental officer from Holyhead who often walk together, we chat for ages and they tell me that I can cut across the beach towards the last headland before Cemaes. The earthy cliffs are cut with treacherous caves and overhangs, and the beach studded with oddly shaped and coloured rocks, the latter I assume the result of mineral rich seams. I spot a mermaid, not out at sea, but printed on a deflated helium balloon; and I set my hand in concrete hand prints, but now, looking at the photographs, I cannot work out why there was concrete on the beach at all.

Cemaes itself is set in a bay within a bay, a natural harbour, with its breakwater creating yet another bay within the bay in the bay.  On the land side of the quay boats are drawn up on the shingle and a small river runs out from a culvert with a parallel tunnel to let the walker through into a small semi-wooded parkland beside the water, and then up the far side into the town.

The bus stop is opposite Cemaes Menter y Pentre (Village Venture).  It is half past five and so it is shut, but it seems to be a sort of multi-use community shop.  I am waiting for the bus to Amlwch, the first of three buses to take me back to Llanfairfechan.  I shelter from the drizzle under a shop doorway and for a short while a lady also shelters and chats before moving on.

Waiting for the next bus at Amlwch was Rhys, his fair, or maybe bleached, hair, in sharp contrast to his black leather jacket and platform boots. He saw my banner, asked abut the walk and gave me a donation, but above all was so excited about the idea, not least the millions of footfalls: yet another lift to end the day.

The common notion is that women talk, but in my experience of B&B proprietors, it is the men who are the talkers. Maybe ‘talker’ is precisely the right word, as, true to stereotypes, the men seem to be collectors of facts and information and are willing to share it with minimal encouragement.

Certainly I learnt much from Keith over a relaxed breakfast.

The best place to catch the Royals is evidently the Menai Bridge Waitrose where Kate pushes her trolley along the aisles with a lack of airs that has made the couple popular on the island.

I recall the investiture of Prince Charles as ‘Prince of Wales‘ in 1969 when I was in junior school. I am by nature a romantic and took it at face value as part of Welsh national pride. However, I did not know the history of the title. In 1301 Edward I, after a series of bloody campaigns to subdue Wales when he had asserted his and England‘s control¹. In Caernarfon Castle he stood on a high balcony and addressed the people.

[sem ]Edward II[/sem] being invested as ‘[sem ]Prince of Wales[/sem]‘ by his father.

"Do you want a Prince of Wales?", he asked.

"Yes", the crowd shouted, thinking they were to be offered back at least some semblance of a vassal state.

"I give you your Prince", he cried, their momentary hope destroyed as he held up his infant son.

Thenceforth each successor to the throne has been given the title ‘Prince of Wales‘, historically a sign of Welsh humiliation, not pride.

I knew nothing of this as a child, but as I treasured my Investiture Mug, given to all school children, and watched the pomp on black and white television, the Free Wales Army, in typical amateurish defiance, attempted to disrupt the ceremony with makeshift bombs, one of which injured a child slightly when the police ignored the telephone warning of where to find the bomb; the only blood, save scuffed knuckles, in the last armed Welsh uprising.

Where paramilitaries failed, successive years of non-violent resistance and slow political pressure have afforded a growing independence. Given William and Kate‘s obvious popularity and natural ease, I wonder if, by the time William, in turn, takes on the title ‘Prince of Wales‘, it may be as the constitutional head of state of an independent nation.

I have been fascinated by the micro-communities of the caravan sites ever since the wonderful welcome I received at Monmouth Caravan Site. I learnt that far from being quiet out of season, the B&B stayed busy throughout the year. One source of customers was Wylfa, the nuclear power station, where temporary construction or maintenance workers would seek accommodation even this far afield. However, the other was a sort of overflow from the static caravan sites that surrounded Benllech.

The caravans are mostly owned by retirees who spend nearly their whole year here. During the summer, when family visit, they are often put up in the B&Bs either because there is no room in the caravan, or because they prefer respite from small children overnight. During the winter the caravan sites close for two months, a statutory requirement to show they are ‘temporary’ not permanent housing. But for many, this is their home, and even if they have a house somewhere else they would prefer to stay close, maybe visiting their caravan during the day even if the electricity and services are cut off. So they stay, flotsam of the winter gales, in the shelter of Benllech B&Bs.

The Coast Path out of Benllech runs along the wooded cliffside. The path is narrow in places, and sometimes quite steep down to the sea, but usually wider and well levelled where the cliff is steep.  I find myself catching up with a group strung out along the path ahead, and decide that I will need to simply relax and take my time behind them, but then come to a slight opening with a bench where they stop for rest.

