caernarfon other ice-cream, please?

While the Snowdon day was very much the focus and highlight of the trip as far as I was concerned, we did do some other stuff while we were there, edited highlights of which are below:

• We went up the road (only 15 minutes drive away) to Caernarfon Castle, which is tremendously impressive, largely intact, full of exciting little nooks and crannies to explore and towers to ascend, and, crucially, free to enter for Cadw members. It was also known to the kids from having seen it feature in an episode of GoJetters back when they were much smaller. 
• We went to Anglesey for an afternoon including a quick visit to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch - a blatant tourist trap, to be sure, and the super-long version of the name is largely a Victorian conceit, but it's a bit of fun and provides an irresistible opportunity for a photo under the railway station sign and the purchase of some souvenir T-shirts and/or key-rings and/or fudge.

• In order to get to Anglesey we went in over the Britannia Bridge (which carries the main A55 road as well as the railway line) and back out over the Menai suspension bridge. The latter is older and more architecturally striking, but the former has the more interesting and chequered history, originally carrying a pair of wrought-iron tubes that housed the railway but then falling victim to a catastrophic fire in 1970 which fatally compromised the strength of the tubes and necessitated a rebuild with a different design, making use of the original bridge pillars and re-purposed as a combined road and rail bridge.
• We didn't actually go into Beaumaris Castle but did have a bit of a wander round its outer walls before getting bored and going and finding an ice-cream. It's comparatively small and rounded and cuddly compared with the harsh sharp-cornered polygonal gigantitude of Caernarfon Castle.
• Anyone buying an ice-cream from the Red Boat ice cream parlour and thinking of taking it out towards the pier to eat it will be warned by the people in the shop to watch out for predatory dive-bombing seagulls, and they are not joking; no sooner had Nia had a few licks of her mint choc chip cone with white chocolate sprinkles than some homicidal freakin' albatross attacked her and nicked the whole thing. I recall being menaced by similar large sharp-beaked bastards while trying to eat some chips on the beach at Porthcawl many years ago; evidently they enjoy a varied diet.

hangin' in the crib

Part two of our summer holiday was spent in north Wales, in particular at this campsite in north-western Snowdonia a couple of miles from Caernarfon. But what is there to see up there? Well, a variety of things as it happens but mainly GREAT BIG MOUNTAINS UP THE FREAKIN WAZOO. We'd hit upon north Wales as it was a place this collective group hadn't been before and it seemed to me like it might provide a means of transitioning from the kid-centric low-level (though delightful) camping trips we'd been doing since popping out five kids between us - Cornwall, Buckinghamshire, Dorset - to something that might perhaps include some more ambitious expeditions. No expectation of getting back to the glory glory days of pre-parenthood full-blown Munro-bagging but I'd hope we might aspire to bag one here and there in future among doing other things. 

To put it another way, I'd spotted an opportunity to drag at least some of our group up a mountain at some point during the holiday and fully intended to seize it with both hands. In fact I thought: well, given that we've only got one shot at this let's super-size that mofo and do the Snowdonia walk I really want to knock off my bucket list: the full Snowdon Horseshoe. 

The disadvantage of this is that it was not a route everyone could be expected to be able to do, nor indeed want to do, and so I was fully mentally prepared to be thwarted at any point up to and including the day of the walk. It's not just people, of course - while we're in the grip of a prolonged period of warm dry weather I hadn't ruled out the weather gods deciding to blanket the whole mountain in cloud and rain for the day, just to fuck me over. 

A brief bit of scene-setting regarding the route: this is the route up and over the Crib Goch arête, around to the summit of Snowdon and then down again via the subsidiary peak of Y Lliwedd, making use of sections of the Pyg and Miner's tracks to get from and to the start point at Pen-y-Pass. I'd never done it before despite having been up Snowdon several times - I couldn't say exactly how many but it's at least six, as follows:

