run for the hills

Back in Newport as of yesterday, so I decided to go for a walk this morning to wear off some of the calories I'd been shovelling in in various forms, both solid and liquid, over Christmas.

North and north-west are the best two directions to head in from Newport if you want to get to high ground, and the nearest serious bit is the big plateau between the Ebbw and Lwyd rivers. Phrases like "nearest hill" and "nearest mountain" are a bit meaningless unless you define what you mean by "hill" and "mountain", but it is true to say there is no summit nearer Newport that's higher than the trig point on top of Mynydd Twyn-glas, so that's where I headed.

This is the highest point on the ridge that the hill fort at Twmbarlwm is at the southern end of, and it suffers from the same problems with being easily accessible to trail and quad bikers, so there's lots of erosion on the main paths. It's probably a bit boggy a lot of the time, and it would have been today were it not for the ground being frozen rock-solid, which was handy. In addition to the bike tracks the plateau is criss-crossed with electricity pylons, so all in all it's not exactly a pristine and unspoilt wilderness. In fact I came over all Jim Morrison for a moment up there:

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down

Nonetheless it does have a certain bleak charm, particularly on a crisp frosty day, and the two guys on quad bikes I passed near the summit trig point (472 metres, 1549 feet) were the only people I met all day. A circular walk from where I parked the car by Upper Cwmbran Methodist Church took me about two and a half hours.


If you go the same way I did you'll end up coming back past the Blaen Bran reservoirs, which I thought looked surprisingly empty today, considering it's not exactly high summer - it turns out they're abandoned, and there has been a certain amount of legal wrangling about having them made safe so they don't disintegrate and send a stagnant mossy tidal wave into central Cwmbran (however much you might think that would be the best thing for it). Some more pictures and details about the problems with trail bikes and general littering can be found here.

My photos (including the obligatory trig point self-portrait) can be found here.