They explain that they are an Anglo-French walking group who converse electronically during the year and then get together once a year for a walking and language week. Alternate days they speak English or French. I’m not sure if I was lucky to catch them on an English day, or whether they took pity on me and spoke English.

"This is nothing", one of them said, looking at the narrow cliffside path; "last year in France the path was this wide", her hands just inches apart, "and a hundred feet sheer down to the sea.". They are clearly experienced walkers as well as linguists.

Pleasure yachts and an RNLI lifeboat bob in sun-drenched waters.  The village of Moelfra sits on a bay with dinghies and tenders pulled up on the shingle beside the quay.  It is nearly noon, and I have a cup of tea at a quayside kiosk and put on suncream before the day gets even hotter.

The lifeboat is at the heart of the village, there is a statue of a lifeboatman and a monument commemorating the loss of the Royal Charter in 1859.

The Royal Charter was the fastest ship in the Australia run in the midst of the gold rush. She was on her way back filled with returning miners, their pockets full of gold nuggets, having made their fortune and looking forward to life of ease in their homeland.

Their journey was almost at an end, and within sight of the shore a Force 12 hurricane struck.  Along with 133 other ships along the western coasts of Britain, the Royal Charter foundered, and of 500 on board only 40 made it to land, the rest, with their gold, sunk in the depths of the Irish Sea.  As part of the rescue 28 Moelfra men made a human chain out to sea to help the survivors to land.

Soon after, the first Moelfra lifeboat was launched and has saved countless lives, including the full complement of the Hindlea, which foundered almost a hundred years to the day after the Royal Charter, in winds of over 100 miles an hour.  With the propellor of the storm-tossed Hindlea spinning above the heads of the lifeboat crew, they managed to come alongside ten times, rescuing the entire crew of the Hindlea, and earning themselves medals for bravery.  And all of them, and indeed all {{RNLI} crews, volunteers, their only reward to know they keep safe the seas and the thanks of those they help.

There is a RNLI museum and a short way along Moelfra Lifeboat Station.

One of the crew is standing outside and starts to tell me some of the stories of the boats and crews who served the coast for so many years.  He invites me in and offers me a cup of tea … well can I say "no"?

The lifeboat station is due to be rebuilt with space for a viewing gallery, so that visitors can see the boat without interfering with its work, even when it is being launched.  The building of the new lifeboat station is however being prompted by the new lifeboat which had just come into commission and is too large to be brought fully inside.

As I leave he suggests I stop for a meal at the Pilot Boat in Dulas and tell them that he has recommended them; he reckons they may give him the odd free pint for his PR efforts.

The way beyond Moelfra is more open and the cliffs low to the water.  I pass the stone monument where the Royal Charter sank. It looks so peaceful, the odd walker, sun glinting on the sea, and a diving boat in the water, maybe seeking dead men’s gold.

I come to the next bay and see a group of older people on the beach ahead.  At first I think that the Anglo-French group overtook me whilst I was seeing the museum and lifeboat station in Moelfra, but then discover they are a group of amateur geologists investigating the rocks.

The sun beats hotter and swirls of smoke-like mist rise from the damp sands as I cut directly across to the far side, wading the shallow water along the way.  I mistakenly think this is Traeth Dulas, a deep inlet and am pleased as I get to the other side as I think I have cut off a mile of walking up and down the estuary … but then realise this was just Traeth Lligwy, a shallower bay.

Traeth Dulas is a minor estuary and the path cuts along one side, on the green hills above the steep wooded cliff, then down a small lane until ahead is an old, brightly painted double decker bus.  It is the Pilot Boat and its children’s ‘Fun Bus’.

Following the lifeboatman’s advice I have a meal there and a pint, a very belated 4 o’clock lunch, and then set off again across a small bridge and then onto the old road that crosses the water at a ford.

Rather than skirting the full muddy length of the estuary edge, the path cuts inland and up, past the tiny hamlet named ‘Dulas‘ on the map (the very slightly larger scattering near the Pilot Boat is strictly ‘City Dulas‘) and the church of St Gwenllwyfo and then back down past farm and fields of sheep to the grassy cliff tops again.

I can’t recall if I first heard or saw the lamb struggling by the cliff edge.  A fence protected the edge, but a lamb had its head stuck firmly through the four-inch square mesh of the pig netting.  As I approached it became more agitated and I was worried I would do more harm than good, but as I touched it, it instantly stilled, and slowly, I shifted its head, the firm wool coat soft under my fingers, rotating it until it slipped free and it skipped carelessly back up the field to find its mother.

