The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Monday 29 December 2014

Long Mountain - Beacon Ring

Sunday 28 December 2014

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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 :-)

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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:

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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):

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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.

5 comments:

  1. I am currently contemplating where we could go for a stroll up a little frozen hill that won't kill me...if that's the second time I've posted, please ignore!

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  2. Bah! I passed within a third of a kilometre of that one on my Welsh walk before I had contracted the Marilyn bug - anyway I did bag another one yesterday. Good to see you out and about again - I must say I am never sure where you're going to pop up next.

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    1. Similarly, I'm noticing that there are a few Marilyns where I've been very close to the top, but it didn't seem important at the time to divert to the summit (Kinder Scout probably being the best case in point, considering how many times I've been up on the plateau).

      When I spotted Beacon Ring on the map, and saw it was just a stone's throw from Offa's Dyke Path, I did initially suspect that we might have visted on our LEJOG, but then I recalled that we had a sudden hankering after a bed as we approached Welshpool and so cut off Offa's Dyke Path to take a direct route to the town.

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