The 50 Greatest Walks of the World E-Book

Barry Stone

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Serie: The 50
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 255

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Barry Stone, author of 1001 Walks You Must Experience Before You Die, delves into some of the lesser-known aspects of the world's most famous – and not-quite-famous-yet – trails. The perfect accompaniment to practical guidebooks, Stone relates how slings and carabiners kept him from falling headlong off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and reports on the progress of the continental-wide monster, the Trans Canada Trail, gaps in which are still being filled by countless grass-roots communities. With walks that will appeal to everyone regardless of ability, The 50 Greatest Walks of the World includes British classics such as the Pennine Way, Offa's Dyke Path, and the Old Man of Hoy as well as personal favourites such as Italy's Cinque Terre Classic and the Isle of Skye's Trotternish Ridge, one of Britain's finest ridge traverses with almost 2,500m of ascents. Whether it's a climb, a stroll, or a life-changing slog, this book has the walk for you.

Leseprobe

GREATEST WALKS OF THE WORLD

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

TIMPSON

Also available

The 50 Greatest Rugby Union Players of All Time

The 50 Most Influential Britons of the Last 100 Years

The 50 Greatest Train Journeys of the World

Geoff Hurst’s Greats: England’s 1966 Hero Selects His Finest Ever Footballers

David Gower’s Greatest Half-Century

GREATEST WALKS OF THE WORLD

BARRY STONE

Published in the UK in 2016 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by

Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,

Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada,

76 Stafford Street, Unit 300,

Toronto, Ontario M6J 2S1

Distributed in the USA

by Publishers Group West,

1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

ISBN: 978-178578-063-9

Book People edition ISBN: 978-178578-087-5

Text copyright © 2016 Barry Stone

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Images – see individual pictures

Typeset and designed by Simmons Pugh

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE 50 GREATEST WALKS OF THE WORLD

