During World War II, my mother served in Great Britain’s Women’s Land Army. She and her sister were assigned to work on farms in the Welsh countryside while the 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 shine a little bit 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 Netflix’s Juno, I started doing Google searches. I started to think about my mother’s life and without much thought I googled “walking in Wales”. I was amazed at how many providers there are to help you plan and run 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 road
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’re 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 trail had access to come and go, 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 backs, which turned out to be a very good asset for us. I chose my provider and we booked it for the third week of July.
For the previous two weeks in Scotland, I checked the BBC weather report every night. And every night the weather and forecast in Wales were the same. Rain, wind and more rain. It looked like we had six wet days ahead of us. But we were committed, we had paid our supplier in advance 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 going to bed early. On Sunday morning, as instructed, we went to St. David’s City Hall, where at 9:00 a.m. a small coastal bus called the Strumble Shuttle arrived to take us to a boathouse on St. Justinians Beach, the point starting point for our trek. There was a fine mist in the air. Not rain, but enough mist to break down rain suits. Within two hours the rain suits were back in the backpack and the day was turning bright and sunny. That remained our weather pattern for the next six days.
The Pembrookshire Way is well marked with posts displaying an acorn symbol. 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 along drop 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 with.
What it’s like?
The walk? Well, it’s a bit sturdy. “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 walked through farm fields, on paved roads 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 mountains to St. Dogmaels. If you watched the British Open this summer, you may remember the 50 mph wind likes they had along the British coast on Saturday. As those winds howled, we walked down an eighteen-inch-wide trail and just a couple of feet from a 400-foot drop down a slate rock cliff. The pint at the end of this walk was, without a doubt, the best of the trip.
Along the way we put a wide variety of interesting people. These are not organized tours. You are alone and go at your own pace. But we were constantly passing people walking in the opposite direction or us heading north. It seemed like every time I stopped to catch my breath after a particularly steep ascent, a small man who looked to be in his 80s flashed by and said, “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 way. She told us that she was averaging 15 miles a day, which we had no trouble believing as we watched her take off up a steep hill.
We walked around eight hours a day and spent every night in a B&B arranged by our provider, 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 abandoned 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 enjoy 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 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.”