One Woman Walks Wales

by Ursula Martin

  “The best thing you can do for yourself right now is to eat something,” I told her, and left her resting, sitting and looking out at the summit of Garnedd Ugain curving out to the left, and the two small lakes: sun-gilded metal cupped in the hands of the surrounding peaks. I clambered on upwards, coming to the final gentle rise alongside the metal café roof, almost at the flat point before the concrete summit. The girl came up alongside me.

  “Hey! It’s you! What happened?” I asked, surprised to see her energy.

  “You happened,” she said.

  I smiled, pleased. We climbed to the summit together. The trig point itself was concrete-footed, an artificial summit with a wide flat circle for people to gather and gasp and take selfies. We took photographs of each other and then went to the café for a beer. There were plenty of people milling around, those from the train and those from the climb, all quietly mingling in the huge single-roomed building, looking at the view and at the displays of keyrings and postcards. I asked the café worker for tap water but he refused – the only place in Wales that refused me water. I had to buy some instead, to cover the cost of bringing it up on the train. I also bought a beer and a pie, celebrating my own highest-peak challenge.

  Drinking my celebratory bottle of Purple Moose, I sat with the girl and some of her team leaders, jolly and alpha. I realised I’d become the experienced one, unconsciously learning how to do the right things to keep me safe, to keep me going. The monitoring of energy, of body temperature, of nutrition, of hydration had become second nature. I wasn’t always doing this efficiently, or making the best journey I could – I still felt overweight and unathletic – but I’d taught myself how to cope, how to survive this challenge. I was doing this.

  I came down from the mountain via the Watkins path, a steep gravelly descent from a short way off the summit, levelling out later into the usual, human-smoothed path. It finished by going through a beautiful oak copse, where I was plunged into the very different sensory experience of tree cover, the smell of leaves, kaleidoscopes of sunlight, the gentle cooling of branches above; I hadn’t realised the starkness of the bare and rocky mountain until I was bathed in tree shade. The delightful oaks formed my final few hundred metres before I reached the road and stuck my thumb out. A car stopped within seconds, a Barmouth farmer and his son, going home from their own day in the mountains. They took me all the way to Machynlleth, where I had four days of resting at a friend’s cottage; I’d arranged to feed their cat in return for solitude and sleep. It was the first time in more than four months that I’d taken more than one day at a time to do absolutely nothing.

  I wanted to write more during this rest break, try and spin a few threads of story from the wisps of memories that were layering down, day upon day. It felt as if all the times I sat down on sheep-nibbled turf to eat handfuls of trail mix from a battered plastic bag were running into one. But somehow I never wrote, didn’t have the energy to do much at all, just lazed on my friend’s sofa, eating good food and watching their crappy film collection. My body shifted into neutral and I slept a lot, dazed and heavy. Did it matter about the sequence of things? If the feeling of the wind tickling hair across my face, or time spent watching the dapple of sunlight through leaves could come from any day at all, maybe I didn’t need to separate them into date-specific memories.

  These are the things that I bought for four days alone: a fine sirloin steak, two chicken breasts, cabbage, broccoli, kale, potatoes, garlic, butter, a box of sugary cereal, milk, yoghurt, cheese, bread for toast, eight scones, clotted cream, raspberry jam, toffee pecan Haagen Dazs ice-cream, crisps and mayonnaise-saturated creamy dips. I bought the food and slowly and majestically ate my way through it. It was almost a problem; hunger ravaged my stomach as I planned for my downtime, so I voraciously bought food in anticipation and then had to eat it all, almost unwillingly, timing my intake so as to eat every last piece. It was an orgy of gluttony, my body craving fullness and nutrition.

  I could carry just enough food to keep hunger away while walking, but if I ate camping rations for more than a few days then a hunger would grow, vast and deep, and I could eat and eat when I finally arrived at a generous home, where people had prepared beef stew or a roast dinner, taking multiple helpings and lashings of gravy. I would take the leftover pieces, the final chicken leg, the extra potatoes, adding extra salt to replace all the lost sweat, until I was finally satisfied.