• with my Dad in what was probably the mid-1990s; up the Pyg and down the Miner's, no photos nor any particular recollection of the walk or the weather, quick stop for a pint of Bass in the Pen-y-Gwryd hotel (after which the Pyg track is probably, but not definitely, named) afterwards, below a pair of Sir Edmund Hillary's Everest boots in a glass case above the bar (I see I mentioned that here)
• with my then-girlfriend Anne in spring of 2000, Pyg/Miner's again, foggy at the top
• 
  Three Peaks training run in summer of 2006, a month or so before the actual challenge. Glorious weather, up the Snowdon Ranger, down the Rhyd Ddu, straight into the pub
• the Three Peaks itself, early July 2006, glorious weather again, Pyg/Miner's for speed, brisk jog down the last section to be sure of being back within the 24 hour limit, bottle of bubbly by the minibus in the car park and then a pint in a pub down the road which I think might have been this one in Capel Curig
• with Hazel, late summer 2008, bit misty and drizzly, up the Snowdon Ranger again, down the Rhyd Ddu again, straight into the pub again
• with Hazel's BNI group for a charity challenge, February 2009, up the Pyg track, snowy and icy at the top, down a combination of the Llanberis path and just following the railway line

Anyway, I'm glad to be able to say that it all worked out beautifully: glorious weather, two distinct groups heading for the summit by two different routes who managed to meet up briefly at the summit, and then again at the car park just in time (literally, a couple of minutes to spare thanks to some more jogging of the last half-mile or so) to get the last Snowdon Sherpa bus back to Caernarfon to pick up the cars.

Much has been written elsewhere about the Crib Goch traverse by those much more knowledgeable and experienced than me, and there is plenty of YouTube footage available if you want a preview before deciding whether it's for you or not. One caveat: lots of YouTube mountain footage is filmed using a fish-eye GoPro-type camera, probably helmet-mounted, which makes it look unbelievably high and narrow. Another caveat: lots of Crib Goch footage in particular has clickbait titles like BRITAIN'S DEADLIEST RIDGE!!! It's important to be clear that people genuinely do die up there - or, rather, they start up there, endure a brief transitional period after which they are not up there any more, and then die - but I'd say as long as you're pretty fit, comfortable with hands-and-feet scrambling and have a good head for heights there really shouldn't be a problem. I would, as an aside, be interested to see whether the casualty rate has gone up since the advent of people going up there with cameras making YouTube videos about it, it being really important to concentrate on what you're doing and where you're putting your feet.

The walk is basically in a few distinct sections:

• 
  A couple of kilometres up the Pyg track from the car park to Bwlch y Moch, where the Crib Goch path splits off. There is lots of signage here intended to prevent people straying onto the Crib Goch track thinking it's the Pyg track, which you would have to pretty dim to miss, but which I'm sure people occasionally do nonetheless.
• The first section up onto Crib Goch is a fairly relentless upward scramble up a big rocky pyramid, not particularly exposed but steep and strenuous, and with some scanning of the wall of rock in front of you required to see where the best scrambling route is. In general, and this applies to the whole horseshoe route, you can usually see a light-brownish trail among the grey rock if you look hard enough which shows where people have been before you.
• You the arrive at the first mini-summit and the narrowest section of ridge is visible in front of you: a flat section to the true summit of Crib Goch at 923 metres (3028 feet) and then a gradually downhill section to the first of the pinnacles that occupy the end of the ridge. You can walk along the top for quite a bit of it but there are sections where dropping off the crest and using it as a handrail is the best approach; in general if you're going to do this the left side of the ridge offers the best footholds and is less murderously steep and exposed.
• It is possible to just scramble over the top of the first couple of pinnacles but the usual alternative route is to drop slightly off the crest to the left to skirt round the base. The key move then is to swing back to the right through the gap before the third pinnacle to ascend some rocky steps up over the top of it.
• You then descend to a wider grassy area for a short while which affords a good opportunity for a sit down and a pork pie.
• There is then some more scrambling, not dissimilar to the first section, to gain the summit of Garnedd Ugain, at 1065 metres (3494 feet) the second-highest summit in Wales, and from there a broad rocky plateau leads to the point where most of the main paths up Snowdon (and the mountain railway) converge and thence to the summit area where you can have a wee, buy an ice-cream (or even a beer), and spend around twenty minutes queueing for a selfie at the summit toposcope.
• You then head past the summit building, in the opposite direction to 95% of people, and descend to the point where the Rhyd Ddu and Watkin paths diverge, head left along the Watkin path and almost immediately down a long and steep descent which has some nice rocky steps for the first half but thereafter is tricky and loose underfoot and requires some care. As the path levels out it takes a sharp right turn into another steeply downhill section, at this point Horseshoe-ers go straight on and up a bouldery scramble (similar to the ones on the first section of Crib Goch and Garnedd Ugain but less exposed than either, unless you stray too near the cliffs on the left) to the summit of Y Lliwedd. There are actually two summits in quick succession but the first one is slightly higher at 898 metres (2946 feet).
• Having traversed both Y Lliwedd's tops you then start a long gradual descent which passes through a gap in the crags and drops down to the lakes and the Miner's Track, which will take you back to the car park.

