Day Twenty Five

Saturday 19 March - Cwmgors to Upper Tumble

To give myself an early start walking, I took a cab from my overnight stop in Pontardawe. The driver asked me where I was walking, and helpfully offered to take me up the first steep hill. I naturally declined the offer, and asked to be dropped where I had finished last time. Making sure that the walk is continuous is important to me, but probably seems a tad fetishistic to anyone else!

A road West from the main Pontardawe to Cwmgors road was busier than its size seemed to justify, but this was because it leads to the council recycling centre (they don't call them dumps any more). Rising up the hill above the centre was a suspiciously round hillock with posts sticking out of it at regular intervals. This was a landfill site, grassed over but not quite returned to nature.

Above the landfill, the road zigzagged steeply uphill. I cut out a zig or a zag by following a track, found the road again, and left it once more to reach the trig point at the top of Bryn Mawr, at about 1150 feet. It was a lovely sunny day, the remnants of frost fast disappearing as I took advantage of the viewpoint. I had assumed that it was a solitary bit of cloud which I had noticed clinging to the top of the mountain to the North, but in fact it was smoke from heather-burning.

From the trig point I cut downhill to the West, into the next valley. After a few minutes of confusion between the single track road and a farm track, I was back on my planned route, following the road down to a bridge over a stream called Nant Melyn, then up again on to Betws Mountain. A viewpoint was marked on the map, and there was certainly a wide view of the Amman Valley, but the visibility was limited as the morning mist had not yet been completely burned off by the sun. Still, a very good information board identified the places dotted along the valley, and beyond, including my target for the day, Tumble. The Black Mountain was featured on the board, but was hidden by murk.

I turned off the road for my first prolonged experience – on this trip - of Carmarthenshire footpaths. I knew from what to expect. Ten years ago, it was in Carmarthenshire that I had been brought to a halt on my coast walk by the onset of Foot & Mouth Disease. The County Council led the way in closing all their footpaths, and limped along at the rear when it came to reopening them.

And when I did resume my walk, I quickly discovered that the state of the footpaths in this county was pretty ropey. They haven't improved. If you're lucky, you get a sign at the roadside, but after that you are pretty much on your own. Stiles are often rotten or broken, waymarks are almost non-existent, and conditions underfoot are frequently horrendous. To cross Carmarthenshire on foot, it helps to be willing and able to climb gates and fences, and where the footpath has disappeared altogether it's good to be handy with a map and willing to trespass.

This first path was fairly easy to walk by following the fences; there was one waymark and an occasional hint of a path on the ground. I reached a lane which I followed into Betws, from there crossing the River Amman into Ammanford's bustling shopping streets.

Today, Ammanford is the third largest town in Carmarthenshire, and serves as a shopping centre for the surrounding rural area. But as with so many places I had walked through East of here, the Industrial Revolution came to this valley in the form of coalmining, railways, and a massive influx of workers from around Britain. In 1925, the Ammanford Anthracite Strike led to a riot during which anthracite workers took over the town, and violence ensued. Later, while his father was working for the National Coal Board, Neil Hamilton – disgraced ex-MP and one half of the husband and wife media team – was raised here.

Of course, when coalmining stopped, a great many of the in-comers went away again. But before and after this exodus, Ammanford was an important centre of the campaign to revive the Welsh language. A measure of the local success of this is that more than 75% of people who filled in their census forms ten years ago claimed to be competent in Welsh, compared with just over 20% for Wales as a whole.

After buying my lunch and getting a quick coffee, I left Ammanford, heading West by road. I soon turned on to another splendid footpath, blocked by barbed wire in three places. I joined another road, which I expected to leave quickly. After passing the alleged starting-points of three footpaths, shown on the map but not signed and difficult to “improvise”, I kept on the road into the village of Saron.

A picnic site next to the village hall was a convenient lunch stop. A specially created “all abilities” path led from the picnic site through some lovely woodland. From this, another footpath should have followed, and indeed there was a kissing gate, but this had been deliberately blocked with thorn branches. Undaunted, I hopped over the fence and made up my own route until I picked up the footpath I had expected to use in the first place.

I emerged on to a road at Pen-y-groes, then followed some more unbusy roads through Morfa and across the A48 trunk road, Picking my way around some of the huge tin boxes which cling to these main roads like fleas on a dog, sometimes housing factories but usually warehouses.

I followed a couple more footpaths (quite good this time; only one bit of barbed wire) to Upper Tumble and my b&b (Beudy Bach – lovely people, great accommodation, highly recommended)