Wentwood

Tuesday 24 March

Consideration was given to the possibility of squeezing two hills into today, but it would likely have been exactly that: a squeeze. Or perhaps a rush, constantly wondering whether I would make my afternoon deadline to be home. So, instead I opted for just the one hill, but shunned the option of parking less than a mile from the summit, instead choosing to take a bit of a meandering route up through the forest from Parc Seymour.

A good choice, even if I do say so myself. A nice bit of woodland preceded the managed forest, and so much did we enjoy it (particularly as our ascent was in the sunshine) that instead of taking the short route (down the road) back to our start point, we meandered back through the woods, where the path choices were plentiful (and some of them were even shown on the map).

Recent forestry works have temporarily messed up the summit and our approach, but one benefit of that work is that rather than the summit being fully wooded, with a wall of trees preventing views, you can now stand at the trig and look out over the Severn Estuary and the Severn Bridge. When I say ‘stand at the trig’, I mean ‘stand relatively close to the trig’, as the forestry works have created a camouflage wooded-defence around it:

Trig point in disguise

As I already said, we chose to wander back through the woodland for our return, on a nice dirt path (well, nice except the little bit torn up by tyres), noting as we went that the clouds were looking very dark and foreboding. We must have walked the right route at just the right pace, as we hadn’t been back inside Colin for more than 2 minutes when the heavens opened; hail and rain lashed down in a way that made us mutter “Glad we’re not out in that!”.

(6.4 miles; 1300’) 

And, that was that: it was time to go home, after a most enjoyable trip involving 178 miles of Welsh Coast, followed by 11 Marilyns, over the course of 15 days, 13.5 of which were dry and most of them sunny.