Saturday, August 16, 2008

Filling in another small gap, and some new leaflets

On Friday 8 August we sought to fill in small gap in our coverage of the Coastal Path, between Porth Trecastell (Cable Bay) and Porth Cwyfan. When we started out on doing the coastal path, this little bit wasn't necessarily part of it, and it's not shown in our 2005 edition of the OS Explorer 262 map, either. The "at the time of writing" in the Official Guide seemed a little tentative, too.

Still, we needn't have worrried as the path was clear enough on the ground. A little sign says it's permissive path, which means (in this case) you can use it any time but the 10th of December each year.

Having walked round over the headland from Porth Trecastell as far as Llangwyfan-isaf, we tried to make a circular walk of it by returning first along the road past Plas Llangwyfan, then crossing the A4080 towards the small church of St. Mary's Llangwyfan. We found that the first footpath to the left indicated on the Explorer 262 wasn't there, or at least didn't have an entry from the road, so we proceeded to the next one, just after the church. This brought us back via farmhouses Rhosmor and Cnwc, towards Porth Trecastell. We also found that the path down to the beach isn't the straight line suggested by Explorer 262: it is necessary to turn sharp left to leave the rocky crag to your right before proceeding along a track at the base of this sandy valley.

A number of Stonechats seen on this walk.

We have also come across some new leaflets of circular walks - available here as pdfs or by post from here. We've covered many of these walks, or bits of them, already. First impressions of these leaflets not very good - walkers like us need to know the length and difficulty stright off, which unlike many of our guidebooks, these don't give.