Walk 356 -- Abersoch to Pwllheli

Ages:  Colin was 72 years and 67 days.  Rosemary was 69 years and 209 days.

Weather:  Misty rain coming across in waves.  Breezy, but not cold.  Less rain pm.
Location:  Abersoch to Pwllheli.
Distance:  9 miles.
Total distance:  3672 miles.
Terrain:  Lots of beach which was mostly firm sand, though some was a bit stony.  Steep ascent up a headland, moorland path on top, then a steep descent with steps through trees.  Some concrete at start and end of Walk.
Tide:  In, going out.
Rivers: No.430, Afon Soch in Abersoch.
Ferries:  None.
Piers:  None.
Kissing gates:  None.
Pubs:  None.
‘Cadw’ properties:  None.
Ferris wheels:  None.
Diversions:  None.
How we got there and back:  Yesterday we towed our caravan from home to Snowdonia.  This morning we drove to Pwllheli where we parked by the harbour.  We walked to the bus station and caught a bus to Abersoch.
At the end we came upon our car parked in Pwllheli.  We had our tea and biscuits, then returned to our caravan. 

The good news is that Colin has at last had his operation — to replace his faulty artificial sphincter.  It took a lot of persistence and determination to get the treatment he so badly needed.  First of all he wouldn’t take “No” for an answer when he was told he couldn’t have a replacement sphincter on the National Health.  He asked for a referral, then he was subject to numerous cancelled and delayed appointments until he made a list of them and complained about it.  Eventually he was given a date, but neither of us could believe it would really happen until he was wheeled back to the ward from the operating theatre, all done and sewn up!  He ended up at one of Britain’s top hospitals (Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham) where he was treated royally, and the operation was carried out by one of Britain’s top urologists.  Well done the NHS!
He made a quick and complete recovery.  Six weeks later the device was switched on — and it worked!  From day one he was more comfortable with this sphincter than he ever was with the last one.  He is not a hundred per cent dry, but he is a hundred times more comfortable than he was before.  Now we won’t have to anxiously look for the public loos every time we enter a town on our Walks, or be afraid that he is going to embarrass himself — we can be much more relaxed. 
The bad news is that the very week Colin’s sphincter was switched on and he was in the clear, my left knee started to give me trouble.  It has become very painful, especially when I walk downhill.  The diagnosis?  Wear-and-tear arthritis.  The treatment I have received so far?  I have been prescribed codeine tablets to take when I find the pain too much.  They have no effect whatsoever.  I can see this is going to have to go a lot further — it is severely hampering my walking.

Now to the Walk.  I took two codeine tablets before we started because my knee was painful, but I was fooling myself that they were doing me any good.  We sat on a bench above the jetty in Abersoch and huddled against the wall in an effort to get out of the rain.  There we ate the pasties we had just bought in a local butcher’s.  Most of the photos I took today I had to take from under Colin’s umbrella, which was a bit of a nuisance.  We saw a man swim across the harbour. When he got out on the jetty I asked him if it was cold in the water.  He answered, “Not really!”

We walked through the town to the bridge where we crossed the river.  Then we had a short section on the road, but there was a pavement all along so it was okay.  We passed a house with plants growing over its roof, we wondered if it was one of those eco-houses that are being built all over the place.

We turned off down a sandy path to the beach where beautiful bright yellow flowers were growing.  A group of youths were down there. They had lit a fire, they were arguing and fighting each other and generally being oafs.

We turned our backs on them and walked away.  Later they passed us on the beach, still acting oafishly.  We had thought they were backpackers, but they were awkwardly carrying bags in their hands as well as rucksacks on their backs.
It was a nuisance having to pack the camera away in a polythene bag in the rucksack in between each shot I took, but I didn’t want it to get wet.  As a result of the rain, I didn’t take nearly as many pictures as I wanted to.

We enjoyed walking on the beach despite the weather.  And we met a number of other people out walking in the rain, which was a bit surprising.  There were a lot of those shed-type houses on top of the sandy cliffs — we didn’t know if they were permanent homes or holiday cottages.  We sincerely hoped they were the latter because the soft cliffs were heavily eroded — the wooden steps down from the estate were skewed or partly washed away.  A dumper truck followed us along the beach, then it turned up to one of the shed-type houses which by now were practically level with the beach.  The dumper truck was obviously working on said house, but it got stuck in the soft sand as it turned up towards it.  I wouldn’t have liked to be living in such a house, or in any type of house in that uncertain location.
There was no Wales Coast Path sign directing us off the beach so we just had to guess.  We took a not-very-obvious path through the dunes, and it was only when we were well up the hill that we came across a sign.  We sat on some rocks that were there and ate our sarnies.  We followed the road gently uphill as the view was gradually revealed to our left.  We were amazed at the extent of the shed-type houses which were still being constructed.