Anyway, the story of our day in a nutshell was that we had perfect weather: sun, no wind, no cloud, everyone did the walk they wanted to do and were best-suited to do, the two groups met up briefly at the summit and then again at the car park at the end, although the Horseshoe group had to re-enact the last bit of our 2006 Three Peaks expedition by jogging the last half-mile or so to be sure of being back in time for the last bus and a quick wee before getting on it. Our group absolutely smashed their challenge; Alys in particular being absolutely in her element and leading the way most of the way round wearing a huge grin on her face, only dropping back a bit on the later stages of the descent when her knees started to hurt. Nia was slightly nervous right at the start of the most exposed section but was fine once she got started. Summit photos from Crib Goch, Garnedd Ugain and Snowdon (the first two are selfies so feature my grinning mug prominently; sorry about that) are below.

I had been a bit concerned about the number of people we'd be sharing the ridge with, as having to pass on the narrow bits is awkward - we deliberately did the walk on a Friday rather than a Saturday to avoid some of the weekend crowds, and overall Crib Goch was fairly quiet. We probably met 15-20 other people in total over the course of our end-to-end traverse of the ridge; obviously there were a lot more people at the summit, most of whom had arrived by other routes. Like Striding Edge, the general convention is that you use Crib Goch as a means of getting to the summit of Snowdon rather than as a means of getting off afterwards, but there were people going in both directions. People do take dogs up there, and occasionally die while attempting to rescue them, but I don't recall seeing any when we were there; there was certainly no repeat of the two guys I met on Striding Edge walking a dachshund along the crest of the ridge.

So how does it compare to other UK ridge routes? The obvious comparison is with Striding Edge, and it's similar in many ways; Crib Goch is a bit narrower, but the main difference is the exposure, which is much more extreme on Crib Goch even while the actual technical demands of the scrambling aren't that complex. You can convince yourself that a fall from Striding Edge might be survivable, one from Crib Goch, especially off the north side of the ridge, would not be. My memories of the only other two comparable things I've done, the Càrn Mòr Dearg ridge round the back of Ben Nevis and the Black Cuillin, are dim and distant enough (probably around 1999) to probably not be very reliable, but I don't recall Càrn Mòr Dearg being as narrow or as exposed as Crib Goch. There are supposedly routes navigable by the experienced walker/scrambler that are more extreme than Crib Goch, like the Aonach Eagach ridge in Glencoe. Maybe next time....

So, to summarise, a fantastic day, one of my favourite ever days out on the mountains, absurdly proud of my girls (and of Huwie, who led the Pyg/Miner's group up with some motivational singing), highly recommended to anyone but do your research and assess your own fitness, competence and inclination first. 

The other thing about Crib Goch is that it is a peak in its own right, and a Welsh 3000 at that, so if you have aspirations (as I do) to bag all of them (14 or 15 depending which list you adhere to) then you will have to do the ridge traverse at some point. The horseshoe walk incorporates all three in the Snowdon range (Garnedd Ugain and Snowdon itself are the other two), which is nice, the rest comprise five in the Glyder range (of which I have done four, Elidir Fawr being the odd one out) and the Carnedd range, none of which I have ever been up BUT fully intend to have a crack at in future. 

Route map and altitude profile are below. The whole walk took us around nine and a half hours, although we did have a fairly lengthy sojourn at the top meeting up with people, buying ice cream and getting Alys a souvenir key-ring for her collection. 

quantocky surveying

As I said at the start of the recent avalanche of book review posts, the reason for the logjam is that we've been on holiday recently - two holidays actually, though most of the reading was done on the first one. It wasn't all reading, though, my goodness no. 

