More than a wet weekend in Wales
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 5 ~ May 19 ~ Treehouse
There's a small ‘honesty’ shop which also has some information about the locality and recommendations. You may notice there's quite a bit about Machynlleth, but it's more “if you need
Our morning plan is to walk to “Power Mountain”, which is a slightly fanciful name for a hill with a lot of wind turbines.
Walking down the road, what's this? It's a radio camera sensor disguised as a wol! Whatever next!
We're on the main road to the farm. It doesn't get a lot of traffic even allowing for treehouse visitors like us.
Amanda is a bit unconvinced that this is where we're supposed to be walking, but it is.
It's a wind farm, all right, and there's an awful lot of wind for them to harvest right now! It's getting quite rainy too, after earlier hints of improvement in the weather turn out to be wishful thinking.
But here we are on the top now, and you can just see a trig point behind us to prove it.
The sheep aren't very interested in wind farms or weather.
We can tell we're high up because we are looking down at this military plane. As a four-engined turboprop, I thought it might have been a Hercules, but I can now reveal that it's actually an Airbus A400M ‘Atlas'. Its design goals include replacing the Hercules, so it's not entirely astonishing that it should look a bit similar. (That's my story, etc...). I have to admit I didn't know Airbus had a military aircraft range before now, and that Wikipedia article linked above is definitely worth reading if you are a bit nerdy.
Back at the treehouse, let's have a selfie. Whether it's a different local microclimate or the day has changed generally we can't say, but it's a lot quieter and drier here.
We're leaving here tomorrow, and we'd like to visit Caernarfon Castle, so Amanda books tickets online. The website seems very clunky, and oops, not sure how, but she seems to have booked for the day after instead. There's no obvious way to make changes on the website, so she emails them to ask if it's possible to change. No reply so far.
And now Amanda will have a swing before we set out on our afternoon walk.
Can't say the morning was hard, weather notwithstanding, but this is supposed to be the easier option.
At first glance, the steps of this stile appear to be on the verge of falling apart, but the odd angles seem to be deliberate.
For a supposedly easy walk, the trail is not exactly broad and clear.
Ah, turns out we made a bit of a mistake. We end up in the same place, but we have had a more adventurous path to get here.
You can just make out the wind farm in the distance.
Interesting... This is definitely the right path, but it's extremely steep [as is often the case, the photo rather flattens out the terrain visually] and Amanda is glad to have her pole with her. We're surprised, because even allowing for our initial error, no way is this an easier walk than the morning route.
We are now starting to complete our loop and this sign may be a clue.
It seems that this is the gate we should have gone through on the outward leg. Obviously the gate is wide enough for a vehicle and there is clear evidence of tyre tracks, but we really don't think it's very horse-and-cart friendly, never mind the symbol on the sign.
This is the gate we actually took! It is marked as a footpath, it wasn't a wholly random choice.
The weather has definitely been better this afternoon, and while we've not had any sun, the wind and rain have moved on.
Still no reply on Caernarfon tickets by the evening, we'll just have to see what happens.
For dinner, we think we'll bake some potatoes in the woodburner. However, our experience baking potatoes in woodburners is limited – well, nonexistent – and the results are not entirely as we had hoped. “Inedible lumps of ash and charcoal” is, I think, a fair description.
And so to bed.
This seemingly unremarkable picture is actually quite an astonishing testament to how little light a good modern camera needs. Back in the film days, it was possible to buy ISO 1600 film, but the quality was pretty horrible and I only ever bought a few rolls to experiment with. ISO 400 would have been the fastest film I'd normally use, so I've simulated what this picture would look like taken on that:
Wow! Even the brightest spots directly under the lights are barely visible!
Should you need to pay a visit in the night, you need to turn on the loo light before going out, there's no switch when you get there.
It's still more like decoration than illumination.
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