After yesterday's short walk, today's was to be a longish one. So I breakfasted early and set off soon after 8 o'clock. The A40 goes all the way between St Clear's and Robeston Wathen, but my task was to dodge it as much as possible.
I started by walking alongside the trunk road, perverse I know, but five minutes along the verge enabled me to find a side road through the village of Pwll-trap. After a quiet wander along this road, just beyond a level crossing, I turned West on a footpath. Oh blimey, you are saying: he's going to drone on about it not being signed or looked after. Yes and no.
It wasn't signed, but there was a stile in good condition, followed by two more good ones and one which seemed to be rotting away as I watched it. The path, although not visible on the ground, was easy enough to follow, and it led me the start of a lane by Llangynin Church, its ivy-clad tower looking absolutely lovely in the sunshine which had broken through early cloud.
There was no traffic on this or the next lane, but a sense of foreboding took the edge off my enjoyment. My progress depended on finding a footpath, in fact my last footpath in Carmarthenshire. The map showed the path starting where the lane ended, in the middle of a farmyard. I duly walked into said farmyard, heard voices round a corner, and caught sight of a chap addressing someone invisible inside a cowshed.
The visible man turned and saw me, and we approached each other with appropriate greetings. I explained what I was about; by this time we had been joined by the third party. The first chap, quite young, was (I guess) the farmer; the older man (I guess) the farmhand. They agreed that there was no actual footpath on the ground, the fatal flaw in the route on the map being an un-bridged stream.
They had a five-minute discussion about whether fording the stream was possible, concluding that it probably wasn't. End of discussion? - not a bit of it. While the farmhand rather alarmingly waggled a syringe (he didn't actually try to inoculate me!), the farmer invited me to have a look at the stream for myself, and pointed out the most practical way of getting to it. So what might have been a source of conflict became a friendly encounter, and I left the two men with many thanks.
Their gloomy assessment – perfectly genuine, I'm sure – turned out to be wrong. There was a place where the stream flowed over stones and, because there had been no rain for several days, it was shallow enough for me to wade across without any water getting into my boots. A steep bank, some thorns and a little barbed wire later, I was trotting across a field on my way to another farmyard. Here the only man in sight studiously avoided any eye-contact as I walked through the yard and down the track to the main road.
Crossing the A40, I turned to walk roughly parallel with it, Westwards), on what was obviously a former incarnation of the trunk road and is now a traffic-free backwater. These superseded bits of road are curious to walk along. They still tend to have all the trappings of heavy traffic management – double white lines, large signs – but no traffic.
Where this stretch ended, a footway/cycleway alongside the A40 linked with the next bit of “orphan” road, which took me to a further road into Whitland. By now I was walking in shirtsleeves, The sun had burned off the remaining cloud, there was no wind, and it felt genuinely Springlike. My forearms (and, decently beneath my trousers, my thighs) were covered with scratches and prick-marks. Anyone would think I had been through a lot of hedges!
It was a bit early for lunch when I reached Whitland. I was going to buy some stuff for later and press on, but I was seduced by an authentic Italian café, serving authentic Italian coffee and run by an authentic Italian – you could tell that by the fact that as soon as he went out of the door to fetch something from his car, he chatted up a couple of passing girls (they enjoyed it).
So good coffee and a well-stuffed baked potato later, I did a bit of quick shopping and set off again. In order to keep on heading Westwards, and cross the River Taff, I had briefly to rejoin the A40. The upside was that as I crossed the youthful Taff I was leaving Carmarthenshire (hurray!) and entering Pembrokeshire, of which I had much higher hopes.
Leaving the verge of the A40 again, I turned on to the next stretch of ex-main road, and then on to a narrow length of never-main road. Coming up: the first footpath of the new county. Would it put the last one to shame? There wasn't a sign – oh dear! - but there was a nice pedestrian gate at the near end, and an unlocked farm gate at the other end. Promising.
Across a road, I was on to the next footpath. This one, a complex path crossing fields, woodland and water, was signed at the road, waymarked frequently, and often visible on the ground. It wasn't always simple to follow, but that was because it was such an up-and-down, in-and-out affair, a proper country footpath, not because nobody cared about it. There was even a short cut across a playing-field to get me on to the next lane without the 100 yards of A40 I had been expecting.
The next footpath also started brilliantly, with signs, waymarks and stiles. A not-very-well marked diversion rather let it down, but it was easy enough to find the route. A stream flowing through woodland is a recipe for mud, and particularly gloopy mud it was, too. Following a farm track, I returned to the main road, crossed it, and trotted down another deserted lane. Two bridleways provided an easy route to follow, along with loads more mud.
From the end of the second bridleway, the shortest route to my goal for the day, Robeston Wathen, would have been along the main road for a mile and a half, but I opted for a diversion via Narberth using minor roads.
As I joined the road, a couple of blokes were digging a hole in the road. One of them helpfully moved a barrier to let me pass more easily, which was nice of him. This pair proved to just the warm-up act for the great roadshow further on. In the middle of the road was a decrepit sign, a folding chair and a bag with a flask sticking out of it. The sign said “Road Closed”, but this was obviously just an invitation to talk. The owner of these props waited as a car stopped in the gap between the sign and the kerb, and the driver started chatting to the roadman. At the same time another car approached the gap from the opposite direction, its driver parping his horn urgently. This unseemly noise was completely ignored by the other driver and the roadman, who continued to chat.
Meanwhile, more cars and vans (and a couple of buses) built up in both directions. I was tempted to stay on and enjoy the show, But I had to make progress. There was more entertainment, though. Further on, a large piece of equipment was removing the surface of the road, while other vehicles threaded their way past it. A man guiding the heavy plant moved reluctantly aside to let this queue past. There was no “Road Closed” sign at the far end of the road, so chaos was predictable.
Reaching a crossroads in Narbeth, I turned on to a road back towards the A40. The trunk road has very recently been diverted, leaving the village of Robeston Wathen on yet another peaceful backwater. Good for me, as I sidled towards my b&b, and for the school children who were hanging around in the village centre in new-found safety. But how good it is for the garage, the pub and, indeed, for the b&b, I wasn't so sure.
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