• We stayed here, just outside Washford a couple of miles inland from Watchet on the north Somerset coast. Not massive for five people but perfectly fine, especially given that the sunny weather enabled a lot of sitting on the verandah reading or outside in the garden eating barbecue food. 
• We made an initial foray into Washford to have a look at Cleeve Abbey, which is quite interesting but which we had to whizz round at high speed as they were about to close. Free entry, though, thanks to our Cadw membership and their reciprocal arrangement with English Heritage.
• After being ushered towards the door there we went up the road a couple of hundred yards to the charmingly rustic White Horse Inn for a cheeky pint. I had an Exmoor Gold, not my favourite thing but perfectly quaffable on a warm day.
• On the Saturday morning Nia and I did the short drive into Minehead to bag their parkrun for our collection. It's a bit of a funny one, all along the seafront so it's very flat but the course is only a kilometre long, so there are five 180-degree turns and it's quite narrow, and consequently not as fast as you might expect. In any case I'm struggling with chronic back pain and sciatica at the moment so I was happy just to trundle round and finish. 
• We'd set aside a day for going back to Minehead and spending some time at Butlin's, one of only three remaining under the original name (the other two being at Bognor Regis and Skegness). It's easy to imagine that there were dozens of these in the holiday camp's heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, and of course it was enough of a cultural trope to generate a whole long-running situation comedy in Hi-De-Hi!, but there were only ever ten of them. The main idea in terms of us visiting was to make use of their water park, which is perfectly fine and has all the usual waves and slides and flumes and the like, but is probably not as good as similar facilities at places like Bluestone, Bracknell's Coral Reef and CenterParcs, the bruising full-body rapids at CenterParcs being the gold standard all other water parks should aspire to. Elsewhere in the park we pumped a few quid into the tuppenny waterfalls, had a ice-cream and went (or at least the kids did) on some fairground rides, which commendably were free with the day pass we'd bought.
• Last Minehead-related thing - if one of my kids had asked me: Dad, why is it called Minehead, I would probably have sat back in my chair, put my slippers up on the table, lit up my pipe and said, well, they used to do mining there and the village was where the, if you will, "head" of the mineshaft and associated workings came out. Good job that didn't happen as that would be completely wrong; in fact the name is an Anglicised version of the Welsh word mynydd, which means "mountain", a very generous description of the modest hill west of the town. 
• We also visited Dunster Castle, again, gratifyingly, for free by virtue of our National Trust membership. I'd never been before (and it is quite interesting) although I had visited Dunster village with Hazel back in 2011. We had a quick wander round the village this time as well and rectified an omission from the previous visit by going to the pub, in this case The Stag's Head where I had a pint of St. Austell Tribute. One very exciting thing that happened during our visit to the castle was Alys spotting a namesake (a fairly rare occurrence), in this case Alys Luttrell, lady of the castle in the first half of the twentieth century. You will of course be able to verify that that is Alys' hand doing the pointing by the size of her thumbnails.
  

• I hadn't been to the area since spending a couple of days here at the wedding of some friends of Hazel's (spoiler alert: they have since divorced) back in the very early days of this blog when I was still charmingly giddy about having recently hooked up with my future wife. Having much more recently done some walking in the Malverns and the Cotswolds and, in passing, bagged the highest point in each, I was keen to do something similar in the nearby Quantocks while we were here. My original notion was to do some sort of point-to-point walk making use of the West Somerset Railway, which has a station at Washford and runs diagonally down the west side of the Quantock ridge between Watchet and Taunton. I couldn't find a way of making this work without constructing an absurdly long walk that was mainly on the flat getting to and from awkwardly-placed railway stations to catch awkwardly-timed trains for awkwardly-large ticket prices, though, so in the end we drove to Crowcombe, parked in their handy village car park and did a round trip walk incorporating Wills Neck (the highest point in the Quantocks at 384 metres or 1261 feet) and a portion of the Quantock ridge before dropping off and coming back into the village from the other side. I say "ridge" but you really have very little sense of it being a ridge in the way that you do on top of the Malverns; it's just a broad plateau. Thirsty after our exertions (just under twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles) we then went to the Carew Arms for a refreshing beverage. I was in need of something cold so I had a pint of Ice Breaker, about which I would say, eh, it's fine. Route map and altitude profile (this one is from GPS Visualizer) are below in the usual way.

it's the fort that counts

A few loose ends to tidy up, mostly documenting of interesting walks that I deem worthy of mention here. This isn't exactly that, but is something I missed from my list of What We Did On Our Holidays when we went for a long weekend in Dorset a month or so ago. I see I did briefly mention that we'd been to Weymouth, but forgot to mention that in addition to walking around the harbour area and paying a very brief visit to the beach we also went to Nothe Fort, an interesting fortified complex occupying a site overlooking the harbour mouth and Portland Harbour to the south which has served many purposes over the years since its construction in the second half of the 19th century.

