stag nation

While I'm on the subject of photo galleries I should also draw your attention to this one, which is a collection of photos taken at my recent stag weekend up in mid-Wales. Since the lovely Hazel and I are getting hitched on June 25th, it seemed prudent to take care of the stag & hen partying a few weeks in advance, thereby avoiding the sort of scenario which only ever occurs in comedy films or adverts, i.e. being sellotaped, naked and covered in jam, to the guard's van of a train to Inverness and having to make one's way back to the wedding venue in the nick of time.

So, anyway, in order to conduct the requisite stagular activities I hired us a bunkhouse (highly recommended, by the way, as it was perfect for our requirements) just outside Trecastle and set about planning some outdoorsy walking activities. I did consider some more orthodox stag activities like go-karting or clay pigeon shooting, but in the end I just decided to do what I would want to do if I were there on my own; inevitably this involved climbing a mountain. What we ended up doing was parking up near Llanddeusant village (here) and heading up onto the Black Mountain, as previously climbed by me and Hazel (but from the other side) here. Unfortunately the weather, while starting off fairly promising, soon degenerated into a typically mid-Walesesque foggy pissy drizzle, which spoiled what would otherwise have been some spectacular views. We had to skip scouting around trying to find the source of the Usk, which is apparently on the northern slopes, as well. Oddly, while both the Wye and the Severn rise within a mile or two of each other on the slopes of Plynlimon, both the Usk and Tawe rivers rise within a similarly small distance of each other here.


But we survived, which is the main thing, after all. The GPS-captured route info for the walk can be found here, and the altitude profile here. Some more general stag weekend photos, including some where a fair amount of drink had been imbibed (but nonetheless fairly safe for family consumption) can be found here. Many thanks to Doug, Andy, Robin, Jim, Mark, Ray, Martyn, Ian, Andy and Richard for indulging my strange habits and making it a throroughly enjoyable weekend.

I also had a bit of a clear-out of the old track logs on the GPS and found a couple of other things of potential interest, specifically the walks I did around the Black Mountains (track here, altitude here) and the communal jaunt up the Blorenge (track here, altitude here). The Blorenge one is slightly incomplete as I think the GPS lost the signal towards the end, but you can hopefully join the ends up for yourself.