During World War II, my mother served in the Women’s Land Army of Great Britain. She and her sister were assigned to work on farms in the Welsh countryside while Welsh farmers went off to fight in the war. She told me that it was dirty and hard work; but then her eyes would always twinkle a little and she’d smile and she’d say, “…of course Wales is the most beautiful country in the world.”
One night while my wife was watching Juno on Netflix, I started doing Google searches. I started thinking about my mother’s life and without much thought I googled “walk in Wales”. I was surprised by how many providers there are to help you plan and go on a walking tour in Wales. I recently retired, four months shy of my sixty-fourth birthday after heart surgery. I was looking for some excitement, and the more I read about Wales, the more exciting the idea of walking through a part of the Welsh countryside became.
pembrookshire path
Since we were going to be in Scotland for part of the summer, a trip to Wales seemed easy. There are many options for walking in Wales. Generally the north is more rugged than the south. I started looking south and came across the Pembrookshire Coastal Path, a national park in Wales. The actual trail is 143 miles long and they say if you are fit you can do it in 12-14 days. If you are really fit, you can do it in 10-11 days. It runs along the south coast of Wales, turning north at the western edge. Jean asked if the path had access to go back and forth, and when I found out that it did, she suggested that about half that length might be better. And so we found a great route from north of St. Davids to St. Dogmaels. It’s 61.2 miles and can easily be done in six days. Walking north we had the added benefit of having the wind at our back, which turned out to be a very good asset in our favour. I chose my provider and we booked it for the third week of July.
During the previous two weeks in Scotland, I checked the BBC weather report every night. And every night the weather and forecast in Wales was the same. Rain, wind and more rain. It seemed like we had six wet days ahead of us. But we were committed, we’d paid our vendor upfront, and there didn’t seem to be anything we could do other than make sure we moved our rain suits from our golf bags to our backpack.
On the 12th of July we flew from Glasgow to Cardiff and arrived in brilliant sunshine. Our driver was excited because he hadn’t seen the sun in three weeks. We spent Saturday night in St. Davids and toured the historic St. David’s Cathedral before an early night. On Sunday morning, following instructions, we went to St. David’s Town Hall, where at 9:00 am a small coastal bus called the Strumble Shuttle arrived to take us to a boathouse on St. Justinians beach, the point starting point of our walk. There was a fine mist in the air. Not rain, but enough fog to break out rain suits. Within two hours the rain suits were back in the pack and the day was turning bright and sunny. That continued to be our weather pattern for the next six days.
The Pembrookshire path is well marked with posts displaying the symbol of an acorn. Acorn poles often contained a second symbol, this one of a man falling off a cliff, which I think he is there to remind us walkers to pay attention. Most of the cliffs you walk on have drops of up to 400 feet into the ocean. Our providers prepared us well. We had an excellent guide written by two guys who are professional walkers and writers about walking. They had precise notes to accompany their hand-drawn maps, which provided great detail. Their hand drawn maps were the perfect complement to the official map of the coast that they also provided us.
How is?
The walk? Well, it’s a bit tough. “Walking, climbing huge rocks, and going up and down huge hills” might be a better description. Some of the ups and downs are quite steep. We hike through farmer’s fields, on paved paths through small towns and along the edge of cliffs. We had the constant company of sheep, wild goats, horses, and cows. The only time I was really scared was on the last day when we crossed our last few mountains towards St. Dogmaels. If you watched the British Open this summer, you may remember the tastes of 50 mph winds they had along the British coast on Saturday. As those winds howled, we were hiking down a trail eighteen inches wide and just a couple feet from a 400 foot drop down a slate rock cliff. The pint at the end of this walk was undoubtedly the best of the trip.
Along the way we put a wide variety of interesting people. These are not organized rides. You are alone and you go at your own pace. But we were constantly passing people walking in the opposite direction or us heading north. It seemed that every time I stopped to catch my breath after a particularly steep ascent, a small man who looked to be in his 80s streaked past, saying, “Good morning. Good day for a walk, isn’t it?” At a stop in the town of Newport, we shared some banana bread with a twenty-year-old Slovenian woman. She must have had 50 pounds on her back while she was camping and cooking along the trail. She told us that she was averaging 15 miles per day, which we had no trouble believing as we watched her take off up a steep hill.
We would walk around eight hours in a day and spend every night in a B&B arranged by our supplier, who even showed up every morning to move our luggage from one B&B to the next. Some of the most interesting people we met were the people who owned and operated these B&Bs. Several of them were young, middle-aged Englishmen who had given up the London rat race to buy and operate a B&B in Wales.
words of wisdom
The best advice we received before our trek was this:
1. Buy good, low-cut walking shoes and start breaking them in at least four weeks before your hike.
2. Walk six miles a day four times a week for at least a month before your walk.
3. Buy a good cane.
But the absolute best advice I discovered was on the first page of the guide. “Take your time. Stop to take in the views. Take pictures. Don’t focus on how much further you have to go today.”
We followed that suggestion and enjoyed our hike because of it. I’ve told my friends that I’m glad I did it and I’m glad it’s over. But I loved her and now I can smile back at my mum and nod her head when she says ‘Wales is the most beautiful country in the world’.