Prologue to Welsh Marilyn Backpack

For my second 1-night backpacking trip of July, I took a look at my nearest unbagged Marilyns and, after logging a few that I did years ago but somehow missed in my mass logging catch-up of 2020, I found four hills just over the border in mid-Wales.

I plotted a 2-day route that took in three of them, with the fourth to be tackled separately on the drive home, and pencilled the trip into the diary. In the week before setting out the weather forecast changed from fine and sunny to generally wet, although not as wet as the Monday, when the whole of Wales was subject to a weather warning (in July, for goodness sake!). Happily, by Monday evening (as the rain still came down) the forecast reverted back to mainly dry, with plenty of sun.

Things got a bit busy in the few days before the off and although I intended to revisit my route and check a few things, I didn’t find the time until late the evening before, when we were parked up for the night in a car park in Oswestry. StreetView and aerial photography seemed to confirm my inkling that some of the paths I had intended to use were probably notional and whilst I’m not a fan of tarmac, in some places I thought it the lesser of the evils compared with battling through wet and overgrown paths strewn with nettles whilst playing ‘spot the stile’. A new route was quickly planned, sent to my phone, and off to bed I went, ready for an early start in the morning…

…except I no longer needed an early start. The summit of my first hill of the trip sits on Access Land, but with no lawful way of accessing that Access Land, meaning I either needed to ask permission or trespass. With the latter being the most likely reality, I wanted to set out early, before anyone was around. The problem was that if I set out early, I would finish early, and I didn’t want to camp until most people would be on their way home off the hills. So, I revised my route such that rather than approaching that first hill from the south, taking a track that would be in full view of the dwellings below, I would approach from the east, where I would be hidden from habitation. I also modified my start time to 10am.

That gave us a relaxed start to Tuesday, and it was approaching 0930 before we set out for the 20-minute drive to Llansilin, where Mick dropped me in a car park that was surprisingly large for a little village.

The plan:

Red = Day 1

Blue = Day 2