here's summit I prepared earlier

A bit of an end-of-year tidy-up of unblogged stuff here, in particular this photo which I came across when looking at some stuff on Google Photos with the kids. You'll be aware that I've posted a few mountain summit and trig point shots here over the years, but I am pretty confident that this is the one which features the largest group of living individuals (I don't say "people" for reasons that will become obvious shortly).

So this is the culmination of a walk we organised with the members of the NCT group we were part of while in the last stages of expecting Nia in early 2012. Members of the group have been the subject of previous expeditions featured here in the past, but those were mainly Dad-centric expeditions leaving the wives and kids, bless 'em, at home. This time we decided we wanted to do a more inclusive thing and take everyone (or everyone who wanted to come and was available, anyway, which in our household meant me and Nia); that meant some careful planning so as not to go hog-wild and devise some terrifying 15-mile ridge scramble that would take all day and probably result in some deaths. 

Having been given responsibility for route planning, what I came up with was a walk featuring as its centrepiece and highest point Pen Cerrig-calch, the mountain that overlooks Crickhowell, and which also takes in on the way up the Iron Age fort of Crug Hywel which gives the town its name. Route map and altitude profile are below.

It's a fairly simple straight-up-and-down sort of route, and at about six and a half miles probably about right for a group including six adults, five kids (aged between eight and ten) and two dogs - all of whom, if you look carefully, are included in the summit photo at the top of this post.

By my reckoning I'd been up here twice before, once with Huw and his dog Baxter in December 2013 when we did a similar walk which also took in the neighbouring (and slightly higher) peak of Pen Allt-mawr, and once as the first part of my epic 19-mile solo Black Mountains horseshoe walk in April 2010. The one thing almost all walks starting from Crickhowell have in common is that you pop into The Bear for a pint afterwards, something we made sure we adhered to here.