To sea there is a low island, or simply rocky shelf, on which is a tower looking not unlike the tops of the tall monastery bell towers you see in Ireland.  On the map I see it is called Ynys Dulas and it simply says ‘tower’.  At the time, I wonder whether it is the home of a hermit, like the island below the Severn Bridge, or a warning for ships, a lightless lighthouse, but having now checked online, I find that rather (or as well as) warning mariners off the rocks, it was built in 1821 as a shelter for those already shipwrecked and finding their way to this forlorn rock.

It is after five o’clock and I still have several miles to go.  The scenery is beautiful but I am glad when Port Amlwch gradually comes into view and I  walk past the museum of the copper industry and the deep docks into the town.  The wait for the bus is not long and soon I am on the long journey back to the campervan still at Llanfairfechan.

1. He was no more kind north of the border where he was known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots‘[back]

I arrived at Menai Bridge by bus and started the route where I had finished it the previous night outside The Bridge Inn on the Anglesey end of the bridge.  There is a tiny garden here with a seat and a plaque; it was made to commemorate the children who died in the Aberfan in 1966.

Menai Bridge is definitely not down at heel.  No boarded up shops, but an interior design studio, art gallery, and posh restaurants.  The Coast Path follows small streets through the town, with occasional small grassed areas overlooking the Menai Straits.

Looking back to the bridge, it is an amazing feat of engineering, but maybe more amazing are the bus drivers who go across it day by day. Each carriageway goes under its own arch, and when I say ‘carriageway’ of course when Telford designed it it was for carriages. A modern bus is a lot wider than a 19th-century horse-drawn carriage. To get through the arch the bus has to first come to a complete stop; I think this must be to allow the normal slight side-to-side swaying to decay. The traffic builds up behind. Then, very slowly it inches forward, the wing mirrors nearly scraping the stone, then, like a snake wriggling from its skin, once the wing mirrors are through the driver speeds up, until the bus reaches the second tower and the process starts again.

The Coast Path follows the main road towards Beaumaris.  The road has few cars and is pleasant, with views across the straits, so much so that when the Coast Path takes a more minor road inland, I wonder why, given it normally hugs the coast so closely.  However, I can imagine that in summer the now tolerably busy coast road will be tail-to-tail with cars.

For a while, the small road leads through semi-suburban-style village, with houses or close hedgerow on both sides, adding to my wonder as to why the path ever left the coast road with its open views up and down straits and across to Snowdonia.  But then, the houses on the seaward side ended and gave way to open fields and open stunning panorama, from the Great Orme to the valleys cutting into the mountains, and I decided the path planners perhaps did know what they were doing.

For a short while the path leads off the road past bluebell woods and then into a veritable Hampton Court Maze of gorse land. Instead of neatly cut hedges the gorse branches near meet across the way, pulling and tearing at you like a Sleeping Beauty forest, and underfoot, instead of manicured grass, sinking boot-churned mud that threatens to swallow you. I have been wearing sandals instead of boots since the day from Mostyn to Abergele when my ankles swelled, and for the first time since then I thought that maybe boots had their advantages.

Unlike the ancient unicursal mazes and spirals, this is a land of crossing pathways, and instead of an Ariadne thread, occasional (too occasional) marker posts to tell you that this is the right clinging narrow track amongst many.  In short, although maybe half a mile across or less, the sort of place that as a child I would have died for.

Coming down into Beaumaris (Biwmares) the road passes fern-lined under a railway bridge and I am struck again that while the camera can ‘capture’ sights and the recorder sounds, the smells are still held only in your memory, and so hard to express unless you have experienced them yourself: the dark dank earth smell of the fern; the almost sickly rich, honey-sweet gorse; the sharp aromatic wild garlic; and even, a few days before, along the A55 leading from Conwy to Penmaenmawr, the pungent peaty sweat-sour rubber on tarmac.

I find it hard to bring a smell to mind, in the way I can a sight or sound, as if my own memories are as limited as tape and celluloid, but when you smell one again – the sheer emotional force… In psychological terms, recall is poor, but recognition instant. Smell is very old, pre-dating trilobites with their early eyes. Smell links directly to ancient parts of our brains, that we share even with reptiles; a dinosaur in our minds. Yet, perhaps because so primitive, hard to explicitly grasp.

I have noticed too that while in dreams I see and hear, I do not smell or taste.  Perhaps these are too deeply buried; do dinosaurs dream?

I guess perfumers have a vocabulary for scents, as wine lovers do for taste. Does this help with recall, as having more colour names does for recall of colours? Do cultures that have fewer colour words dream in monochrome and do perfumers dream in scent?