Most of the exhibits in the main central courtyard on the hot sunny day we were there were concerned with its use during the Second World War - essentially the same use as it was put to in the 19th century, i.e. as a base for launching big lumps of exploding metal at seagoing vessels belonging to the enemy; only the flag flown by the enemy and the technical complexity of the exploding devices really changing much over time. 

There was also an interesting audio-visual installation featuring some old black-and-white photographs from the fort's lengthy period of dereliction in the second half of the 20th century, and some recent sound recordings of the people who used to use it as an unauthorised adventure playground during that time; mostly teenagers at the time but in their sixties and seventies when the recordings were made. These were interesting, although as with anything involving old-ish people reminiscing about their childhood adventures there was the occasional unpalatable whiff of Kids Today With Their Bloody Computers and some suggestion that It Never Did Us Any Harm, as long as you don't count Fat Alan who fell off a wall onto a rusty spike and died.

A note on pronunciation; the audio-visual material we watched fairly consistently pronounced it Nothe to rhyme with "betrothe" or "clothe", rather than to rhyme with, say "both", "broth" or "frothy". The picture below shows Huwie and Alys at the controls of a Bofors gun, about to mercilessly shell downtown Weymouth to secure enough beach space to build a sandcastle.

running joke

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but one that I did make at the start of 2024 (pretty much the only serious one I've ever made, actually, thinking about it) was to get out to the parkrun a bit more often, and since "a bit more often" is unacceptably woolly and just invites weaselling out or retrospective redefinition of the challenge to accommodate laziness, I made it a bit more specific: at least one parkrun every calendar month during 2024. So that means every month of the year has to include a parkrun, no skipping March and doing two in April, for instance; that doesn't count. 

I am a tedious evangelist for parkrun as a thing - all you have to do is register, save your membership barcode in some form (this used to mean some physical format but as of recently includes just having it saved on your phone), turn up, and run five kilometres (a smidge over three miles). That's it; all the timing and collating of results is done for you, including collection and analysis of your own personal stats. It's great, and for the reluctant runner (something I would definitely class myself as) provides just enough structure and accountability to encourage participation while not making the bar to entry too high. Running with a large group of other people of extremely mixed abilities has advantages as well; some find the whole community spirit and post-run chat and coffee thing delightful, while some (like me) don't really go for that but find it helpful and motivating to run in a group including lots of other people who are not conspicuously thinner and fitter than them but who are nonetheless not succumbing to the temptation to walk for a bit or just jack the whole thing in and slope off for a pint and a fag.

My brief parkrun history is as follows: I became aware of it back in the early noughties when some friends from Newbury started going regularly to the Greenham Common one and (as people tend to do) evangelising their ass off about it to all and sundry. No disrespect intended to those people, but I looked at them and thought, well, I could probably do that. This was around the time that parkrun (which started in late 2004 in Bushy Park in west London but only added a handful of events in its early years) really started to take off, and my first one was at Tredegar House (which bagged the Newport parkrun name as it was the first in the area in 2011) in March 2013, at which I ran a perfectly respectable 28:58 (that's me approaching the finish line on the right). I did another in May of that year and then took a brief sabbatical for around five and a half years before doing my next one at Riverfront in central Newport (which had started up in 2017) in September 2018. 

That pattern of occasional dabblings continued until early 2020 when Nia, who'd been a reasonably regular participant at the junior parkrun (two kilometres) decided that she'd like to upgrade to the adult version. We did a couple, the second of which in March 2020 turned out to be the last one before the COVID lockdown regulations prevented large groups of people getting together to breathe heavily and sweat over each other for around eighteen months. We participated in the first one back at Riverfront in August 2021 (and got our picture in the paper!) by which time it was clearly evident to me that I was on borrowed time in terms of finishing in front of Nia, or even keeping up with her for any length of time. 

Even after that participation was a bit patchy, though - having done three in the remainder of 2021 and an excellent nine in the first seven months of 2022 I then did none in the rest of 2022 and not a single one in 2023, for reasons I have no recollection of and therefore must just have been apathy. And so by the end of that year I obviously felt that some structure needed to be imposed.

Anyway, long story short, having done a total of eighteen parkruns up to the start of 2024 I fulfilled the terms of the challenge by doing fourteen in 2024 - double-up months were the nice friendly summer months of June and August, the second one in August being my first proper bit of parkrun tourism as we went to Wycombe Rye and had a minor celebrity encounter as described here. In renewing the challenge for 2025 I added a couple of optional stretch objectives: do more parkruns in total than in 2024, and have a crack at getting to fifty in total by the end of the year. That second one would entail doing eighteen during the year, something I'm here to tell you I achieved by running the new Llanfoist Crossing parkrun in early December. I'm slightly reluctant to make a big thing of it, although it's significant to me, as I personally know people whose tally stands at well over a hundred and the guy I spent most of the December parkrun behind (though I'd like it noted that I had him in the sprint finish) was wearing a 250 T-shirt, and I have seen a few 500s at other parkruns. 

