“You look exhausted,” were his first words to me.
It must have been the way my body slumped against the low stone wall, tucked away from the breeze whipping over the top of it.
“I am,” I said, smiling weakly. He drove away after a few friendly words and I decided to settle there, against the wall; perhaps it was a day I didn’t need to push myself any more.
There was the threat of thunder coming up from the south of the country, a night of big storms and hard rain for others. But I heard nothing more than the faintest of rumbles in the depths of the night, a tender breath of spotting rain making me snuggle further down inside my warm cocoon, thinking of the tattered edges of the storm blowing by, far above me.
The following morning, Cader had become a cauldron, overflowing with white mist that rippled down the cliff edge, oozing down the sides of the mountain 700 metres above me. I’d never seen it this way before, apparently full of mist on the other side but clear blue sky above me. I came along the valley to the northwest of the mountain. I could have cut across the reedy, high land, climbed the heights of Tyrrau Mawr and come across to the Cader peak from the west but I knew the effort that would take, the picking around wet patches, shaggy clumps of moor grass ready to roll my ankles, the steep slope towering above me waiting to reduce my efforts down to small steps and long rests for breath.
Instead, I took the Pony Path, the easy, steady climb up to the edge of the horseshoe, my favourite mountain, looking from the peak over a bowl of cloud, as far as I could see. It was a slow descent to the car park, the hundreds of steps on the Minffordd Path testing my aching knees, lowering myself awkwardly with the help of my flagpoles. I slept in that car park, hiding myself from the main drag behind a line of trees, too tired to walk any further.
The next day’s trek was long but easier, somehow: across a set of high hills that curled around the northern edge of the Dyfi Forest, the great basin of pine trees dropping away to my right. I’d walk from gentle peak to gentle peak before dropping down to spend the night in Dinas Mawddwy. I realised that the land had changed, these weren’t rocky steep mountains any more but peaty hills, gentler and easier to traverse. I’d made it over the highest points of Snowdonia and nothing would be so difficult again.
During a break that day, I found myself chanting Shu-Gar-Mouse, Shu-Gar-Mouse as I rummaged, elbow-deep in my rucksack, feeling my way around the odd shapes I knew so intimately; there was my book, my socks, my first aid kit. And there were the mice, snuggled down at the bottom, three left in the packet. I stopped the chant, laughing at myself but also a little shocked as I realised how much I was relying on this sweetness. It was something I was starting to need, a boost to get me through the late afternoon energy-dip. Was I becoming an addict without realising it?
At times, I’d go to sit in a café for a while, pot of tea, extra hot water to eke it out, palming handfuls of peanuts or the trail mix that I could chew endlessly but never to satisfaction. Having denied myself a sandwich or toast or a slice of cake, thinking of the cost, I’d find myself chewing sugar-lumps, wolfing pure energy, putting anything into my body to satisfy a gnawing urgent hunger, enjoying the sharp sweetness of an entire sugar cube, sucking it against the roof of my mouth until it disintegrated into sweet juice and crystal crunch.
The Cader-Idris good mood remained as I walked further south. As the terrain became easier to cross I could see what I’d come through and understand that maybe I was suffering because this was hard, not because I was weak and rubbish. I’d also walked into the mid-Wales area where my morale-boosting friends were; I could stay with Jackie in Dinas Mawddwy, Annie in Comins Coch, Heloise in Llanidloes, Anna in Swyddffynnon and then Alice in Tregaron. A neat row of stopping points.
The day after leaving Dinas Mawddwy I came down the side of the hill and onto Annie’s land. Grandmother Annie herself came out to meet me, with granddaughter Amma who cried my name, running forward to give me a hug.