Difficulty ratings: Easy / Moderate / Strenuous

50. White Horse Trail, Wiltshire, England

144 km / Easy / 8–9 days

49. Monmouthshire and Brecon Canals, Monmouthshire / Powys, Wales

51.5 km / Easy / 2–3 days

48. Llangollen Round, Denbighshire, Wales

53 km / Easy to Moderate / 2–4 days

47. Keenagh Loop Walk, County Mayo, Ireland

12 km / Moderate / 4 hours

46. Dingle Way, County Kerry, Ireland

162 km / Easy to Moderate / 9 days

45. Formartine and Buchan Way, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

85 km / Easy / 4 days

44. Cotswold Way, Gloucestershire, Somerset, England

164 km/ Moderate / 8–10 days

43. Herriot Way, North Yorkshire, England

88 km / Easy / 4–5 days

42. Burren Way, County Clare, Ireland

114 km / Moderate / 7 days

41. Dublin Mountains Way, Dublin Mountains, Ireland

43 km / Moderate / 2 days

40. Rob Roy Way, Stirlingshire and Perthshire, Scotland

127 km / Moderate / 6–7 days

39. Thames Path, Cotswolds to Thames Barrier, England

296 km / Easy / 12–14 days

38. Anglesey Coastal Path, Anglesey Island, Wales

212 km / Moderate / 10–12 days

37. River Ayr Way, East and South Ayrshire, Scotland

66 km / Easy / 3 days

36. Offa’s Dyke Path, Wales and England

285 km / Moderate to Strenuous / 2 weeks

35. Causeway Coast Way, Antrim, Northern Ireland

51 km / Easy / 2–3 days

34. Aonach Eagach Ridge Walk, Glen Coe, Scotland

9.5 km / Strenuous / 6–9 hours

33. Camino de Santiago (The Way of St James), Spain and France

800 km / Easy to Moderate / 30–35 days

32. Channel Island Way, Channel Islands, England

185 km / Easy to Moderate / 14 days

31. Kerry Way, County Kerry, Ireland

214 km / Strenuous / 9 days

30. Skerries Circular, Shetland Islands, Scotland

9.7 km / Easy / 4 hours

29. Great Stones Way, Wiltshire, England

58 km / Easy / 3 days

28. Dales Way, West Yorkshire and Cumbria, England

135 km / Easy / 6–8 days

27. Wales Coast Path, Monmouthshire to Flintshire, Wales

1,400 km / Moderate / 3 months

26. Cape Wrath Trail, Highland, Scotland

312–357 km / Strenuous / 12–21 days

25. Uluru Circuit, Northern Territory, Australia

10.5 km / Easy / 4 hours

24. Derwent Valley Heritage Way, Derbyshire, England

88 km / Easy / 6–9 days

23. Isle of Man Coastal Path, Isle of Man

153 km / Strenuous / 5–7 days

22. West Highland Way, East Dunbartonshire to Highland, Scotland

153 km / Easy / 8 days

21. Moray Coast Trail, Moray, Scotland

70 km / Easy / 3 days

20. Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb, Sydney, Australia

Negligible / Easy / 2 hours

19. Coast to Coast Walk, Cumbria, North Yorkshire, England

309 km / Moderate / 14 days

18. Hadrian’s Wall Path, Tyne and Wear to Cumbria, England

135 km / Easy / 7 days

17. Papa Stour, Shetland Islands, Scotland

Variable / Easy / 1 day

16. Via Francigena, England / France / Switzerland / Italy

1,899 km / Strenuous / 3 months

15. Tour du Mont Blanc, France / Italy / Switzerland

170 km / Strenuous / 10–12 days

14. Trans Canada Trail, Canada

23,000 km/ Strenuous / 2 years+

13. Hayduke Trail, Utah / Arizona, USA

1,328 km / Strenuous / 3 months

12. Southwest Coastal Path, Southwest England

1,014 km / Moderate to Strenuous / 5–8 weeks

11. Alta Via 1, Trentino Alto Adige, Italy

119 km / Moderate / 11 days

10. Buckskin Gulch, Utah, USA

21 km / Easy to Moderate / 1–2 days

9.Cinque Terre Classic, Liguria, Italy

12 km / Easy / Half a day

8.Trotternish Ridge, Isle of Skye, Scotland

37 km / Moderate / 2 days

7.Bright Angel Trail / South Kaibab Trail Circuit, Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA

27.3 km / Strenuous / 2 days

6.Milford Track, Southland, New Zealand

53.5 km / Moderate / 4 days

5.Inca Trail, Arequipa, Peru

45 km / Moderate / 4 days

4.Annapurna Circuit, Annapurna Massif, Nepal

190 km / Strenuous / 2–3 weeks

3.Pennine Way National Trail, England / Scotland

431 km / Strenuous / 14–21 days

2.Appalachian Trail, Georgia to Maine, USA

3,476 km / Easy to Strenuous / 5–7 months

1.Mount Kailash, China (Tibet)

52 km / Strenuous / 3 days

Disclaimer

The descriptions given in these articles are for general guidance only, and should not be used as a substitute for a proper route plan or map. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss, injury or damage allegedly arising from any information contained in this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry Stone began his writing career in 1998 as a travel writer before authoring his first book in 2007, I Want to be Alone, on the history of hermits and recluses. Nine more titles have followed, and in between books he indulges his passion for walking and taking to trails wherever in the world he finds himself when wearing his travel writer’s hat. Barry lives on a quiet acre in Picton, an hour’s drive south of Sydney with his wife Yvonne and children Jackson and Truman. He rarely has a day when he is neither writing nor walking.