I fully intend to renew the basic one-per-month resolution for 2026, though I'm not sure exceeding eighteen for the year is realistic. 

A few random observations to finish:

• My personal best progression is a bit of an odd one: while some people spend years nibbling off a few seconds here and there I set a target of 26:11 at my first ever Riverfront parkrun in 2018 and didn't improve on it until May 2025 when I ran 25:44. Not wanting to have that stand for another seven years I subsequently lowered it again to its current mark of 25:29 (at Riverfront again) in August.
• The watershed of Nia's PB being faster than mine was crossed in September 2024 when she ran 26:05 at Riverfront and she has remained ahead since (and I'm sure will permanently). Her current PB stands at just over a minute faster than mine at 24:36.
• You'll notice that Riverfront seems to be a PB-friendly course, and so it is. This is highly dependent on gradient and terrain, and Riverfront is pretty flat and on tarmac all the way. The one at Tredegar House, by contrast, is mostly flat but there are roots and rocks and mud to cope with so it's never as fast. The hilliest one I have done is at Belvoir Castle up in Leicestershire. 

river deep, mountain high

More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay. 

Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.

Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.

Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.

Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.

So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on. 

There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.

It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out. 

The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.

Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen. 

Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.

Just to cap off the holiday activities, once we came to the end of our stay in Dunoon we headed back across to another quite similar holiday park just east of Edinburgh for a couple of days and spent some time doing the usual tourist-y stuff in Edinburgh including a trip down into Mary King's Close which was very interesting, and a walking tour of locations relating to JK Rowling (a former resident of Edinburgh) and the Harry Potter books. I would describe this as a commendably game attempt to get some tourist mileage out of some incredibly tenuous connections: once you've been to the site of the former cafe where she sat and wrote some of the early books you're reduced to pointing at various knobbly buildings and saying: hey, might this not have been partial inspiration for Hogwarts? Go on, squint a bit. Our tour guide was an engaging enough bloke, though, and it was pretty good fun. We didn't have time to climb Arthur's Seat but we did have time for me and Nia to have a crack at the Meadowmill parkrun on Saturday morning. Anyone fancying a bit of Scottish parkrun tourism should be aware that most if not all of the Scottish ones start at 9:30am rather than 9am. Not sure if this is a daylight thing or just a bit of bolshy being different for the sake of it.

back once again with the hill behaviour

We went for a walk up the Blorenge a couple of weeks ago; broadly similar in route and distance to the two previous walks we'd done - the slightly ill-fated (in terms of the health of my ankle and boots) lockdown one in 2021 and the one with some work colleagues all the way back in 2009. So we're not breaking any new ground here but as always there are some points of interest that are worth mentioning, and it serves as an intro to some other more significant walk stuff that we did earlier in the summer and which I'll get to in another post.

So, anyway, I don't want to rehash the content of earlier posts here but you'll recall that the Blorenge is a smallish mountain (or a largish hill, whatever you like, I'm not getting into an argument about categorisation) just outside Abergavenny, really just the steep end of the largest lobe of a sort of cloverleaf-shaped area of high ground centred just north of Blaenavon. Any walk that wants to qualify as an "ascent" in any meaningful way pretty much has to start somewhere in the vicinity of Llanfoist, and it just so happens that there's a car park at Llanfoist Crossing, at the start point of the cycle path that follows the old railway line from Llanfoist to Merthyr Tydfil along some of the bits that haven't been subsumed by the Heads Of The Valleys Road. The only drawback is that the car park is quite small and heavily used by dog walkers so it can be a bit of a bunfight finding a space. I'm not going to be That Guy and suggest you provide minor botheration to the locals by parking on a residential street as an alternative, but clearly that is a thing you could do if so inclined. 

Anyway, you're an adult, sort your own parking out. Having done that you walk up the path that goes under the old Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and then smashes straight up the hill through the woods directly towards the summit of the Blorenge. On emerging into the open you can, if you so wish, carry on straight up, but a more scenic and less lung-busting option is to take a left turn and head for the pleasant spot of the Devil's Punchbowl, a small pond in what is presumably some sort of glacial cwm. It's apparently man-made, and surprisingly recent (circa 1960s) - it was previously just a low-lying marshy area. Apparently quite a popular wild swimming spot, although when we were there the water level was quite low and it all looked a bit green and murky.

