In Wales: The Off-The-Beaten-Track Beaten Track

Wales is criss-crossed by ancient Druid tracks, drover's roads, and Roman ways. They run from sacred spring to chapel, from village to market, from garrison to copper mine to coast, down river valleys and over Cambrian passes. Many are lost now, forgotten, swallowed up by heather and bog. Some are paved and still go where they've always gone only faster. The old tracks climb over this little country and its wind-scabbed feols like cracks across old weathered knuckles.

They say the oldest road in Wales is the Kerry Ridgeway. And when they say 'old' they mean it. Older than the Iron Age hillforts that run along it. Older than the Norman mottes guarding the trade routes along the valley Severn below. Older than the Celtiic tumps placed carefully beside it, it is thought, for the tremendous views of mighty Cadir Idris, the biggest blue lump on the western horizon impressive even at 40 miles.


The Ridgeway runs allong Kerry Hill from Cider House Farm near pretty little Kerry in Powys, Wales, 15 miles to nearly-posh Bishop's Castle in Shropshire, England.

After something of a slog up the rise to Two Tumps, the path can be called 'gently undulant' and it is through pasture and sheep on a farmer track along the sunken gully of the drovers' road. It's lumpy only with ancient tumps on which sheep are standing presumably for the view, because there is a fine Welsh Forestry Commision look-out tower - like a windier, sheepier Bridge on the S.S. Enterprise or a DJ mixing table - that you step up into and are ringed with full color, amazing maps (in both Welsh and English) of the vista before you. You look at the map, "Here are the wind turbines," you say, and then looking up, there they are on the horizon! and then you trace your finger along the Cambrian mountain vista and say things like "ok...let's see...that should be...gosh, is that Cadir Idis!? Thirty five miles. Gosh. There's Cadir Idris. Would ya look at that."


Impress Your Companions
Three rivers rise from just below the Ridgeway all within half a kilometer. You can venture up and over Feol Goch, Red Hill to find the sedgy dip the Teme springs from. The three rivers are the Teme, the whole length of which has been name a Site of Significant Scientific Interest by English Nature, the Itheon, that bubbles out of some woods across from the car park, beside Cider House Farm, and the Mule. All three of which run into the Severn. I fear your companions are waiting to be impressed. Hold on. I'll come back with something really good. Something having to do with...um....bees ma;ybe...