| Jun. 27th, 2009 @ 06:29 pm Walking in Wales |
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I have the weekend off, but train fares plus Sunday's crappy train schedule means it's not worth my traveling back to London. So I decided that today I would go for a walk. I looked some walks up on the internet, but without a map I figured my chances of sticking to their routes was slim.
I found some signs that said Taff Trail so I decided to follow those, but the Taff Trail is very long and my blood pressure was playing up (I have very low blood pressure and half an hour in I started feeling quite dizzy, very annoying) so I figured I wouldn't go the whole way round. As it was I did pretty well I managed to find my way from part the way up the Taff Trail into a Nature Reserve and from there back down along a different river on the other end of the Taff Trail and into Cyfarthfa Castle. It's a fascinating area, 70-250 years ago it would have been a huge centre of industry with coal and iron coming down from the mountains and mills and other works all down the river valleys all powered by water and steam. There are old sections of these buildings all over the river area, over grown and fallen down since river's stopped fueling our industrial base and our coal industry collapsed. It also has many wild strawberry plants :)
  
The nature reserve area is really beautiful and I want to go back there and walk further up that river valley. There was a man made water channel that came off the river and then ran right along it, staying higher than the river, until it filled an artificial lake at the castle. Although the channel is so leaky these days I'm surprised any of the water makes it to the lake.
     
Just before I reached the castle I found a mole on the path that didn't seem to know well enough to leg it at any sign of humanity.
After the castle I walked down Merthyr Tydfil High Street. Although Merthyr is clearly a town that is short on money and jobs, it's not so bad as people make out. I kind of like it. It must have been so different though, before the 1950s. The original train station, now demolished, was built by Isembard Kingdom Brunel to replicate Paddington train station and had six lines running through it. Now only one line runs down towards Cardiff from a tiny brick hut. A giant Tesco's Extra stands on the site of the old station and I finished off my walk with an hour of exciting shopping. I bought an orchid for my room, a large number of 30B bras (who knew such things even existed? most places don't go below 32A), and some dinner.
Then I got back to the Travelodge and watched Dune on C5, good film. I think all in I probably made about 9 miles, I was walking for over four hours but I wasn't going very fast and I stopped for lunch.
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