After the brief respite of the fairly flat (even slightly downhill) walk to the Devil's Punchbowl and maybe a brief respite to take in the scenery and have a drink and a KitKat (other chocolate bars are available) you turn south-west and start uphill again, briefly meeting a minor road before turning north for the proper assault on the hill. You'll notice that the path takes a slightly indirect hook-y route before approaching the summit trig point from the north-east and you might be tempted to say: hell, I'm going to cut that corner off. To that I would say: go for it if you want, but I have done it (partly by accident) and generally found it to be a bit of an arse. I mean, you won't die, but the energy and irritation expended in pathless floundering about probably means taking the main path is a better option. You do you, though.

The summit trig point is by a big pile of rocks (which obscure it until the last second coming from the north-east) and, having bagged it and dropped off the top (we went south as this happened to be the direction that got us out of the wind) for a pork pie and a Granny Smith, the walk then drops off the summit ridge to the north-west and eventually joins up with the route of Hill's Tramroad, which includes an exciting tunnel which the kids had some fun exploring and where they shot a video for Huwie's YouTube channel. That path follows the contours round the hillside until it links back with the path up through the woods which takes you back down to where you started.

I think this is the best of the three slightly different routes: the 2009 walk included an extension to loop round the Foxhunter car park and Keeper's Pond (another popular wild swimming spot), which is all very nice but doesn't really add much apart from some lateral distance, and I think the ascent via the Devil's Punchbowl is better than the route along the canal towpath and then an uphill slog along some roads. The 2021 walk took a similar route up (with a bit of inadvertent pathless floundering as described above) but then a much more direct route down, which is fine if you're in a hurry but less interesting than the route incorporating the tramroad and tunnel.

Overall route distance was just over ten kilometres, or about six-and-a-half miles. Details below: latest in the long and varied series of altitude-graph-generating tools is Strava which my Garmin running watch is linked to: this seems not to have the random starting height discrepancy that the old phone app had, which is nice. 

leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

smallebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are my son Huw and 1970s yellow cartoon weirdo Bod. Small skinny-legged person, three-letter name, voluminous upper garment coming down below waist level, profile view that makes them appear to only have one leg.

A bit of context for both halves of the image: the thing Huwie is standing on is a groyne (no, stop it) on Southbourne beach where we were last weekend, and the thing Bod is looking at is, and I quote: "an enormous bowl of strawberries and cream". This is from the episode Bod's Dream which can be seen here. The thing people who grew up in the 1970s forget about Bod is that the animated bit was only the first 4-5 minutes of a 15-minute show, and the rest of it was filled with some stuff-spotting puzzles, random songs and the interminable adventures of Alberto Frog And His Amazing Animal Band, culminating in the impossibly thrilling climax wherein Alberto chose a flavour of milkshake for a reward (for solving some mystery or other) from a shortlist of about three. 

snorklebrity lookeyspikey of the day

Today's pairing features my son Huw, in the pool at our holiday house in Brittany a couple of weeks ago and borrowing some of his big sister's swimming accessories, in particular her face-mounted snorkel, and also the strange underwater artificial dinosaur hybrid submarine that I drew for my school yearbook at Bandung International School in Java in about 1979 (when I would have been about nine). Obviously the shape and positioning of the snorkel is the thing that brought the two together in my mind.

The drawing was accompanied by the following explanatory (well, sort of) text:

It's interesting to unpick all the things that (consciously or unconsciously) influenced both the drawing and the text in my nine-year-old mind:

• The BBRFC on the creature's sleeve, and indeed the rest of the design of the T-shirt the creature is wearing, is a reference to Bandung Barbarians Rugby Football Club, a loosely-organised group of expatriates from various countries (mainly the UK, Australia and New Zealand) for which my father used to turn out. My recollection of the various rugby days out we went to during our time in Java was that they were mainly a pretext for epic beer consumption, probably mainly the product of the Anker brewery with whom the club seemed to have cooked up some sort of endorsement/sponsorship deal, judging by the club T-shirt I am wearing in the images below (probably taken at Pangandaran). The beardy guy piloting the craft is also probably modelled on my Dad, though I should point out he has never smoked a pipe as far as I know.