INTRODUCTION

Walking, if you want to reduce it to its base mechanics, is little more than a ‘controlled fall’, a forward movement initiated by the legs, one of which balances us in an upright position before pushing us forward, while the other swings through in a rhythmic motion just in time to prevent us from collapsing flat on our faces. If you believe the best guess of evolutionary biologists it’s likely the advent of walking – of becoming bipedal – arose 4–5 million years ago when our ancestors first became providers for family units and so needed to free up their ‘hands’ in order to bring home food and provisions. At the same time that our heels, hips and knees were becoming enlarged to carry the extra weight required of them, walking on two legs began to free up those same hands for rock-throwing in order both to procure food and prevent the throwers from becoming food themselves. Over time – a lot of time – what began as something that was purposeful and survival-driven, a process of natural selection, morphed to become our most efficient mode of travel. From an exo-skeletal point of view running is, by contrast, 75 per cent less efficient than walking. Which I guess means apologies are in order to all the joggers out there who think it better to run than walk. Millions of years of trial and error, and the science of human design, say otherwise.

The era of ‘recreational walking’ – walking for pleasure – was inaugurated in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries partly as a reaction against increasing industrialisation, partly because the ‘Industrial Revolution’ brought increased leisure time to an already leisurely aristocracy, and partly nudged along by the Age of Enlightenment. But mostly it was thanks to the era of heroic Romanticism, which lauded the visceral emotive responses born from getting out and confronting the raw beauty of nature, the expressions of which were then being seen everywhere in art, music and literature. ‘Pedestrianism’ – the pastime of watching other people simply walking – became for a time the largest spectator sport in late 19th century America, eclipsing even baseball, which was still in the process of finding its own ‘legs’. Walking marathons were so popular they began to take on gladiatorial dimensions when they were extended over so many days they doubled as rather gruesome endurance tests in how not to sleep. How different that is to the ‘new pedestrianism’ of today advocated by the American urban designer and futurist Michael Arth – redesigning urban spaces where walking and cycle paths take the place of roads, pushing the bitumen and those horrid cars that go with them out to a town’s perimeter, thus returning cities to the people.

People who indulge in recreational walking in the 21st century do so for many reasons. Me? Well, the reason I walk is not because I like the physical act of walking so much as because I like the landscapes, gorges, ridgelines and suspension bridges through and over which it takes me. I walk because for me it is reductive – it simplifies life, reduces it to a few core decisions. Turn left. Turn right. Go straight. Keep going. Ignore the weather. Be inventive. Don’t look back. I like to walk because it is a slow pursuit, rhythmic and repetitive and purposeful and exhilarating. My feet have taken me to places no other mode of transport could: through the sinewy web of iron and steel that makes up the 52,800 tonnes of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, thankfully now accessible to all who want to climb it and a prime example of how our urban environments are becoming increasingly accessible with every new piece of adapted infrastructure; and along the High Line, an old elevated rail line through New York’s meatpacking district, now a triumph of urban renewal National Geographic called the ‘Miracle above Manhattan’. Whether negotiating the fractured limestone pavements of Ireland’s Burren Way, rock scrambling through Utah’s Buckskin Gulch, moving over ice floes in the Russian arctic or along the Cornish coast – my mind works best when these places slow it down, when everything you need for the day is on your back and when the promise of a well-grassed campsite, cosy hotel, or B&B is all you need to keep you moving forward.

When walking I can be the vagabond ‘of no fixed address’ I’ve always longed to be, a wanderer who seeks anonymity and passes through landscapes unnoticed, a passive participant in life. I walk because, in words echoed by the French philosopher Frederic Gros, I have ‘a need for contemplation’. Contemplative walking is what inspired Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth and C. S. Lewis. It frees up the mind to find rhythms otherwise suppressed by the demands of everyday life. It problem solves and ‘leaves behind’, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘all base and terrestrial sentiments’. Rousseau’s mind only worked, he said, when his legs were in motion. Walking may not of itself provide solutions to life’s complexities, but it can facilitate them, expose them. Whittle them down into manageable, bite-sized chunks.

