St David's to Great Malvern, Sunday 20th

Left-most Land
First stop; the most westerly bit of coast I can find.  Traditionally, people say it's St David's head, but peering at a map, it looks to me like the two other promontories on the St David's peninsula are a tad further out.  Anyway, I'm in my best biking togs and not at all geared up for a long, muddy hike, so I set off by road through the village of Rhosson and on to St Justinians.  There are three houses, one ruined stone barn and a life boat station, tucked in to a fold in the rocky coastline opposite Ramsey Island.

The proud citizens of St Justinian erected a mighty pole to make the exact centre of their community.  They laugh when tourists mistake it for a telegraph pole.

Can't pass through St David's without taking a picture of the cathedral. In daylight, I see there's the ruin of an earlier one just behind it.








Coast Road to Aberystwyth
Now off North East on a wonderful coast road.  It's relatively early on Sundy morning so there is very little traffic.  The road is well surfaced and has just enough bends and hills to flatter one's IAM-honed riding skills without being tediously slow or particularly dangerous.  The weather is by turns misty-meditative and gently sunny - that's two of my top ten, especially for Autumn.

I couldn't resist stopping off at Aberporth airfield.  My company had an office there for a while to work on their unmanned air vehicles, taking advantage of a large volume of the lower atmosphere in that area being set aside for drones.  It's all very exciting technology; spot the bad guys and see what they are up to without ever having to endanger one of those clever pilot chappies.  But it's not terribly photogenic for the passing Sunday traveller.  Try as I might, I just couldn't get a convincing picture of a few cubic miles of controlled airspace.

Not much going on in the UAV centre.










So on to Aberystwyth.  It's one of those once-grand, now rather down-at-heel victorian seaside places.  At one end of a long promenade, there's a bit of a pier - probably a lot shorter than it once was - now almost entirely taken over by one-armed bandits.  At the other end, a gravity tram still runs up and down a hill overlooking the town.

Aberystwyth civic pride.  A bronze of some long-gone worthy outside what must have once been the city hall.
















Severn, Wye and Hergest Ridge
Now turning inland, the road turns into a regular scenic route.  It's quite on a par with roads I've travelled in the Highlands and the Black Forest.  I don't half miss having Mrs S along when I'm having a magnificent ride like this.  Such a pity her back won't let her ride pillion any more.  I'm calling in at the motorcycle show at the NEC tomorrow and I will have a very serious look at sidecars.  I could quite fancy something with a bit of a retro look to it (Triumph Bonneville with Watsonian GP sidecar) so we can go pottering around country lanes together looking like Wallace and Grommit - or if it's night time, Hagrid and Harry.

Two of my formative years were spent in an army apprentices' college on a spit of land where the Wye empties into the Severn and both become the Severn Estuary.  Looking back up the Severn from the college, it went East into Gloucester, then meandered northwards, tracking the M5, in the general direction of the Midlands.  The Wye, on the other hand, came from under the shadow of the Forest of Dean and appeared to emerge from the Welsh hills.  The one river seemed essentially English and the other Welsh.  So I was surprised when I followed them on a map and saw that they both rose on the side of the same Cambrian mountain not far from Aberystwyth.  Going to their source - only a few miles apart - has been on my must-go-there-some-time list ever since.
Well, I still didn't go there - best biking togs, again; long muddy hike - but I did get very close.  My route crossed over the Wye where it is a six-foot wide brook.  Looking on the map, I see it passes under the foot of a mountain called 'Y Foel,' which means 'The Bald One.'  That probably accounts for my attraction to the area...
A few miles on, I made a short detour to the town of Llanidloes, which is the first settlement of any size on the Severn.  I noticed that the Wikipedia entry for the town was ... hm... barbed, shall we say?  The people, it suggested, were at something of a tangent from the norm; due to the large proportion of aging hippies and what not.  The local police call the town 'Planet Idloes.'  In fact, it's really just another little 'ancient market town,' the same as many another.  Well, I did see one person in a layby not far away selling carved tree stumps from a dilapidated camper van, but there were no significant signs of fairy-lovers and crystal-sellers in the town.

The Wye starts up there somewhere, just under The Bald One.

The Severn is already quite substantial as it passes through Llanidloes, only ten miles or so from its source.








But that name; Llanidloes?  I've been studying my Observer Book of Welsh Place Names and have learned that the 'Llan' bit means 'chapel.'  So 'Llansteffan' would be 'Chapel of St Steven's' - or just 'St Steven's' we'd probably say in England.  And 'Llanfair' is 'Chapel of St Mary' ('Mairi' = 'Mary,' right?  Now change the M to F because it follows a consonant.  Then drop the final i because we don't want to make it too easy for the damned English, do we, Bach?)  And 'Llandewi' must be 'Chapel of St David.' (I suppose you can just about see that 'Dewi' and 'David' are related somehow.)  But what about all these other Llans all over the place?  Have you ever heard of a saint with a name anything like 'Idloes?'  Or just down the road, there's 'Llangurig.' Who was Saint Gurig?  I think they're making it up to confuse us.  Maybe they're sneaking in other things than saints' names; maybe 'Llangurig' actually means 'Chapel with a broken window in the vestry where Dai the Asbo chucked a stone.'

Llanripeforrenovation, just off the road above Rhyader.  It might well really be a renovation job.  There's a static caravan just along in the woods where the family could be living until it's sorted.  Watch out for it on the telly on Grand Designs.






Crossing the border into England on the A44, I saw Hergest Ridge on the right.  What Ridge?  Well, it might become famous for being a good place for grandfathers to hold shouted roadside telephone conversations with granddaughters to talk them through the tricky art of powering up a recalcitrant old PC so that it connects to the internet so they can do their homework.  For the few of us who sat around pretending to be deep n' meaningful listening to Tubular Bells (before everybody associated it with The Exorcist), Hergest Ridge was Mike Oldfield's other opus.  I've got it on my smart phone; it's quite ... quite... yeah, it was all pretty pretentious stuff, wasn't it?

Hergest Who?










The weather turned dull and depressing as the afternoon progressed, darkening an already too-short day.  This is my least-favourite weather; not cold, not raining, just ... well, sulking.  I especially hate it on a Sunday afternoon.  It pressages a sort of anticlimactic end to the weekend, with nothing to do but watch old movies, agonise over uncompleted weekend homework and wait for tea time to come and end it all. But hey! I'm on holiday tomorrow, so what do I care?  That said, I do actually have some homework to do, so I'm heading for my next overnight stop, Great Malvern, without further delay.