Out of Lockdown: a Trip to Brecon

We have finally been released from captivity!

“Stay at Home” changed to “Stay Local” in Wales in mid-March, and was further relaxed to allow travel throughout Wales from 27 March 2021. No travel was allowed into or out of Wales at that point though; travel in Wales was only for Welsh residents. It was time to start booking a trip….

We decided that the Brecon Beacons would be a perfect destination. It’s in Wales, so we wouldn’t be relying on restrictions being further relaxed over the border in England to allow us to travel. Also, its attractions are mainly outdoors, an important point as museums and other indoor venues were still all closed in both Wales and England.

Normally, we flit around on our tours, stopping a night or two in each location as we visit all manner of historic sites, museums etc. Flitting around seemed a bit pointless in current times, so we decided to look for a camp site to base ourselves on for the duration of the trip. Luckily, we picked a good one. We really liked Aberbran Caravan Club Site and will no doubt be back.

Setting Off

Luckily, the cold weather that had gripped Wales for the couple of weeks prior to departure magically lifted and summer arrived as we were packing up to leave. Having emptied the van this time last year when we realised that we wouldn’t be going anywhere for a good while, it took a bit of repacking. That’s it done now though; all we generally take out when we get home between trips is our dirty laundry and food from the fridge / freezer.

Amazingly, we don’t seem to have forgotten too much. We have a short list of items that didn’t make it back into SOK, including Mark’s cheese grater (which I am assured is necessary for human survival). We’ll have nine days at home before our next trip to track down the missing items…..

SOK also seems to be behaving pretty well. Our only niggle is the Control Panel, which can be slightly reluctant to turn on and is insisting on showing us the engine battery voltage most times we turn the water pump on or off. Everything seems to be working, though, so we’re just ignoring it for now and hoping it’ll sort itself out. It’s probably having a sulk at Mark shouting “that’s Spurious!” at the blinking fresh water warning light (that turned out, of course, to be correct – we did need some more water! He’d been taking two buckets of grey water out each day and putting two watering cans of fresh water in, without taking into account that the bucket is slightly bigger than the watering can).

While we’re on the subject of the bucket, Mark did have a small accident on the last day of the trip:

There’s a hole in his bucket but I don’t think any of the suggestions in the song are going to fix it. Time to buy another one from the monster Chinese bucket factory…..

Aberbran Caravan Club Site

One of the big advantages of Caravan Club Main Sites is that they are easy to book online and bookings can be amended or cancelled without penalty so long as you give 72 hours notice. That flexibility has value in these uncertain times when you just don’t know what might be around the next corner…. Having lost two camp site deposits last year we weren’t for taking any chances.

(One trip got cancelled on the day of departure when we discovered a gas problem when SOK was all packed up and ready to go. Another trip got cancelled the day before departure when we took SOK to the petrol station to fill up with LPG and he threw up an “Adblue System Failure” error message. 2020 – truly a year to forget!).

Aberbran is very small for a main site. Running along a disused railway line, it’s a long thin camp site with grass pitches for caravans and, at the far end, some hardstanding pitches.

There’s no toilet / shower block, but we don’t use them anyway (and in any case, they’re all still closed at the moment on sites that do have them). It’s cheap at £16 per night for the two of us and SOK – or so we thought. We were pleasantly surprised on arrival to only be charged £14 a night, due apparently to the reduction in VAT on hospitality to 5% (announced last year) that we’d completely forgotten about. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

Brecon – Walking, Cycling and Exploring

It’s a four and a half mile walk along a quiet country lane from the Aberbran site to Brecon, so we did that on our first day. Brecon itself is an attractive little town although the town centre did seem very quiet and, of course, cafes and the like had not yet reopened at that point. There are a couple of outdoor shops but overall, it didn’t feel as overtly “outdoorsy” as, say, towns in the Lake District or Snowdonia. We made a point of wandering down to the end of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal; normally there are ducks but they seemed to have taken the day off.

I went into a “non-essential shop” in Brecon, for the first time since the term was invented; I purchased a book at Brecon Books (Jonathan Sumption’s “The Albigensian Crusade”). I could have bought more if it hadn’t been for the four and a half mile walk home. Quite how books can have been considered non-essential, I really don’t know…. Mark acquired his own essential item at the local butcher’s shop, a pork pie:

We did a couple of walks from the camp site on the following days plus some cycling expeditions. I am not a confident cyclist whereas Mark has been pretty much living in lycra for the past year. I did manage cycle trips along the quiet lanes to Brecon in one direction and Sennybridge in the other, though I wasn’t too convinced about parts of the mountain-bike loop he took me on from the Garwnant Forest Visitor Centre. I do like a solid surface under my wheels and parts of this route were ankle-deep in freshly strewn coarse gravel….

Pen y Fan

It would have been remiss of us to visit the Brecon Beacons and not walk up Pen y Fan, a bit like visiting Snowdonia and not heading up Snowdon. Pen y Fan is the highest “peak” in South Wales, and the most popular route up seems to be from the Storey Arms, so that’s what we figured we’d do as our first proper Brecon Beacons walk.

