Spring 2010 part 1:
Winter clings on - wanderings around Glaslyn and Bugeilyn
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March
21st arrives and with it the Vernal Equinox and the feeling that Winter
has finally packed its bags and left, with temperatures at last hitting
double figures by day and the sun feeling warm. This is of course
premature as snow and frost can occur pretty much anytime into the
Spring, but a touch of optimism feels like a good idea!
Winter has really clung on this year, especially up in the hills, where
the dry and often sunny weather has seen me out for a walk or two. Only
in the past few days have the tinder-dry anticyclonic conditions abated
with some much-needed rainfall - March has been a very dry month
indeed, with a spate of big grassland fires occurring. More about that
further down: we'll start with a Sunday afternoon stroll on the 7th,
when I parked-up at the top of the Machynlleth-Llanidloes Mountain
Road, from where this was the telephoto view towards Plynlimon:
This is all excellent walking country with a network of good tracks and
footpaths, one of the latter being well sought-after on the southern
flank of Moel Fadian. After a quarter-mile of crunching across frozen
bog and tussocks, I picked it up and in no time arrived at the summit
trig-point at 564m...
The view south-west from the summit across
to Plynlimon is one of the best aspects of the latter mountain:
however, with the low afternoon sun in the same direction, all attempts
to get a decent image failed miserably! I dropped off the western end
of the ridge and skirted around the top of the great ravine of
Esgairfochnant, itself black in shadow, bit nicely framing the
Tarrenhendre-Tarren Y Gesail ridge across the Dyfi Valley:
Continuing
on across deep-frozen bog and deep heather, I met the path to Glaslyn
and walked around it anticlockwise. At its SW end, thin ice-floes had
been aggregated together by the constant SE wind of the last few days:
Here's
a detail. Wind is a very competent agent for moving and piling up ice:
the same thing happens with the sea-ice in the Arctic - but on a much,
much greater scale!
Here's a retrospective
of the route, with the summit of Moel Fadian in the distance:
From the exit path from Glaslyn, I followed the main track back to the
road. It was heavily banked-up with deep snow in places; fortunately,
freeze-thaw cycles had left the snow hard enough to walk over without
sinking in....
On the 9th, I spotted a few Celandines along roadsides closer to the
coast. Normally, these would be everywhere by now - everything is
incredibly late following the coldest UK winter since that of 1978-79.
I remember those late-seventies winters well - there were two harsh
ones in a row. In February 1978 I had a silly mishap on the Glyderau in
Snowdonia: hopelessly ill-equipped (one ice-axe, no crampons, crappy
sheepskin mitts) I was ascending Bristly Ridge where an awkward
rock-step demanded more tactile ability than the frozen-solid mitts
permitted. So I took them off and whilst trying to pocket them managed
to drop one. The move made, I arrived at the top of the ridge with
completely numb fingers. It was so cold, with iron-hard snow and a
60mph Easterly wind, that earlier in the day I had discovered my
plastic bottle of orange squash, deep in my rucksack, was completely
frozen solid.
As the circulation returned to my fingers, with it there came a pain
that can accurately be described as akin to putting your hands into a
flame and leaving it there! Eventually it subsided, but in the days
that followed the skin on my fingertips split all over the place and a
visit to the GP revealed the first case of frostbite he had ever seen
(he was in Dorridge, a rather sleepy West Midlands
village-cum-suburb!). Fortunately, it was the only case of frostbite I
have had, too! Before venturing into the higher mountains again in
winter conditions, I had made sure that I had amassed the correct
equipment for the job. Believe you me, if you ever get frostbite,
you'll do everything in your power to avoid getting it again!
Dry conditions in the late Winter-early Spring period are the time when
controlled burning of heather, gorse and grass is undertaken - before
the nesting season gets underway. Again on the 9th, I watched this burn
being done near Abertafol:
Here's a zoom-out. It is not without attendant risks though as the dead
vegetation and litter on the ground are all tinder-dry. There have been
a number of larger blazes in recent weeks: on the 17th there was a
major blaze near Caersws that lit up the night sky - I was coming back
from Newtown and was cursing not having a camera with me - according to
reports I have read, 38 firefighters attended that incident....
On the 14th, another Sunday stroll was mooted: this time I
decided on a longer route - out to Bugeilyn, where I found a beautiful
arrowhead last summer amongst the old peat-diggings. Had the
frost-heave brought any others to the surface? There was only one way
to find out! Here's the view down to Bugeilyn farm with the lake beyond:
The arrowhead-search merely served to confirm that they are an
extremely rare find! What was interesting, though, was the
permafrost-like layer of ice, several inches down in the peat, and a
testimony, on a mild day, to how deeply Winter has bitten up here in
the hills. On my return I followed Bugeilyn's western shore, passing
the out-take that sends water down via a tunnel to Nant-y-Moch - these
lakes all being part of the Rheidol hydro-electric power station's
supply:
By the time I reached the northern end of the lake again, it was a
beautiful sunny afternoon and quite warm out of the stiff nor-westerly
breeze.....
Heading back up past
the ruin of Bugeilyn farm with its attendant grove of weatherbeaten ash
and Hawthorn....
Beyond the farm, the track passes into the Glaslyn Nature Reserve - one
of Montgomery Wildlife Trust's reserves, encompassing a mixture of
heather moor and regenerating moor where there was improved grassland.
It's being allowed to go back to nature. I decided to head for the edge
of the escarpment that looks down into the Dyfi Valley: difficult-going
in the summer with only sheeptracks and deep bogs, the fact that the
ground was still frozen made life a lot easier. I headed out for the
indistinct top of Foel Esgair-y-llyn, passing this minature pool
en-route, with Moel Fadian in the background....
Foel Esgair-y-llyn
throws a graceful ridge down northwards from its top, a feature that
dominates the view looking up towards the escarpment from the mountain
road. Here's the view down into the valley, with Tarrenhendre, Cadair
Idris and Dyfi Forest forming the background. But the main reason to
visit this top was the view back towards the ravine of Esgairfochnant.
It was in shadow at this point but eyeballing the clouds overhead I
felt sure it would become nicely-illuminate in due course, so getting
out of the wind, I sat down in the heather and waited.... and waited...
Finally, after over half an hour, I managed to get this shot in dappled
sunlight:
The whole ravine is not visible in the above image.....
This is one taken from well down in the ravine, around about 1994. A
mate and I explored it top to bottom, abseiling the occasional
rock-step and sliding on scree/clattering across disintegrating slabs
for the remainder. It's a most unusual feature for Central Wales, but
its formation has been due to the shattered nature of the host-rocks -
faulted mudstones of the lower Silurian Cwmere Formation. Most slopes
are so steep and so mobile that nothing much has managed to gain root
purchase on them. The rusty colour is due to the high pyrite content of
the mudstone - this weathering to iron oxides. As an idea of scale, the
highest gully visible in this image takes two 50m fixed ropes to climb
back up - much easier with jumars to pull on as everything underfoot is
disintegrating and sliding back down!
Here's a zoom-out with Glaslyn to the R - which is where I headed for
before returning along the track to where I'd parked.
Two excellent walks, then: in the days since, several of us have been
extremely busy organising the launch of our Transition Initiative,
which was a very enjoyable event held at Y Plas, Machynlleth, on March
18th. Talking of which, my personal Transition Project #1 - the
veg-garden - will be OK to plant by early April - several weeks later
than last year but with the soil needing to warm up a bit, that's no
bad thing. Sure beats having everything coming up anaemic-looking and
stunted!
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