what I did at the weekend

Quite nice not to have any plans for the weekend, so as it was such nice weather on Saturday we made some up on the hoof. Nothing very elaborate, just find a park somewhere and go and sit around for a bit, maybe read a book or something. Oh, and stop off at the garage on the way for a nice bottle of chilled wine to drink.

Perusing my Ordnance Survey map of Newport (Explorer 152, if you're interested) I noticed a large open space over between M4 junctions 27 and 28, about a mile and a half or so from the house. It turns out this is the top end of Tredegar Park, and features an Iron Age hillfort which is, I can now confirm, a very nice place to sit around on top of with a book and a bottle of wine on a sunny afternoon.

The park extends south as far as Tredegar House, whose impressive oak avenue has been lovingly preserved by having junction 28 of the M4 carved into the middle of it.

On Sunday I popped up to Raglan to meet my parents for lunch at the Beaufort Arms Hotel. And very nice too. If you go on a Sunday and can't quite face the full roast dinner, the hake is very good. I really like hake, but you don't see it in supermarkets often, if at all.

To work off lunch we then went for a stroll around Raglan Castle - more impressive than I was expecting, actually. I took a few photos, which can be found here.