There have been times when I’ve been so immersed in the distractions and random thoughts I’ve conjured up that I’ve failed to negotiate the next step. I’ve had my fair share of walking mishaps. ‘Would you like me to carry you?’ my guide asked when he saw me struggling down a stepped section of trail on the Kali Ghandaki gorge, the ligaments in my right knee well and truly stretched thanks to a single ill-timed step. Pride, of course, prevented me from accepting his offer. On Italy’s Alta Via 1, I slid 30 metres down a snow slope after missing a foot hole while daydreaming, and cannoned into the only protruding rock there was – a fortunate trajectory, it turned out, as it prevented me continuing down the hill a further 100 metres. I’ve rolled down a slope above a Norwegian fjord, grasping at tussocks of grass to help slow my descent. I’ve even fallen off a suspension bridge.

The 50 walks in this book represent a cross-section of mountain and cross-country trails, circular loops, and historic and coastal walks that showcase the enviable network of trails that criss-cross the United Kingdom but also include some of the world’s classic trails such as the Appalachian Trail and the Tour du Mont Blanc. There are trails here that we should all be a little more familiar with than we are, such as Ireland’s Dingle Way and the awe-inspiring Trotternish Ridge on the Isle of Skye, as well as many of the ones we ‘think’ we know – the Pennine Way, the Coast to Coast, and the Cotswold Way.

We live in a modern world in which we are increasingly being ‘moved’ rather than moving, helped along to wherever it is we want to go by planes, trains, automobiles, electric bicycles, escalators, travelators, segways and hoverboards. Our comforts and conveniences are sapping our strength, and this is no recent phenomenon. Studies at Cambridge University suggest that ever since we gravitated from hunter-gatherers to farmers, our mobility and lower limb strength have been on a gradual decline. Humans, put simply, are past their peak. And urbanisation and a more sedentary lifestyle are to blame.

Now that’s not to say that getting out and going for a walk – even a lifetime of very long walks – is going to reverse the effects of the last few thousand post-hunter-gatherer years.

But it’s a start.

THE 50 GREATEST WALKS OF THE WORLD

_____________

50. WHITE HORSE TRAIL

Wiltshire, England

Distance: 144 km

Grade: Easy

Time: 8–9 days

They are scattered right across Great Britain – 57 figures (gigantotomy) and horses (leucippotomy) carved into chalk and limestone hills in areas where their exposed ‘whiteness’ contrasts well with darker soil or grassy surrounds. There were once many more. Most were created over the last three or four hundred years, not as ancient as their graceful Celtic-like forms might suggest, although Oxfordshire’s Uffington White Horse, a masterpiece of minimalist art, dates to the Iron Age or late Bronze Age and was itself the inspiration for other white horse carvings – including the eight examples you can now see as you make your way along Wiltshire’s White Horse Trail.

When it comes to white horses, Wiltshire is without doubt the ‘county of counties’. Its oldest and largest, set on the site of an even more ancient carving which it completely covers, is Westbury White Horse, cut in 1778 on the boundary of Bratton Downs above the Vale of Pewsey. Westbury White Horse was restored in 1853 and again in 1872, and in 1873 a line of edging stones was added to help keep the chalk in place. Pewsey White Horse, cut on Pewsey Hill in 1937 close to an earlier example dating from the late 1700s which scholars think may have included a rider, was designed and cut to honour the coronation of George VI. The Alton Barnes White Horse on Milk Hill appeared in 1812, and in 1804 students at a school in Preshute designed the ‘tiny’ (19 m nose to tail) Preshute, or Marlborough, White Horse. The Winterbourne Bassett White Horse was likely cut in 1838 by Henry Eatwell, the Parish Clerk of Broad Hinton, most likely to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria. Broad Town White Horse, visible from the village of Broad Town, probably dates to 1863/64 when it was cut by a local farmer, William Simmonds, or could be older if the claims of a curator at the Imperial War Museum that he scoured it with a friend in 1813 are to be believed. Cherhill White Horse, Wiltshire’s second oldest (1780) and second largest (43 m ear to hoof), sits below the Iron Age ruins of Oldbury Castle. The county’s youngest figure, the Devizes White Horse just north of the town of Devizes on Roundway Hill, cut in 1999 to usher in the new millennium, was based on the design of the now barely visible Snob’s White Horse (1845), a figure that has defied several attempts to have it re-cut and is therefore not counted in the list of horses the trail aids you in discovering.

