I think this counts as a microadventure. It didn’t involve wild camping or sleeping outside but there was a fair amount of walking, some of it in pretty terrible conditions so I’m counting it as the February entry in the year of adventure.
We’d been given a voucher for Canopy and Stars by some friends for our wedding and had finally gotten around to actually booking somewhere. A lot of places on that site need you to book for a week or a minimum of 3 nights which is a bit frustrating but eventually we found somewhere after speaking to the company.
We booked two nights at the Shepherd’s Hut at Argoed, near Brecon
So plan was to leave work earlyish on Friday, get the train out to Reading where we would pick up a hire car and then drive to Brecon. I got the hire car through Budget, a 10min walk from Reading station for the great price of £41 until Sunday afternoon. There wasn’t a problem or extra charge with dropping it off out of hours either so this worked out perfectly and something I’d definitely look at doing again.
Saturday we got up fairly early to a cooked breakfast in the main house and then drove into the park to attempt a fairly ambitious walk around the Brecon Beacons. The weather was not good, it had been snowing the past few days and visibility was very poor when we got out of the car. I was excited and up for the challenge of some more difficult navigation and conditions but I probably underestimated just how bad it could be.
As we got up to Corn Du the wind was coming in very strongly and the snow was quite thick. I don’t have any photos as neither of us really wanted to hang around and take photos. Sarah had injured herself earlier slipping on the snow and so we decided to come down off the hill and cut the walk short. We walked down past a lot of people heading up in jeans and trainers – not sure they knew what they were letting themselves in for. Everyone else along the ridge was in full Goretex plus crampons. Once you got down out of the cloud the weather was pretty reasonable though, amazing the difference up at the top.
So back to the hut and then later we walked down to the Felin Fach Griffen for dinner. This is a great gastropub with fantastic food which was a lot better than I was expecting in a random Welsh village.
The next day the weather wasn’t much better so we decided on a low level walk to the waterfall at Sgwd yr Eira. This is a big waterfall which you can actually walk around the back of and was good to go and see. It was interesting seeing the remains of gunpowder works along the way as well and to see the different varieties of landscape. This walk worked out a bit longer than expected though as we took a wrong turning at one point, deceived by what looked like a place to cross the river. After weighing up our chances of wading across or building some sort of bridge or stepping stones we doubled back on ourselves, adding about an extra 45min to the walk. This was a lesson to carry more food than you think you’ll need – by the end I was starving. However, I can vouch that a long walk outside will do wonders for hangovers brought on by excessive wine, beer, food and whisky.
So despite the lack of any camping, I’m going to call this my February microadventure. I’ll be looking for an excuse to go back to the Brecon beacons as we had a great time.
What would I do differently next time?
- Give more respect to the weather forecast and adjust plans where necessary – should have come up with a different walk for the Saturday
- Be sure on where river crossings are
- Carry more food than I think I’ll need