Long Mountain - Beacon Ring

Sunday 28 December 2014

What an absolutely stunning day to be out on a little hill! Near-perfection, it was, with not a breath of wind, not a cloud in the sky and the most perfect powder-snow lying above 250m.

I had put two hills on the agenda for today, but a failure to make a sufficiently early start (it took a looooonnnnng time to defrost Colin’s windscreen!) meant that it was gone noon by the time we set out from the deserted Offa’s Dyke Business Park. The name of the Business Park was apt, as it was Offa’s Dyke Path that was to take us all but the final few yards to the summit of Beacon Ring.

The ground was frozen, and at 200m we hit the first snow (the snow-line here being rather higher here than it is at home), and not long later we were walking through a blanket of powder. No hard slogging through heavy wet stuff for us today :-)

The low sun in our eyes tried to hide from us the access point into the forest plantation on our final approach to the summit, but eventually we spotted the gateway which took us through:

Then it was into some native woodland, past a couple of masts, and into the final bit of woodland, which sits within the hill-fort. Mick was weaving around all over the place through the trees, but I had the benefit of a map and quickly located the trig point (which isn’t the true top. That’s about two paces ahead of me in the next photo):

In the absence of any Rights of Way which would help us to form a circuit of an appropriate length for the time available, we simply retraced our steps, benefitting, on our return journey, from the open views to the west.

The stats for this glorious outing were 5.4 miles walked with 1200’ of up.