WHITE HORSE TRAIL

Photo: Mcbish

The White Horse Trail takes you to each horse in turn through the lovely rolling hills of central Wiltshire’s chalk downs, and while you are certainly welcome to walk the trail in its entirety, each horse has its own approach trail so it is possible to pick and choose which particular horses you’d most like to see. Driving to each horse and walking the trails to their individual viewing points is of course an option, but for those who have a week or more to spare and plan to walk the trail in its entirety, a good starting point is the car park above the Westbury White Horse that skirts a firing range on Salisbury Plain. From Westbury, metalled roads, bridleways, farm tracks, bogs, sleeper bridges and rutted tracks can then get you the 38 km or so via Redhorn Hill to Pewsey, but Westbury’s remoteness from the remaining white horses makes this the one section you’re probably going to want to drive.

The 18 km from Pewsey White Horse to Marlborough White Horse outside Preshute begins with a lovely walk through uncultivated fields into Pewsey and briefly along the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath. From there continue on to the Mid-Wilts Way (MWW), a lovely rural walk in its own right that runs for 109 km from Ham near Inkpen to Mere, not far from Warminster. Join the Wansdyke Path (more on this wonderful path shortly) on the edge of West Woods, pass through Short Oak Copse and make for Preshute House in Marlborough College, where the Marlborough White Horse can be seen behind the college’s tennis courts, sitting in its shallow slope on Granham Hill.

Just 10 km away is Winterbourne Bassett White Horse, reached via Totterdown Wood and along the Ridgeway, long considered Britain’s oldest road. The 10-km trail to Broad Town and the Broad Town White Horse begins on the Ridgeway, takes a route through the grounds of Bincknoll Castle and neighbouring Bincknoll Wood, and ends with a trail through brambles, thistles and nettles that may or may not be open to the public thanks to landslips and the path being overgrown, though the alternative approach via Horns Lane and Chapel Lane into Broad Town is easy enough.

The 12.5 km to Cherhill White Horse starts with the crossing of a succession of fields and farm gates until you reach the hamlets of Clevancy and Highway, beyond which you’ll have your first sighting of Cherhill’s Lansdowne Monument, a 38-m-high obelisk erected by the 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne to commemorate his ancestor William Petty – scientist, philosopher, and charter member of the Royal Society. The Cherhill White Horse is a ten-minute walk from the monument on the hillside below, on a slope so steep that after it was cut children from Cherhill would slide down the figure on sacks and trays. A major renovation was conducted in 2002 which involved re-cutting the horse’s outline and resurfacing it with more than 160 tons of fresh chalk.

From Cherhill it is 15 km to Alton Barnes White Horse, an historic treasure-trove of a walk that has you briefly treading an old Roman road before joining up again with the Wansdyke Path, which here follows as best it can a long ditch and embankment dating to the Dark Ages (400 to 700 CE). Constructed by persons unknown on an east-west alignment, the Wansdyke ditch is one of the UK’s largest (and least-known) linear earthworks.

Passing more farm tracks, kissing gates and barns you leave the Wansdyke Path and enter Pewsey Downs Nature Reserve, famous not only for the Alton Barnes White Horse which now lies before you on Milk Hill, but also as a Special Area of Conservation in what is a classic chalk down habitat with its early gentians and an orchid-rich grassland that includes a proliferation of burnt-tip and frog orchids that help support the reserve’s impressive butterfly population. The Alton Barnes White Horse underwent a significant restoration in 2010 when 150 tons of fresh chalk was helicoptered to the site where volunteers then got to work on giving the figure a much-needed facelift.

