Day Twenty Four

Monday 21 February - Resolven to Cwmgors

Despite being near several industrial sites, Resolven has remained a relatively small village. One of the old factories now accommodates the busy Rheola Market on Saturdays. Peter Hain is the local MP, and apparently also lives in the area. There was no point in making a call: I had seen him the previous evening on the telly, addressing his party’s Welsh Spring Conference in Llandudno.

The village centre is unremarkable. I bought some lunch at a convenience store, then head Northwest across the Neath Valley. A footbridge took me across the not-specially-busy main road, then I crossed the River Neath and the Neath Valley, which has been restored and provides, I read, a four-mile walkable towpath from here to Glynneath. But I was heading at a right-angle to the canal, uphill.

Some steps by a pub led me up through trees on to a path which contoured for a while then climbed diagonally, joining and leaving some forestry roads. The path became increasingly rutted, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The damage had been done by motorbikes, their tyre-tracks clearly visible in the mud. These bikes had broken up the surface and then churned the mud until in places the ruts were deep enough to have axle-marks on their sides. I had passed the very occasional sign urging motor vehicles to keep off these upland tracks, but nothing is actually done to block them off.

At the crest of the hill, a trig point is marked on the map, hidden from sight in the trees. My path crossed the route of a Roman road, then plunged downhill. As forks and junctions confused the situation, I lost my intended route, but a GPS fix and some map-reading saw me into Crynant with a little bit of trespassing but no incident.

Crynant has followed the usual pattern: it was a tiny village known best to monks, who maintained a cell here for overnight stops on their travels. Then came coal and collieries, including the world’s deepest anthracite mine. One former mine has been maintained as a museum, the rest being largely swept away. It was now raining quite hard. This was to last for twenty minutes or so; I kept my head down and saw little of Crynant.

A residential road became a country lane which headed diagonally up the next hill. A hairpin turn to took me on to a stony track on the opposite diagonal which made it nearly to the top of the hill, by which time I was into another forestry plantation. Active forestry operations were going on; I could see large trucks on a higher roadway. At a fork, a sign forbade entry because of the tree felling. It was not clear which way was closed, so I decided it was the other way, and pressed on in the direction I wanted to take.

A track-laying vehicle trundled slowly towards me. I stepped respectfully aside and waited. About ten yards away, the vehicle stopped, and the driver signaled for me to pass. This happened again later. As long as you keep away from active felling and don’t get in the way of the vehicles, there is not a problem. If there were any danger, it would be obvious. So I exchanged waves with the workmen and pressed on.

Then St Illtyd dropped in on Ystalyfera, almost literally. His Way headed steeply downhill; the path itself was perfectly safe, but I wouldn’t have wanted to stray from it. Further down the hill, an alternative path headed in my desired direction, so I left St I. He and I would link up again later.

A new cycle bridge took me over the river into the centre of Ystalyfera, which consists of a few shops, a chippy, and two pubs called the Old Swan and – yes, you’ve guessed – the New Swan, about 50 yards apart.

Ystalyfera has travelled the familiar path from village to sprawling industrial area to economic disaster zone, now mitigated by its handy position for commuters working in Cardiff, Neath and Swansea.

A little pavement-pounding took me to a side road which headed uphill for a mile and a half to a village called Pen-Rhiw Fawr where, as in so many places, a vigorous poster campaign is being fought to save the local school. Just beyond the village, I reached the top of the hill, leaving the road on a track.

This was suddenly a different order of walking. Instead of a sharply-crested hill between narrow valleys, which is what I had become used to in the last four days, I was on grassy moorland on what I’m sure is an ancient track, dressed with crumbling tarmac to start with, becoming gravelly and then just earthy-muddy. Even under the grey pall of cloud it was glorious. I was put in mind of the track I had taken fairly recently across Rannoch Moor, so a big compliment is intended to today’s walk.

Short grass became tufty as I penetrated the moorland, passing some old workings and an abandoned house. I could see farming land further down the hill, but up here it was untended. The usual problem – a sudden multiplicity of tracks – led me slightly off course, but this was soon rectified. I joined an unfenced road which headed downhill towards the main road near Cwmgors, where I need to catch a bus to Pontardawe.

I missed the damned thing by about five minutes. I couldn’t have walked any faster, and running was out of the question. So it was an hour’s wait for the next bus, and risk missing my train, or adopt Plan B. Out went the thumb, and a few minutes later a nice chap in a white van stopped. He took me to Pontardawe, and dropped me right at the stop where I could get a bus to Neath, which I did within another ten minutes. There was just time for an early supper in the Neath Wetherspoons before I caught the train back to London.