  When I returned to the walk it would be to the hardest bit of territory so far. My old mate Stu came up from Aberystwyth. I skipped ahead of myself to walk the Rhinogs with him on his available weekend, missing out the Moelwyns that connected the route between Snowdon and the Mawddach estuary. I’d go back to that bit after he left.

  The Rhinogs, a set of four peaks and assorted rocky foothills, are definitely the toughest and wildest territory I’d passed through so far in Wales. It would have been a lonely and intimidating time if I’d navigated those mountains alone. But fortunately I had company: someone to discuss maps with, to take lunch breaks with, to share fruit pastilles and keep my spirits up on this tricky terrain.

  Stu was a good guy, coming prepared with a stove and tea-bags and packets of dried food. Always cheery and amenable; I read the maps, he made the tea, we both admired the views. It was a fun weekend.

  When I saw my friend hopping nimbly from rock to rock while I paced behind him I was stunned. How can he do that? He’s 38! That’s older than me! I compared his mountain-goat prancing to my packhorse plod and wrinkled my nose with jealousy. My calves were burning, as I stepped my way laboriously up and down, seriously hampered by my heavy rucksack, having to haul myself up each step, bracing my poles to pull my weight up with my arms rather than burden my weak knees. I felt as if this journey had walked all the bounce out of my knees. They were creaking and clicking to begin with, the result of years of being overweight I suppose, but I was starting to feel as if there was no possible way I could jump off something and have my knees absorb the shock of the landing. I was definitely not a lithe, spontaneous kind of a walker. No, no, I had to lower myself gently, using a tripod of walking poles, carefully avoiding any drop, jolt or jar that might damage my fragile shock-absorbers.

  We started in Maentwrog late on Friday after Stu had finished work and, after a short walk around the far corner of Trawsfynydd lake, we camped by the dam there. There was a day of walking over broken land, split by small rocky gorges that crossed our path; we were forever climbing and descending in small 30m increments – this was the stony tableland leading slowly upwards to the first peak of Moel Ysgyfarnogod. We took a long and arduous route down to Cwm Bychan, a seemingly easy descent that was actually a morass of bracken and heather, a green scramble that grabbed and tangled at us. There weren’t many footpaths apparent in this land, it wasn’t a place where many people came. We saw almost no-one in our fifty-six hours crossing these wild and remote mountains: such a strong contrast to the crowded peaks further north. It was a thin sliver of remoteness, however, almost an illusion. To our right the land dropped down to the coast, a line of settlements along it, farms scattering up higher and higher until the land was too rough to build on. To our left was a stranger place, the plains of Trawsfynydd, a very sparsely populated area surrounding a man-made lake, created to service first a hydro-electric and then a nuclear power station, one that ran for twenty-six years and which, now dead, would take a century to decommission and make safe.

  Rhinog Fawr was the real challenge: first a rocky scramble up the face of it, catching our breaths on small plateaux before continuing the climb. Then there was a long descent down the other side, stopping for lunch at the bottom, mixing Stu’s boiled pasta and my tinned mackerel, before the next climb around tiny lakes to Rhinog Fach, dumping our bags to make the last scramble to the top, then dipping back down before the next steep climb to Y Llethr, this one a dangerous gravel slide: more a sheer eroded slope than an actual footpath.

  We filled our water-bottles where we could, in small
pools, at plant-filled edges, checking for eddies of water movement to make sure it was fresh. There were goats in these mountains – wild, stinking goats, triumphantly horned. We would walk past a series of rustles in bracken, their scent coming to us either long before or afterwards, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

  We spent the last night aligned behind a long, high, stone wall that blocked the chill wind coming up from the Mawddach estuary, only leaving small spools of cold air that spun through the gaps in the stones placed by long dead, gnarled hands. Sheep had trotted a path along the extent of their boundary, leading to a thin compressed track alongside the wall where we could find flat places to make our beds. Stone walls were a beautiful feature of the Rhinogs, seen from great distances, swooping lengths across the land, carefully following the exact contours of the land boundaries. We’d followed a wall for most of that day, making a useful route-guide as it split the land at the highest point, all the way from Y Llethr to Diffwys, the final southern peak in the Rhinog range before the descent to Barmouth. We discussed the difficulty of building these walls: the effort of scrambling and struggling up to the heights, spending the day piling stone on stone, matching edges, weighting them carefully, piling in infinite balance. There was the pulling of the stone from the earth to build the snaking walls, the food these men would have had, bread and cheese, knobbled baked pasties, the clothes, worn woven cotton or woollen waistcoats, patched and mended, greasy caps to keep the wind away, each thread touched by human hand, brought from plant and animal by trial and error to make covering for bare skin. We laid there in our plastic coatings, carefully wrought by machine and computer design and thought of them, the hardy and determined men that built these walls.