Beaumaris culture sits low on the north eastern edge of town, out of sight in the first approach.  Multicoloured houses across the water remind me of Tobermory.  I am hungry by now and looking forward to revisiting the seaside café with its own tide-filled crab pool. When the girls were little we camped on Anglesey in our old Type 2 VW campervan, and visited Beaumaris.  The café hired out crab lines, bait and pails, so that children could go crabbing, before emptying the crabs back into the water for the next child.

So I pass by inviting beach front bistros, and press on to the far side of town beyond the large car parks in front of the castle, only to find the café fenced off, its roof tiles missing and the pool drained. Maybe the bottom had fallen out of the crabbing market, maybe it was too far from the centre of Beaumaris, maybe simply not the style of establishment that is attractive to heritage visitors.

So instead I have lunch at ‘Simply Snacks‘, nearly opposite the castle entrance, simple but beautifully decorated, with basic but well-prepared food, definitely café not ‘caf’.  I love them all, from the chintz ‘ye olde tea room’, to  wine-bar-style glass and steel, or natural wood and organic carrot cake establishments, but I fear the Formica-tabled traditional sea-front café may soon be a thing of the past.  Strange, in Italy, it is expected to find the best food in the most basic surroundings, yet in Britain, while not as focused on the ‘experience’ as the French, still ‘appearances matter’.

This makes me think about Apple. In the early days Apple combined strength of design at all levels (well nearly all, the early Apple mouse was always an ergonomic disaster), innovative appearance with the best user interface.  Perhaps even then the latter was inherited from their licensing of Xerox Star design.  Certainly of latter years, not helped when they sacked nearly all their UI research team more than ten years back, and rather like ‘French‘ cuisine (not regional French cooking) has lost sight of the food in search of ambience, Apple have lost sight that this is a computer, which needs to be used to do things, not just an ‘experience’ and a brand.

This is certainly very relevant currently.  If I walk for any period of time, in classic fashion, with hands pushed into rucksack straps, a spot behind my shoulder blade seizes in a knot. The same thing happens when I drive.  It is the long-term impact of the ergonomically disastrous Apple trackpad, sadly emulated by others, which ignores the basic fact that we have an opposable thumb.

Passing Beaumaris Castle, I note that the green area below its walls, which would once have been the killing fields where attackers would fall cut down by arrows from both sides, is now a children’s playground – swords to ploughshares albeit after 800 years.

*****   TBC   *******

Beyond Beaumaris the path keeps close to the coast, along grassy fields or pebble and sand beaches below red earth banks, passing the occasional cottage, farm and dilapidated boat house. The earth banks are scoured by the powerful tide race of the Straits, sometimes cut into caves or even a sugar loaf hummock stranded on the shoreline.

A quarry and long abandoned works blocks the way along the shore, chimney and walls still standing, remnants of past industry. The Coast Path cuts inland towards Penman Priory, ruins dating back to the 13th century when the Augustinian Priory was built on the site of an older Celtic institution. The Christian roots lie deep alongside older settlements and chambered tombs, the island where Roman legions slaughtered druids amongst the oak groves.

At Bangor Cathedral the day before I’d seen a notice about a prayer walk all around Anglesey. It was to be done on a single day with different groups tackling different sections, so that prayer would surround the whole island. I’d mistaken the dates and emailed the contact thinking I’d be passing a group during the day, only to find that I was out by a month, I’d looked at dates, but not month!

The most impressive part of the Priory ruins is the largely intact dovecot, a corbeled roof structure, its internal walls Swiss cheese punctured by innumerable nesting niches. Directly below the circular light from the roof apex, a strange-stepped pillar in the centre rises, from which a ladder could be used to bring in the white-breasted harvest.

The Path leads along a lane north, back towards the sea and the Trwyn Du lighthouse, ‘No Passing Landward’ written on its side, with another red buoy-shaped structure nearby marking more treacherous undersea rocks. The seas break over the latter as I watch, but photos inside the small café at the point show wild waves breaking almost the height of the light itself.

There are a young girl and man inside who are interested in the walk and who, happily, are more observant than me, as I almost left my bag with money, cards, etc., as I left.

After this there is an inland section running initially almost back the way I’d come, sometimes along small lanes, and sometimes footpaths across moorland, through woods and across fields. Looking back the tip of Trwyn Du is visible for some time peeking above cliff top and hedgerow, before it eventually drops out of sight.

I pass signs for a secluded yurt holiday, and telling me that Ramblers have improved the path. To sea large tankers stand nearly motionless. I later learn that they weigh anchor there as it is cheaper than berthing at Liverpool. The crews, from all over the world, sometimes come ashore in the villages further along the North Anglesey coast. Thinking back, I guess this may not always be strictly legal, as not all will have entry visas.