Annie was a major source of strength. We’d met during recovery from our respective illnesses and had bonded over life-changing events, talking of how it felt to experience a before and after, two strong and single women, finding their way through a changed world where we were suddenly weak and vulnerable. Now I came to her calm and strong; she’d planted woods and I’d set out walking, we’d both come to the other side of our healing. I sat in the barn with her family and found I couldn’t speak. The song of the mountains roared at too low a pitch to ever tingle my insubstantial ears but, after walking in the high places all day, I felt it as a vibration of spirit, an imbalance of self. My senses had extended out of my body while I was high up there, pennants of spirit had fluttered around me, flying out in the wind where the turbines whirled and groaned. I had a distinct sensation of having to pack myself back into my body before I could organise my mouth to make conversation, spirit breathing heavily after a long exercise, like lungs too small to take the air they need. I’d grown, out there, the wind whirling my senses out to the horizons, in sight of the hills calling out to the sky.
Occasionally, for a treat, I’d buy a loaf of bread, some butter, cheese and pâté, maybe chutney or onions or cucumber, and make a stack of sandwiches, folding them carefully back into the loaf wrapper, wobbling with the accumulated fillings. They’d last a couple of days as I rationed them out, two sandwiches twice a day. It was a nice break from the stark repetition of my usual rations but way, way too much weight for my shoulders. A loaf plus cheese and fillings became more than 2kg of sandwich. I’d enjoy eating them, though with decreasing pleasure as the repetition became tedious. The final sandwiches were a bit of a chore, squashed bread sweaty and slimy – although I’d eat them, it was tasty calories and still better than my dried food. I did this at Annie’s place, packing sandwiches in her barn kitchen to see me over to the other side of Plynlimon.
The next mountain was barely a mountain at all, my third visit to Plynlimon. I’d cross it from north to south this time and with company: my friend and inspiration, Hannah Englekamp. She’d walked 1000 miles around the border of Wales with a donkey the year before I set off on my walk, combining a hardy, intrepid attitude with great photos and humorous blogging updates. All that plus a donkey made it the perfect public journey. We met for our first coffee in the late-2013 gap between our journeys, and found a shared adventurous spirit: her in the tingling afterglow of a walk successfully completed and me in the nervously twitching, wide-eyed preparatory stage.
It mizzled all day. Low cloud coated the tops of the hills as we walked, first winding through the lower moorlands, around lakes and crossing boggy valleys. Fortunately, at the end of a fairly dry summer, the water was in the air and not the ground, so we could cross the bogs without too much bother. Tufted white grasses burst from cracked brown peat, trodden with sheep hoofprints. Then we climbed into grey drizzle as it whipped diagonally past the thistleheads and dried grasses. It was still a good day, though; we wrapped ourselves in waterproofs, me rolling my flags up to avoid their unpleasant wet flapping against my face. We took silly photos at the summit, dipped our empty water-bottles into the peaty pools of the high places, tasted the brown tinged liquid, and decided the distinctly earthy flavour might make a good whisky mixer but otherwise should definitely be used for survival only. We drank as little as possible until we descended; this wasn’t fresh water any more.
We camped in the rain, me using a newly borrowed truly lightweight tent for the first time; it turned out that Hannah had the same model and showed me tricks to get the fabric perfectly taut. We sat in our individual cocoons, chatting through small gaps in our zipped-up doorways, pushing pieces of sandwiches and pork pie through to each other, alternating swigs from a bottle of brandy. Hannah spurned my bag of trail mix after the first handful; I’d been adding varied packets of snacks into it without thinking, so Bombay mix and salted peanuts rubbed dusty shoulders with yoghurt raisins and dried apricots. I was happy to munch at whatever flavour presented itself, enjoying the salt-swee
t combination, but sensed she was faintly disgusted!
It was my first day of walking and camping in proper rain for months, and it felt like a foretaste of the difficulties ahead. Hannah was relentlessly cheery in the face of my grumbles and I realised that I was feeling a bit ground down and worn out; the accumulation of so many months of effort revealed in the warm light of her fresh energy. It was good to experience someone else’s positive attitude and realise that my own miserable one was just that, an attitude, a state of mind. I could enjoy this more, if I decided to.