The 19-km walk to Devizes starts with a visit to Adam’s Grave, a Neolithic long barrow on the summit of Walker’s Hill that was opened in 1860 by ethnologist and archaeologist John Thurnam who found several incomplete skeletons and a leaf-shaped spearhead inside. A delightful 11-km walk along the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath through the villages of All Cannings and Horton leads to the gorgeous tree-lined avenue of Quakers Walk before a series of hedges, tarmac roads and a wooden kissing gate brings you to the Devizes Millennium White Horse. Designed in 1999 by a former pupil of Devizes Grammar School, Peter Greed, and the only white horse in Wiltshire to face to the right, it was executed by more than 200 enthusiastic locals and now forms the logo of the Devizes Nursteed Primary School.

Sadly, not all of Wiltshire’s white horses have survived. The Rockley White Horse, discovered on Rockley Down in 1948 when the ground above it was ploughed, was lost when the chalk was dispersed, while a horse at Ham Hill cut in the 1860s was lost long ago as it was just an excavated shape with no chalk infill.

The White Horse Trail is an undemanding, gentle walk through a peaceful part of southern England that is filled with history and mysticism. It gets you close to prehistoric Avebury and Silbury Hill, part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site, and includes tantalising glimpses on to some fabulous trails including the Wansdyke, the Ridgeway, and sections of the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath.

49. MONMOUTHSHIRE AND BRECON CANALS

Monmouthshire / Powys, Wales

Distance: 51.5 km

Grade: Easy

Time: 2–3 days

It’s a mouthful, isn’t it, having to say Monmouthshire and Brecon canals all the time, which is why those who work on it every day prefer to call it, simply, the ‘Mon and Brec’. But it wasn’t always the single waterway it is today. It began its life as two canals: the Monmouthshire Canal, authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1792 with its main line from Newport to Pontnewynydd (20 km long, 42 locks, rising 136.3 m) opening in 1796 and its Crumlin Arm (18 km, 32 locks, rising 109 m) following in 1799. The other canal, the Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal, was opened in stages from 1797 to 1799 and was originally meant to join with the River Usk near Caerleon but instead was linked to the Monmouthshire Canal at Pontypool.

MONMOUTHSHIRE AND BRECON CANALS

Photo: Greg Willis

The canals, built by Navigators (Navvies) to transport iron, coal, stone and processed lime, began declining in profitability in the mid-1800s with the arrival of the railways, and sections routinely began to be abandoned. Commercial traffic ceased in 1933, and in 1962 they closed altogether. Restoration work to convert the canals to recreational waterways, however, soon commenced under the auspices of the newly formed British Waterways, with work on Brynich Lock near Brecon in 1968. After suffering all of the usual ravages associated with more than a century of decline, the canal reopened from Pontypool to Brecon in 1970. It has since evolved into one of the most spectacular and scenic canals to be found anywhere in Great Britain.

Walking (or mountain biking) its towpath, almost all of which passes through Brecon Beacons National Park, is a delight as it winds its way from Brecon to Pontypool past farmlands and woodlands, hugging mountain slopes above the valley of the River Usk. Not being connected to the broader network of British canals means there is far less boat traffic on its slow waters which makes for a quieter, more intimate experience than one generally has on a British canal. The wildlife here is particularly impressive too, with the valley’s blanket of wildflowers and the canal being a magnet for birds such as kingfishers, herons, moorhens, swans and mallards. There are also several additional trails you can pick up along the way, like the Henry Vaughan Walk, named in honour of the well-known 17th-century poet that begins in the village of Talybont-on-Usk.

The walk proper, however, begins in Brecon and from Brecon Basin it’s about 4 km to the first lock at Brynich and from there to the five locks at Llangynidr – these come as something of a surprise on this canal which is a contour canal, meaning banks of locks are a rarity. The next 37 km to Pontymoile are lock-free – an impressive accomplishment in itself considering the contours of the hills – and often wind under gorgeous canopies of overhanging trees and pass through towns such as Pencelli, Talybont with its abovementioned Henry Vaughan Walk and Crickhowell, with its Iron Age and Norman remains as well as the spectacular arched bridge over the River Usk, built in 1706 and added to in 1828–30 with thirteen arches on its upstream side, yet only twelve on its downstream!