  The next morning I scrambled out of bed early and climbed closer to the peak of Diffwys for a wonderful view of the sunrise, Stu following blearily behind me. Grey mist billowed low over the land beyond us, only a few high wisps of clouds glowed pink to herald the sun’s arrival, and we cheered at the entrance of the golden globe, welcoming life to the earth for another day.

  We rushed down over the wide tranche of land descending to Barmouth. Stu had already stepped half-way back into his own world of appointments and house renovations and as he drove away, back to his life in Aberystwyth, I felt a little sense of sadness. I have to carry on doing this? All alone? For another 2000 miles? Through the winter?

  Maybe it was the shock of returning to walk after a five-day holiday, or losing the comfort of walking with a friend, but I suddenly felt like this was all very hard going. The thought of all the hardship yet to come was hovering above me, my own personal doom cloud. During the five days off I’d added a tent to my kit; someone had emailed and offered to post me one from Scotland. I’d said yes without asking about its type or weight. I’d also added a few extra pieces of winter gear – waterproof trousers, gloves, handwarmer – to my pack. Things I’d happily discarded during the spring were reclaimed in anticipation of the wet and cold weather I knew was to come.

  Along with the food I’d added for a few days of wilderness, plus the thick wedge of maps I needed, the weight of my rucksack rose to a staggering 17-18kg. The tent weighed 2.5kg, was a double-skinned, two person, four-season tent. Total overkill. I hadn’t noticed the weight while walking with Stu as we’d shared out my kit between us, but it began to tell on me as I headed away from Beddgelert alone.

  It’s a short day’s walk according to the guidebook, thirteen miles up over Cnicht, curl around behind it through the moorland, over Moelwyn Mawr, down through the foothills and along the side of the steam-railway line towards Maentwrog. It took me two full days of aching shoulders and painful knees, lots of rests and plenty of cursing as I humped my heavy bag over two peaks and through endless boggy foothills. By the time I came to terms with the truth – that the bag was horribly overloaded, that I’d borrowed the wrong, far too heavy tent and would have to take kit out again and send it home – I was far up in the hills with nowhere to dump anything. Sitting puffed out and irritated on a boulder, considering the reduced lifespan of my knee joints, I grumpily ate sandwiches, thinking of every mouthful as taking grams away from the strain on my shoulders.

  The next day was a lesson in the merits of spontaneous wild camping versus advance arrangements with hosts. At about 5.30pm, as I’d been stumbling my way down the side of Moelwyn Fach for a couple of hours, losing my way and having to scramble down a sheer slope, recklessly throwing my rucksack down ahead for the second time, I came to flatter land, softer grass and the treeline began with a grove of autumnal oak. I could sleep here, I thought. Why am I battling and pushing to get to a bed? What is so wrong with wild camping, because right now I’d love to stop here for the night: it’s only because I’ve arranged this bed in advance that I feel I have to get to it at all costs.

  After all that, I reached Maentwrog at 8pm, too late to be able to hitch to Barmouth where a bed and a friendly host awaited me. They didn’t answer their phone so I couldn’t get them to come and pick me up. Instead, I slept in a bus-shelter in a faintly grumpy and sorry-for-myself kind of way, occasional car lights flashing over me. I’d shone my torch through the darkness to illuminate a nearby footpath but decided against the uncertainty. Who knew how far I’d have to walk along the dark path to find a useful sleeping spot. I was going to catch the early bus to Barmouth the following morning, back to the end of the Rhinog path I’d followed with Stu a few days previously, jumping back to the normal order of things.