Coming down to Cwmystwyth, where I said goodbye to Hannah, I reached Anna’s patch and she whisked me home to a place where I could hang my sodden clothing and take a bath. She didn’t normally drink, but had a dusty bottle for Christmas recipes so we improvised with Amaretto and milk cocktails, giggling at their deliciousness. My tent was still damp the next morning and I used it as a thinly-veiled excuse to take a day off. I was groggy and unwilling, preferring to spend the day drinking repeated cups of tea and eating Welsh cakes. I oiled my boots, waiting for the oil to sink into the thirsty leather before reapplying. I oiled a leather satchel of hers too, a small token of gratitude.
The path from Cwmystwyth led upwards, winding from tarmac road to farm track to footpath, up along the edge of a deep wooded valley and into the high places, where trees didn’t grow and there were no fences, just a landscape of rippling grasses and rolling land, where the sheep could roam for miles, the land soaked in water, pools and small lakes springing up. Up here the grass was short and coarse with long seed-stalks, silver brown in colour, harder wearing against the colder temperatures and strong winds. A rocky cairn stood high up on a nearby outcropping, ritual monuments built in the Bronze Age, marking death, talking to the gods.
On the way up, where the path took me around a ruined cottage, there was a gate beside a row of hawthorn trees, where, hanging on the fence, was a heavy carrier bag. I’d found it there when I walked this route months earlier with Gregorwicz the Pole but had left it behind in case someone came back for their forgotten booze. I checked inside. Treasure! Four full cans of Strongbow!! They’d been swinging here for weeks. I couldn’t resist and washed water over the mouth of the cans, rubbing round the tops with a dirty finger, opened one and drank it down. A light alcohol dizziness made the next few hours mildly more enjoyable than usual.
I reversed the steps I’d taken with Greg, months earlier, eventually swinging right to descend a steep slope, treading carefully down on the bouncy grass to bring me to the only house in the landscape. A curlicue of tarmac far in the distance was the only other mark that humans had lain here. Down in the dip where a stream curved the cottage was a long-abandoned structure now maintained as a bothy for travellers. An open house that I can just walk into and sleep in for free? A long-distance walker’s dream. In trepidation, I pressed down the latch and opened the door; inside were a set of dark, empty rooms. It was a cold place, sparse and unclean. I could feel the empty energy, the lack of anyone there to make it a home. A great open fireplace stretched across the side of one room containing an old range, ovens on either side of a small grate. Smoke-marks blackened the beams and plumed out across the once white ceiling. Inexperienced people had made scatty, scavenged fires here, filled the room with smoke many times over, graffitied names covered every wooden surface. It felt like a sad shell of a house, once a wholesome farming cottage, reduced to an anonymous shelter, disrespected.
I had a picnic to eat, courtesy of Anna, who brought my bag to the bothy, children trailing around her, leaving a bag of sandwiches and a tin of gin and tonic. I drank another can of cider and left the gin on a shelf, a gift for another walker. That night I had a proper twelve hours’ sleep; without electricity or phone reception there was nothing to keep me awake beyond dusk. It felt strange at first, trying to sleep in a house with unlocked doors. I felt frightened of noises, aware of every creak, thinking of ghosts, intimidated by the dark and empty space surrounding me. I checked under the bed platform before laying out my bed on it. How foolish, I thought, that I would feel more secure lying against a wall outside. Eventually, though, I slept thick and deeply, dawn light failing to wake me, only able to creep through small windows.
The guidebook told me to keep wild, stay on the higher hills and make a straight line south towards Soar y Mynydd, but instead I dropped down into Tregaron to spend a night with Alice and her mother in their tiny terraced weaver’s house. I sat down in a low, high-sided chair beside the stove and watched their tall, thin figures moving around the kitchen, stooping over the table to prepare food: the kitchen’s coal range forming the warm belly of the tiny cottage. There was something very ancient about the close darkness of the warm kitchen, the way houses would have been before insulation allowed warmth to spread beyond a fireside.
