Black Mountains walk

We stayed at the Weatherspoons in Tewksbury on the Thursday night – good location to split the drive up. On leaving we found a nice deli doing sandwiches called ad1471. For anyone into cheeses its worth calling in.

Our plan for the Friday was to do a walk en route to driving to Merthyr Tydfil, where we were going to be based. We found a walk in the Cicerone guidebook ’Walking on The Brecon Beacons’. We picked walk 40, the shorter version. We started in Crickhowell where we headed up to a farm and across fields to a wooded area. The path climbed up along the river through the woods. In the book it was noted that in spring the ground is covered in spring flowers but due to the cold weather everything is late. Where the river tumbled over the rocks the water had frozen into little waterfalls. Once out of the woods we climbed up to a rocky outcrop called Darren before climbing to the summit of Pen Cerrig-calch.

The going was tough as the snow had frozen and it looked like it had rained at one point and then frozen on top. So every time we stepped on the snow we crashed through the ice. However from the summit we had good views looking out over the Black Mountains, although an icy wind meant we didn’t stay for long. From there we retraced our steps, back through the snow and ice, before picking up the path back through the woods and down to the car.