It is 10 years since the first Mid Wales Midwinter post and I’m back spending a few days before Christmas with my old friend Tony Cross. The rural landscapes of rolling mountains, small green fields, steep bracken-clad valleys and cliff-lined coastline are as beautiful as ever. Of course, the day we take the mountain road…
Tag: Cambrian Mountains
Ffridd
The unenclosed hill slopes or ffridd are a mosaic of bracken, scrub, heather, grass and wet flushes that lie between the pasture fields and the mountain plateaus. Around the Elenydd mountains in mid-Wales, ffridd is rich with small birds including redstarts, yellowhammers, tree pipits, whinchats and stonechats. Redpolls, siskins and mistle thrushes are common in…
Cwm Doethie’s Merlins
Right at the heart of the Cambrian Mountains in mid-Wales, the Doethie valley runs north off the Pysgotwr which in turn runs down into the Tywi by the Dinas nature reserve; it is a rare valley in that there is no road or driveable track just a path used by walkers and mountain bikers between…
Elenydd Meadows and Woodlands
10th June 2018 From the roadside, the hay meadows at Hirnant Farm (Caeau Hirnant) on the winding road along Craig Goch Reservoir are a rare picture of summer colour; yellow with rough hawkbit, bird’s foot trefoil, yellow rattle and buttercup, white with pignut and eyebright and dashed purple with red clover and marsh orchids. The…
Elenydd
21st – 23rd April The Elenydd mountains are an empty landscape of soft grassland plateaus cut by deep, bracken-clad valleys; the myriad small streams feed the Cothi, Elan, Teifi, Tywi and Ystwyth rivers. The highest plateaus are capped with blanket bog and mires full of sedge, cotton grass and Sphagnum fill the shallow depressions. These uplands are…