Along the paths I notice that a light turquoise is a popular colour for metal work and even the rope holding rocks to close gates. Much of the land is part of Plas Newydd, maybe it is a favourite colour of the owner.

I think the frequent alternation of path and lane confused my sense of progress. I knew that ahead was Bwrdd Arthur (Arthur’s table), a hill with an old fort on top, and was sure that I was almost there, only to realise it had been another hill and I still had far to go. When eventually I did pass it, I had a moment of confusion as the Path leads through a farmyard with no indication of the way to go. After eventually deciding from the map that this was definitely right, I found, a short way on, a footpath sign, and also, somewhat weirdly, found the hillside was ‘Bryn Offa‘, as if a flashback to two weeks ago.

So all good, and I was on nearly the last stretch down towards Red Wharf Bay, when, disaster, the way ahead is blocked by red plastic fencing and a sign ‘Danger Keep Out’, ‘Footpath Closed’ – there had been a landslip and the way ahead was blocked.

The way back to the last major road was a long way, so I took the only path that seemed possible, a small footpath that led up across the hillside. The way narrowed as it entered woods, and brambles and nettles began to crowd close. It became increasingly difficult, brambles began to cut my bare legs, but I was committed, and then … another small sign perched in a bucket, ‘no public footpath, go back’.

I could see that the way beyond became even more choked, but I had come so far and the time was getting late, so I ignored the sign and pressed on. Now there was no protection, nettles stung and brambles tore, until, at last, it broke free into a small field. The field was fenced all around, except for one gate that led into a small yard, which itself led out onto the road.

I came into the yard and was greeted by a middle-aged couple, "You can’t come through here; there’s a sign; go back".

*************************************************

I had been told not to expect much of signage in North East Wales as tourism was seen as an irrelevant distraction in an industrial or post-industrial area. However, while the signage for the actual path could sometimes be sketchy, the local history signage in the North East had been exemplary, beautifully shaped metal signs with often unexpected glimpses of past times. The waterside walks, designed less for the long distance walker and more for the resident, were also well laid out.

I was now in Anglesey, where tourism is a major facet of the economy, with, since the closing of the Holyhead aluminium smelting plant, only the air force base as a rival.

At Red Wharf Bay I saw the first of the many beach information signs around the coast of Anglesey. I guess there was probably one at Beaumaris too, but I’d missed it amongst the crowds. Here, at the car park on the east end of Red Wharf Bay it was unmissable, a blue metal, three-sided sign rising above the cars.

Each side had an upper and a lower section. On one side was a map of all of Anglesey, useful, I guess, to get an overview, with information about Anglesey in general. Another had a map of Red Wharf Bay itself, dedicated solely to telling you where you were NOT allowed to walk a dog, and also a copy of the local beach by-laws. The final side had a large photograph of Red Wharf Bay, which of course I could see by turning round. The production values were excellent, it had clearly not been cheap; but absolutely nothing about the nature, history or culture, just prohibitions and a superfluous photograph.

Throughout the walk I had been assiduously photographing the signage I saw on the way, and I similarly photographed this sign, but it was the last of these beach signs that I bothered to take as all were effectively identical. It felt such a waste, impressive I’m sure when they were launched, but utterly useless.

The Coast Path leads round the bay, and I was walking along the sands. However, the tide was out and the whole bay a wide expanse of sand. So instead of skirting the shoreline I set out directly across the bay, which appeared, from the map and from what I could see to be firm sand except for a small channel that ran across the middle of the bay. I knew I might have to trace it back to the shoreline if it was impassable, but thought it was worth a try as I was late and it would save me some time, and also because it is just lovely to march out across the sand.

I was so glad that I was walking in sandals not boots. Although I could have taken boots off and walked barefoot, it was so easy to just wade through the shallow channel with sandals and shorts, the water coming barely above my knees.

On the far side of the bay it was just a short way around the back of a small static caravan site, round a headland, and into Benllech, where the Sea View Guest House sat on the small sea front. Keith (I think) directed me across the road to the Bay Café, a lovely restaurant with picture windows overlooking the sea.

I was just staying one night in this B&B and then taking the bus back to Llanfairfechan the next evening from Amlwch, so I needed only a change of clothes and a toothbrush in my day bag to make it an overnight one. Although with chargers, iPad, and the large, albeit light, recording box for the dot.rural narrative project, my rucksack was far from minimal, still there is something satisfying in having all you need in a small rucksack.