Parking at the Storey Arms did kind of feel like cheating when we discovered where it is – at the top of the pass on the A470, meaning we’d driven half way up Pen y Fan before even putting our boots on! We did a circular walk, taking the path up from the Storey Arms then back along the path to the Pont ar Daf car park where we’d left SOK, just up the road from the Storey Arms.

This turned out to be one of those “motorway up a mountain” walks; there was no chance of getting lost! You can just about see the road over the pass where we left SOK in the photo below:

Further up the path, the top of Carn Du (873m) came into view ahead of us:

On the final approach to the top of Carn Du (on the right), the summit of Pen y Fan was finally visible (on the left, a whole 13m higher than Carn Du at 886m!):

Looking back from Pen y Fan, we then had an easy path to follow with a steady gradient across the back of Carn Du and then back down to the car park:

At a massive four and a half miles, this was hardly a major expedition! We do now have a better understanding of the landscape, though, so we can plan some more interesting walks next time. Not that we’re going to start running up hill and down dale with massive backpacks like the handful of squaddies we saw scampering around (the British Army uses the Brecon Beacons for SAS / lunatic training).

We did also find time during our stay to explore a few places of interest in the area. CADW (the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage) has reopened many of its sites, so we took the opportunity to visit White Castle and Tretower Castle. We also had a look at St Cynog’s Church at Defynnog near Sennybridge on the day we cycled in that direction.

White Castle (CADW)

White Castle, a couple of miles north of Llantilio Crosenny, is one of the “Three Castles” in the border area to the East of Abergavenny (the others being Grosmont and Skenfrith). It’s old, with the original wooden castle possibly dating back to the 11th century.

We’d planned to park at Llantilio Crosenny and walk to the castle, the CADW website only promising parking for 3 cars and Google maps clearly showing the castle’s location at the end of a narrow dead-end lane. The Visit Monmouthshire website suggests parking in the church car park to walk to the castle so we figured that must be acceptable practice. Great plans and all that – the gateposts turned out to be too narrow to get SOK through, so we bit the bullet and drove up the narrow lane to the castle car park.

The car parking arrangements weren’t as bad as feared. It might not be a good idea to drive a motorhome up here on a busy weekend, though!

The castle was fabulous. Just as a castle should be – towers, arrow slits and a deep moat!

Unfortunately, the information boards at the castle gave scant information and the site was unmanned.

CADW “sell” White Castle as being an early example of the handiwork of Edward I, the late 13th century king who went on to build the highly impressive ring of castles in North Wales – Caernarfon, Conwy, Beaumaris etc. On the other hand, www.castlewales.com gives much more detail on the development of White Castle over time and tells us that Henry III (Edward’s dad) “seized White Castle in 1239 when it must have looked much as it does today”.

Right then, so which bits exactly are we attributing to Edward I?

Tretower Castle (CADW)

Tretower is on the way back to Aberbran from Abergavenny, so we stopped off to have a look at Tretower Castle, which dates back to the 12th-13th centuries. Again, the information available on site was somewhat limited, partly, we felt, due to the ongoing restrictions. A new visitor centre and cafe were under construction. We’ll have to go back another time anyway as there’s a very impressive-looking medieval manor house (“Tretower Court”) on the same site (built by the same family from the early 14th century) that had not yet reopened when we visited.

St Cynog’s Church, Defynnog

Cycling to Defynnog near Sennybridge along the back lane from Aberbran seemed like a good idea at the time, at 6 miles each way. I spent most of the journey furiously huffing and puffing whilst wondering who exactly thought it was a good idea to build a country lane like a flippin’ roller coaster. Why couldn’t they just follow the contours of the hillside? I was pretty wiped out by the time I got back home to SOK!

St Cynog’s Church “only” dates back to the late 15th century although it stands on the site of an earlier Celtic church.

There’s a yew tree in the graveyard that has been widely reported as being 5,000 years old: the oldest tree in the UK and possibly in Europe. A quick search online, though, revealed a detailed debunking by the Ancient Yew Group, which says that “it may quite possibly be over 2,000 years old, but is very unlikely to be as much as 3,000” and that “considering all of the available hard data the Fortingall yew is certainly the older tree by a substantial margin” (the Fortingall Yew being a very old yew tree in Perthshire). Oh well, it’s still a very old and impressive tree….

In the porch of the church is what is described by www.britainexpress.com as a “5th century Roman tombstone, in the shape of a pillar. On one vertical face is a Latin inscription reading ‘RUGNIATIO LIVENDONIO‘, or ‘Rugniatis, son of Vendonius‘. Also carved onto the stone’s side is worn Ogham script. At the top is a carving of a Celtic ring-cross, added some time between the 7th-9th centuries.” This was found set into the tower wall, a good example of 15th century recycling. The stone is a bit weathered and we did fail to find any Ogham script on either side of the stone, although the inscription and celtic cross were clearly visible.

Unfortunately, the church itself was locked when we visited so we couldn’t check out the apparently 11th century (or earlier) runic-inscribed font. Another time…..

Time to Head Home

Overall, we had a great short break in the Brecon area. The weather was kinder than usual for Wales in April; we only had one wet day. With all the walking and cycling we didn’t miss the museums too badly, although it’ll be nice to get back to our usual “flitting around” ways when circumstances allow.

Time to head home now for a few days before setting off for our next destination: Yorkshire.