Walk 346 -- Maltraeth to Dwyran

Ages:  Colin was 71 years and 168 days.  Rosemary was 68 years and 310 days.

Weather:  The rain clouds cleared away and it was mostly sunny and warm, though the wind remained strong.
Location:  Malltraeth to Dwyran.
Distance:  9 miles.
Total distance:  3572 miles.
Terrain:  A cycle track on the sea bank.  Beautiful forest walks.  A sandy beach.  Some quiet roads.  Boggy tracks and fields.  Stepping stones across a river.
Tide:  In.
Rivers: No.424, Afon Cefni.  No.425, Afon Braint — which we crossed on stepping stones,  HELP! 
Ferries:  None.
Piers:  None.
Kissing gates:  Nos.652 to 655, all towards the end of the Walk.
Pubs:  None.
‘Cadw’ properties:  None.
Ferris wheels:  None.
Diversions:  None, because I was brave enough to cross the stepping stones!
How we got there and back:  We were staying in a cosy little holiday cottage near Criccieth.  This morning we drove from there to Dwyran where we parked just round the corner from a bus stop.  From there we caught a bus to Malltraeth and alighted right next to the car park where we finished the last Walk.

At the end we finished the official Walk in the fields south of the village.  We walked across a couple of soggy fields and emerged on the bypass.  We crossed this and walked into the village, soon realising that we weren’t on the road we thought we were.  I was walking on looking at the map, trying to work out where we really were when I practically ran into our parked car!  So we had our tea and chocolate biscuits, then we drove back to our cosy little cottage.

We crossed the bridge over Afon Cefni which was canalised in 1824, but I can’t find out why.  Was it something to do with the copper industry?

The estuary on the southern side of the bridge is an important nature reserve.  We walked across “The Cob” which is a raised bank alongside the estuary.  My!  It was cold out there!  A bitter wind cut across the sands — I put my hood up and Colin got out his furry hat.  We were both still wearing our full wet-weather gear, which is also windproof, because we didn’t trust the weather despite the clearing skies.  (There had been torrential downpours until the early hours, and we had left the cottage in the rain this morning.)

After about a mile we came to a picnic area which was much more sheltered as it was amongst trees.  We sat at a picnic table and ate our quiche/pasty.  There was a permanent step there to mount horses, and we watched two girls use it to set off on ponies accompanied by a woman walking with a dog.  We followed the same track into the forest because it was the official coast path.  It was a wide track with hardcore, but was actually quite muddy after all the rain we’ve been having.  It was not the type of forest path we had been led to believe it would be from looking at the map, more like a rough muddy road.  We found it to be a bit soul-destroying.
After a mile or so we turned right through a muddy puddle on to a delightful forest path.  This was much better!  It was great to look upwards through the trees to the blue sky beyond.

The path took us out to the estuary which was marshy.  We could see a manor house in the woods on the opposite side — we had passed entrances to this estate when walking along a lane on our last Walk.  It was windy out in the open but not cold because, unlike The Cob, we had trees partially sheltering us on one side.  We could see the pony riders ahead, we must have been following them.  We also saw dragonflies and butterflies in the sunshine — that’s more like it!

The track led along the edge of the forest, then it turned in.  We saw strange flowering palms, very pretty but they looked totally out of place in this forest setting.  We wondered who had planted them, and why.

We could hear the wind in the trees and the waves on the shore which wasn’t very far away now.  It really made us feel good.  It was very sheltered where we were and we began to get quite hot.  So we removed our wet-weather gear.

The path came out on an earth road by a huge rock which looked like a sleeping dinosaur.  It looked man-made, then we thought it may be an erratic because it seemed so out of place.  We looked at the map and realised it was an extension of the rocks which make up Llanddwyn Island — Colin was the first to deduce that, and admitted he wouldn’t have thought of any such thing before he started studying geology with the U3A (University of the Third Age).

Two huge JCBs were working on the earth road.  One was a heavy roller, and as they passed us the ground vibrated like an earthquake.
The road led down towards the beach, we could see the sea through the trees.  We turned off the path, made our way over a bank and came out on the sands.  It was lovely!  It was not nearly so windy as it had been earlier and the sun was warm.  There were quite a few people there, many were speaking Welsh.  We had wonderful views of Snowdonia across the water, and of Llanddwyn Island stretching out towards the rest of Wales.

The tide was right in, so Llanddwyn Island really was an island — most of the time it is accessible without getting your feet wet, but not at that moment.  Also we were anxious to finish our Walk before we began to lose daylight, so we decided to miss out Llanddwyn Island as being a dead end we didn’t have to walk.  But we hadn’t realised the significance of the island, nor of the strange rocks on the beach.

Two years later we revisited this beach with our local U3A Geology group — a trip led by a university professor.  She told us that this area is a geologist’s “Mecca”.  The rocks on the beach are pillow lavas which only occur on constructive plate margins at the very bottom of oceans.  The geology is complicated, but to put it simply Llanddwyn Island is a remnant of a defunct ocean which was here hundreds of millions of years ago.