• The general concept for the creature is clearly adapted/stolen from the Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure which I read approximately a gazillion times. The smaller shark-based craft there was the brainchild of eccentric genius Professor Calculus. That's his English name, anyway, he was called Tournesol in the original French books. Translations into other languages are available, including, rather marvellously, Welsh; who knows what his name is there. 

• Obviously kids love dinosaurs, and you can see bits from at least three separate dinosaurs in the design of the creature: the head with its distinctive crest is clearly a parasaurolophus, the big fin thing on its back looks as if it's from a dimetrodon, and the spiked tail is a bit like that of a stegosaurus, informally known in slightly tedious paleontological nerd humour circles as a thagomizer. The fins at the rear are presumably a hangover from the fish design I stole the idea from, and I have no idea why the front limbs seem to have their elbows on backwards.

here'th thumbthing interethting

You might recall, if you follow me on Twitter/X, and why in the name of God would you, that I have occasionally - as a twisted means of expressing my love for, and pride in, my kids, though in a typically British oblique and emotionally-repressed way - mentioned some of their fascinating genetic traits, all thankfully on the quirky and endearing side of the dividing line that separates them from the more extreme tentacly Lovecraftian horrors that must be DESTROYED WITH FIRE.

A couple of examples are below:

fascinatingly-named genetic conditions that I exhibit which I have passed on to my eldest daughter: Darwin's tubercle (unilateral), Morton's toe (bilateral, as I think it always is). also, Shatner's bassoon, etc. #genetics

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 13, 2020

the internet is great. I have one of these, as do my father and my eldest daughter. wife and other two kids don't have it. FREAKS! https://t.co/sh0F1C1dwL

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 25, 2019

Another example follows: I'm not sure that we've applied a greater level of scrutiny to the boy in terms of his development after his early arrival and spending the first 91 days of his life in a series of gradually-larger plastic boxes with bleepy machines attached in hospital, but I suppose it's plausible that we might have. Anyway, one thing I've always noticed about Huwie is what I perceive to be his freakishly enormous thumbs. I have always taken this as an indication of future tallness as an adult once the rest of his anatomy catches up with his thumbs - as an aside, although he is currently slightly below average height for his age, the canonical example of teeny prematurity not being a bar to tallness and sporting prowess as an adult is recently-retired cricketer Stuart Broad, born at 28 weeks (Huwie was 27) but eventually a strapping 6 feet 5 inches.

However, it turns out that this may have been en error of perspective - I don't mean that I was accidentally holding the boy's thumbs really close, more that my expectations for appropriate child thumb size will have been influenced by my two daughters. And why not, you might say, except that Nia, who is generally curious about all things and now has a phone with access to the internet, ran into the kitchen the other day excitedly shouting "Dad, I've got toe thumbs!". Sorry, love, you've got what? "Alys has got them too!" Hang on, what?

Well, it turns out that "toe thumbs" are actually a thing, that particular phrase being one of several common colloquial descriptions of a genetic trait more properly called brachydactyly type D. This is the most common form of brachydactyly, supposedly affecting around 2-3% of the population. To illustrate, here is a parade of thumbs:

So you can see that Huwie's thumbnails are almost circular or perhaps even elliptical, with the major axis oriented vertically, whereas Nia's are elliptical(ish) with the major axis oriented horizontally and Alys' thumbnails barely exist at all. We're not fully comparing apples with apples here because Alys (like me) is an inveterate nail-biter while Nia and Huwie are not. Nonetheless there is a stark contrast between Huwie's thumbs, which give a general impression of tapering elegantly, and the girls' thumbs which are squared-off and stubby. No suggestion of any other genetic consequences of having weird thumbs, thankfully, and the only practical consequence is that neither of the girls will be able to play the guitar in the style of Richie Havens. 

So if it's an inheritable genetic trait, Dave, you'll be saying, what do your thumbs look like?

My desk isn't broken, by the way; I had to stitch two images together (badly) owing to a need to have a hand to hold the camera with. It's hard to be objective about something that, after 50+ years of looking at them, implicitly defines my mental image of what a "normal" thumb looks like, but I'd say I occupy a centre ground between Huwie and the girls. My ellipses are definitely horizontal but there's a bit more nail (even allowing for their bitten state) than, say, Alys has. 

Just for completeness, Hazel's are below. She has pretty regular vertical ellipses, so I have to conclude that it's me who is the carrier of the genetic freakery here.