I headed out of Tregaron with a newly heavy rucksack, adding in a couple of parcels I’d sent ahead of myself: such essentials as waterproof trousers and a new set of maps. I’d taken the trousers out at Barmouth and then added them in again. I had to admit that I needed them, even though they were heavy and I still hated wearing them. Then a couple more days’ food made it up to a heavy load. At the last minute, feeling foolish, I slipped in a massive book that Alice wanted to lend me. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I just couldn’t seem to stop loading myself up, everything seemed either essential or insignificant. Each small item was so trivial in weight and volume, but together they were adding up to a load that was hurting me and restricting my ability to walk. I just couldn’t seem to stop carrying stuff.
I trudged up the hills east towards the Cwm Berwyn forest, sun rippling on the hills, bringing out the colours of the browning bracken. There were two birds fighting in the sky above me; squealing and flapping they flew hard to get above one another and claw in, talons first. They flew out of sight, above the trees, but they continued to call in anger until a single bird flew silently back to the rocks, his peace defended.
At the top of the forest I turned right into a stretch of about three miles of pathless bog. It took longer than the five miles of road to negotiate, stepping my way carefully between clumps of grass, feeling ahead with my sticks, pushing through sometimes chest-high reeds. Not impossible, just tiring. I fell over once, clumsily sinking backwards as one of my poles unexpectedly pushed deep into the water and I wasn’t balanced enough to keep upright. There was panic as my big rucksack weighted me down and I was unable to right myself, flailing like an upturned beetle. Fortunately I was cushioned on the reeds and didn’t get wet, just slowly turned over with my big shell on my back and pushed myself upright. There’s an alien feeling about bog-walking, it’s a place humans are truly unsuited to; the ground is tough to manoeuvre over, treacherous, it’s difficult to find safe places to step, water is always sucking at your feet. Every step could find deep or shallow water, it’s impossible to tell. I struggled and pushed along, the forest running alongside me behind a fence, ground rising to the left of me. I was descending into a wide-bottomed dip, where water collected and began to make a stream.
My walking pole, searching and poking for hard support amongst the water-pockets and slurping mosses, brushed aside the hanging reeds to reveal a frog, small and squat and perfectly at home on the root-riven wetness. I had a very strong feeling of his rightness here, the place where he could live comfortably, being here in the wetness, his skin balanced inside and out. I felt our contradiction as I passed over this ground, clothed in protective material, seeking safety elsewhere.
There was a hostel ahead, Ty’n Cornel. I thought it might be a bit early to stop and didn’t want to spend money on a bed when I could camp. On the other hand, it’s one of two independently-run hostels in the area, sold on as unprofitable by the YHA and kept going by the love and dedication of volunteers. I wanted to at least stop in and see what was there.
It was raining again as I came towards the small farmhouse, and the forecast told me it would rain all night. The door was opened by Russ, the friendly v
olunteer warden who led me into the dark hallway, where I could see through to a front room with open fireplace and rocking chairs. I knew I had to stay there for the night and learn more about the place: its history as a farmhouse and hostel, last lived in in 1953, sold to the YHA by the farmer in the late 60s on condition that he remained as warden.
One bad thing happened at Ty’n Cornel and it was pretty awful. I was issued with a sheet sleeping-bag that had a panel to stuff a pillow into at the top, it pulled taut between the pillow and the bed and I woke up in the middle of the night with the muscles of my neck in solid spasm.
Whenever I camped I would bundle my clothing under my head as a makeshift pillow; it was never quite right and would condense into a hard and low lump that I was forever trying to mound and mash high enough to relax onto. I’d regularly wake up with a stiff neck from my poor pillow-substitute but that morning in the hostel was even worse. I couldn’t raise my arms above my head or even pull a hat on without neck pain. I could still walk but I felt awful – further pain on top of my existing struggles was too much to handle. I set off – I had to – stopping every so often to work the muscles of my neck and shoulders with my fingers, trying to soften away the tension. Fortunately I could still wear my rucksack; the thick straps bore down on my shoulders, stretching my inflexible neck into discomfort, but it was a manageable burden.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 20