  I passed through Barmouth, a shoddy, crumbling seaside town. I’d come here for a couple of months during my walk preparation, caring for a woman in the final stages of dementia, her personality degraded to mild smiles and enjoyment of the food I made her, sentences trailing into fragments, a verbal mirror of her fractured neural network. She was a stranger in her own history, sitting amongst her collected ornaments, surrounded by the proof of her life without knowing it at all.

  Never a Victorian parade of a town like Aberystwyth, without the class of Tenby, just a place I came to when I was a child, to stay in huddled trailers, parallel boxes lined along the coast where we could cram in, a mess of children scattering knickers and shoes and supersoakers wherever we ran. Barmouth was a place to eat sweets and play in the sand, gritty between toes, clinging to wet clothing, wind whipping hair against my face and never allowed to go into the amusements, except occasionally the trays of 2p machines. I’m sure they never had gaps at the sides when I was young, holes to swallow your chances in the most blatant way.

  I remembered a rock shop where they had that most glamorous of things, a fried breakfast made out of rock, sweets that were souvenirs, precious riches that you could take home to show you’d been to the sea. We came as a two-parent family, to a rich friend’s holiday home, we came with single parents, always running down past the rock shop and over the railway line, alarm beeping and the barriers closing to allow a train to roll high and gentle across the road itself, metal rails set directly into the tarmac.

  The sweetshop was still there, as was the mystical remembered talisman, the fried breakfast: pale yellow yolk of fried egg sitting uncomfortably on a blob of white, an insipid grey pink sausage and a mass of orange lumps that were baked beans. I couldn’t believe that I’d ever thought this magical. There were other ‘foods’ too; fish and chips, cupcakes, bananas, apples – all solid sugar lumps that didn’t interest me at all. I bypassed the chocolate willies and boobs, lurid neon marshmallows, tins of toffee and fudge, and settled on five sugar mice aligned in a packet, each a different pastel colour with black dotted eyes. They no longer had a string tail trailing behind them but a hygienic paper stick protruding uncomfortably. I spoke to the man behind the counter, grey hair and round glasses, told him that I used to come here when I was a child.

  “Then it was probably me that served you,” he said, smiling, and told me that his family had owned this shop since the 60s.

  I wanted to cry for a benevolent lifetime spent selling sweets to t
ourists, giving them their tacky take-home souvenirs with his kind eyes, taking pride in his history of this place. Sun-reddened customers, mildly drunk. Bare legs and flip-flops, queues outside the chip shop, inappropriate holiday clothing paraded on the north Wales coast. I love Barmouth with its grimy rundown history. It’s tacky, the Carousal café, missing the C from the lettered frontage outside, the discount shops and the inflatable dinghies lolling against shop doorways. It’s a place I might run away to, go and hunker down in the winter and close down like the shopfronts, give up on living, be a shell of a person in this empty town that lives on crowds.

  I stopped in a cheap café for a couple of hours to write a whinging blog about how hard everything was, surrounded by the whiff of cheap frying oil. I also repacked my rucksack, divesting myself of unwanted weight. It was expensive to post the tent ahead but I simply couldn’t walk any further carrying it. This mountain route was feeling like a lot of bloody hard work; no sooner was I over one mountain than I had to walk towards another and climb that one too. It wasn’t walking any more, it was almost scrambling, using my hands and feet to haul myself and rucksack to the top of a steep peak. What was my reward? To look at the view for five minutes and then spend a couple of hours picking my way down, lowering myself slowly and ungainly over rocks and boulders, leaning heavily on my walking poles, knees hurting with every single step. My body had power, I could feel the muscles of my legs working hard, but it was all so much fucking effort. Why was I doing this? Why?

  My mood got better as I walked up Cader Idris. Maybe it was the place I’d slept in the night before: a small copse of beech trees next to a track leading away from an isolated farmhouse with an incongruously well-kept flower-garden. Box hedges and hollyhocks surrounded by the wildness of high pasture. I hadn’t meant to sleep there, I’d crossed the estuary from Barmouth and climbed into the hills but it was still a couple of hours too early to stop. The bouncy grass in the flat spaces between trees was just too inviting, though. A farmer went past me on a quad bike, two sharp-eyed, slinking dogs riding the back of it. He didn’t notice me at first but, at the last minute, caught sight of me out of the side of his vision.