A 3-day route around the hills of Cwm Tawe combined with a short one-off excursion to claim Craig y Llyn, one of our two remaining hills on the 600m Sims list. Yr Allt, the other Sim hill, is traversed on the main circuit.
The apparently popular approach to hill bagging where you drive a car as close as possible to the summit, claim the top and drive off again, is one that normally we thoroughly dislike. However there are a few cases where the technique fits quite well and Craig y Llyn, the historic county top of Glamorgan, is a case in point. It lies on the Coed Morgannwg Way trail (CMW) but this route did not appeal as a backpack. The hill is blighted by extensive forestry operations and a wind farm is under construction near the top, leaving the views from the northern edge as its only merit.
A return to the Brecon Beacons was long overdue and we designed the Tawe route to include our first lakeside exploration of Llyn y Fan Fawr, approaching from the east and taking in Moel Feity, another new Dewey 500m top.
With a forecast of hot sunny weather following an already dry spell, and given the limestone geology of this area where streams can disappear underground, we predicted problems maintaining water levels and took our Platypus water container to supplement our usual bottles – how right we were.
A 4-day backpack of the Kintyre Way (KW) waymarked trail in Argyll, running through the peninsula from Southend in the south to Tarbert in the north.