Gilwern, once a hub of 19th-century industry, is next, with its old tramroads leading to 19th-century limestone quarries and yet more trail diversions, this time taking us to the open moorlands of Llangattock mountain, an undulating plateau that rises to a height of 530 m and formed from coarse sandstones and pockmarked by shakeholes – sinkholes caused by percolating groundwater.

On a canal with a wealth of historic sites, one that should not be missed is Goytre Wharf with its wonderfully preserved lime kilns. At the time of the restoration of the canal in the 1960s Goytre Wharf existed only as a moorage for a few local boats and a boat hire company. It still has its moorage basin, but now the range of vessels is far more eclectic since undergoing its own detailed restoration in 2000.

Walking the canal is more a stroll than a walk. Its industrial history slows you down, but so do its more basic diversions. There is the Royal Oak Pub in Pencelli, the Tipple ‘n’ Tiffin cafe at Brecon’s Theatr Brycheiniog, The White Hart Inn and The Star Inn in Talybont, and the lovely cafe and restaurant at Goytre Wharf. The waterway that was once an industrial corridor bringing raw materials from surrounding quarries along horse-drawn tramroads, incorporating aqueducts over Brynich and Gilwern and the 343-m Ashford Tunnel, is now a canal system built for walking, cycling, canoeing and boating, a delightful reinvention of one of Britain’s most isolated – and idyllic – canal systems.

48. LLANGOLLEN ROUND

Denbighshire, Wales

Distance: 53 km

Grade: Easy to Moderate

Time: 2–4 days

They call it the ‘Permanent Challenge’ – to conquer in a single day the summits surrounding the beautiful Vale of Llangollen on the fully waymarked, high-level 53-km Llangollen Round on the Welsh borders. All you have to do is rise early, have breakfast, and make your way to the Tyn Dwr Outdoor Centre where there will be someone to stamp your route card, give you your Permanent Challenge pack, and take a note of your time. Then off you go, either clockwise or anti-clockwise until you reach the half-way point at the Ponderosa Cafe on Horseshoe Pass, where you collect your next stamp. Then it’s a walk/dash to the finish line back at Tyn Dwr where your time is again noted and you receive your personalised certificate that shows your time and the distance covered. And no matter how exhausted you feel at the end of all this you’ll be glad you did it, because you’ve just completed in a day what most people take three or four to do. Plus your fee of six pounds for the privilege of doing it in a day will be going to Cancer Research UK, the Llangollen branch of which was responsible for devising the route.

Of course there’s nothing to prevent you from making a contribution to CRUK and then doing it in four days anyway, and plenty of reasons why you should not, the least of which is the lovely mix of limestone grasslands, open heather moorlands, and woodlands both deciduous and coniferous that makes walking here such a delight and something to linger over. And for those who are navigationally challenged the trail is a peach – your starting point of Llangollen is almost always visible as you circle it in the hills above.

Most who take the four-day option begin in Llangollen, the attractive market town on the River Dee famous for its annual Eisteddfod and for Chirk Castle, constructed between 1295 and 1310 to keep the Welsh under English rule. The River Dee is crossed twice on the trail: once via the lovely 1660 Carrog Bridge in Carrog, the last stop on the popular Llangollen Steam Railway line; and once courtesy of the magnificent Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, the 307-m-long ‘stream in the sky’. Completed in 1805 using local stone, and a World Heritage Site since 2009, Pontcysyllte is Britain’s longest and highest (38 m) aqueduct with eighteen piers, nineteen arches, and is fed by the waters of nearby Horseshoe Falls. While it is a part of the official trail, there is also a ground-hugging alternative for those who would prefer not to cross it.

LLANGOLLEN ROUND

Photo: Roger W Haworth