And beautiful the rocks are too, many coloured minerals are exposed.  (On that visit the tide was out and we walked the length of the island.)
Llanddwyn Island was also revered as a holy place by our ancestors.  Dwynwen was a 5^th century saint who lived as a hermit on the island after her love affair turned sour.  She was said to be the patron saint of lovers.  (Surely not the right person if she couldn’t manage her own love affairs!)  If a woman scattered breadcrumbs on her holy well on the island, then laid her handkerchief over them, she could tell that her lover would be faithful if the eels in the well disturbed this arrangement.  (I wouldn’t have relied on it!)  This practice became very popular in Tudor times when the chapel was built, and it made the area very rich.  (Another medieval scam?) 

Getting back to the Walk, we walked about a mile along this beautiful beach.

Though the tide was right in, the sand was not too soft to walk on.  With the wonderful views of Snowdonia across the strait it was absolutely glorious!  We approached the sand cliffs where the tide was too far in for us to walk comfortably.

We came to a dip in the cliffs — it looked like a decent path inland, it was well-walked and we weren’t the only ones using it today.  So with a last look at the wonderful view of Snowdonia across the water we turned into the forest.

The path led us up and down through woods.  We could see the official path which runs parallel to the beach but we had to climb over a fence to get to it.  It was not a barbed wire fence so that wasn’t too difficult, but why was it there?  We came to “Trim Trail”, a picnic site with gym apparatus like parallel bars, and there was nobody there.  But we both wanted the loos which we knew were around somewhere, so we looked on the map.  We deduced we must climb a sandy hill behind “Trim Trail”, and there we saw just below us the roof of the loo block in a huge car park.  The toilets were clean, open and free — well done to whoever was responsible for them!  Feeling much more comfortable, we sat at a windy picnic table to eat our sandwiches and apples.

The path continued from a corner of the car park through woods to the eastern edge of the forest.  There we turned north-east and walked along the edge of the forest, just within the trees, for about a mile.  The sun was shining brightly and we loved the interplay of light as it fell between the trees.

Newborough Warren was on our right, not the sea.  There are paths across the Warren, but they are tidal and come to a dead end when they reach the Menai Strait.  So we didn’t walk them, there was no point.  The Warren has been grazed by ponies ever since the myxomatosis crisis of 1954 wiped out the rabbits.  (Colin and I both remember how scrubland shot up that summer because there were no rabbits grazing.  I was nine years old, and remember the grassy slopes in Arundel Park disappearing under a mass of ragwort and brambles.)

The path turned away from the forest — there was still the Warren to the right but now there were fields and a pond to our left.  We came to a car park cum picnic site with a weird sculpture of marram grass stooks.  A notice told us, “This sculpture depicts the ‘gafrod’ of marram grass, harvested and drying in the sun.  Newborough residents used to harvest the grass every two years and leave it to dry from its green colour to a golden yellow.  ‘Gafrod’ was a local term for the bundles of marram standing on end, gathered and tied at the top with a plaited cord of marram.” 

We sat at a table to eat our chocolate.  A group of ponies were carrolled in a pen at the side of the car park.  Some men turned up with a horse-trailer and started inspecting and sorting them.  They all spoke in Welsh so we had no idea what they were saying.
We walked along a road for a short way, then turned down a track towards Afon Braint.  Colin saw a stoat, but it had run away before I caught sight of it.  As we approached the river we were getting a little worried because we couldn’t see the footbridge we thought was there.  That’s because there wasn’t one, there were stepping stones!  (We should have looked more carefully at the map, it is clearly marked as stepping stones at that point.)

The stones were real rocks which had been squared off, and they were more or less flat-topped.  The gaps between them weren’t too big, though one in the middle was a bit wider.  The river was running fast after all the rain we have had, and the crossing looked daunting.

Colin was confident, but I was a little nervous — this type of situation is where my lack of 3D vision becomes a real handicap.  I glanced at the map to look for an alternative route, then I said, “I’m not going back to that b****y road!”  In my own time I leapt safely from stone to stone with great aplomb, even over the bigger gap in the middle.  I was quite proud of myself!  (Colin did take a photo of me doing it, but that was one of the ones that got deleted.)  We then had only a quarter of a mile to go — along a marshy river bank, then through some fields until we were at the nearest point to Dwyran.

That ended Walk no.346, we shall pick up Walk no.347 next time on a footpath just south of Dwyran.  It was half past three, so the Walk had taken us five hours fifty minutes.  We walked across a couple of soggy fields and emerged on the bypass.  We crossed this and walked into the village, soon realising that we weren’t on the road we thought we were.  I was walking on looking at the map, trying to work out where we really were when I practically ran into our parked car!  So we had our tea and chocolate biscuits, then we drove back to our cosy little cottage.