The path we needed to take off the road was signposted, but it was obscured by ferns which had grown very tall.  We found it because we were looking for it.  This path led almost vertically uphill — we were climbing Mynydd Tir-y-cwmwd — and it started with huge steps made from natural rocks.  I found it difficult to pull myself up, particularly as my left knee was so painful.  Colin often had to help me.  I was pleased how well my gammy leg stood up to it.
We reached the top at last.  The ferns were still deep and obscuring the path, but we could always find our way and it opened out as we walked towards the end of the headland.  The views were wonderful — back along the beach we had just walked, Abersoch, the headland we walked round last April and some of the islands beyond.

It was a moorland-type path along the top of the headland, and well signposted at junctions.  We met a family distributing gooey cake amongst their members, and walked on discussing the possibility of adding a gooey cake stop to our list of pasty, sarnie, apple and chocolate stops.  We decided in the end that gooey cake would not wear well stuffed in our rucksacks along with the kitchen sink!  Further on, a girl aged about nine passed us going the other way.  We fully expected some adults to be following close behind her, but none did.  She seemed to be on her own.  We were just discussing the dangers of a young child being in such a wild place on her own (was she a local and knew her way around?) when Colin said, “She’s coming back!”  She looked a little distressed, so I asked, “Are you lost?”  She didn’t answer, but looked even more distressed.  I asked again, but she didn’t answer.  At the third time of asking she blurted out, “Germany!”  Ah!  So she was German and didn’t understand.  I only know about half a dozen words of German, but I managed to ask her where her mutter und vater were.  “There!” she answered, pointing behind us as a boy a little younger than her appeared over the hill.  She ran to him and seemed relieved to see him, but the rest of the family were way way behind.  We explained to the parents our concern for the girl, and they thanked us.  The mother spoke good English, and when I said I didn’t think her daughter understood us and was probably frightened, she laughed — because she said the child only understood English when it was spoken with a German accent!

We came to a metal statue which seemed to be made of a mess of wires.  We didn’t think much of it.  A notice told us that the original statue placed on this site was an old ship’s figurehead.  This was burned by vandals in the late 1970s, so a local artist was commissioned to replace it with a metal one in 1981.  This ‘tin’ man rusted away over the years, so the Community Council commissioned the present statue which was placed on the site in 2002.  I think the money could have been better spent!  There was a magnificent view of the beach ahead from that spot with a row of coloured beach huts.

I was rather dreading the path down because my knee is extra painful when downhill pressure is put on it.  But there were well-constructed steps down through a wood, and it was not as bad as I had feared.  We came to a log with coins stuck into it — why do people do this?  It was very pretty going down through the wood, and near the bottom we came across scenes of little stick men made from natural wood.  It was like a fairy glen!

We came to a junction by a notice board which told us about the granite quarries which used to be prominent features of the landscape around here until the 1950s.  We sat on a seat to eat our apples, and decide which path to follow.  The Coast Path was signposted straight on, not downhill as we expected.  We only later realised that the downhill path was the one marked on our OS map and would have taken us straight to the beach.  We decided to carry on the official coast path, which gently zigzagged down through woods, because of the state of my knee.

We met two women who asked how far it was to the statue.  They looked ready to give up the climb, and they had hardly started!  One of them admitted that she lived in Pwllheli but she had never been up to the statue before.  We assured them the climb was worth it for the view, but we did wonder if they ever got there.

Much to our surprise, we came out in a car park well away from the sea.  There was a small open-air theatre there which was less than two years old.  We passed a big house with a conservatory tea room, and “rude” statues in the grounds!

A tree was being cut down up on the cliff.  We were directed out through the main gate of this mansion on a road through a housing estate, all the way on tarmac going even further from the sea.

Eventually we came to a Wales Coast Path signpost which pointed back on ourselves, but downhill and directed to the sea.  (We were relieved to pass a public convenience block part way down — though Colin is not so desperate to find such facilities now that he’s had his operation.)  This road was very narrow and alongside a stream in a gully.  Cars are warned not to drive down it because there are no turning points, and there is a danger of dropping over the edge into the stream.  At the bottom was a car doing a thirteen-point-turn because the driver had chosen to ignore this notice!
My left knee began to pain quite excruciatingly — I think it was all the downhill I had just walked that had set it off.  I didn’t take any more codeine, I just tried to ignore the discomfort and carried on.

We were out on the beach at last, at a place called Llanbedrog.  We turned left and marched towards Pwllheli which we could barely see in the distance because it was beginning to get misty.  There were quite a few people walking along the beach as well as us, but they all turned round before the next headland and headed back.  We were glad the tide was now well out because it allowed us to walk round the ‘knob’ of this headland on a firm sandy beach.  The official Wales Coastal Path led us round there, but if the tide had been in it would have meant quite a bit of rock-scrambling.

On the other side of the ‘knob’ we cut a corner, paddling through water in some places.  But it was very shallow so that was no problem.  We sat on some rocks to eat our chocolate.  There we noticed that another couple had rounded the ‘knob’ behind us, and were fast catching us up.  They passed us before we were ready to move on, and we followed them into Pwllheli.  The official Wales Coastal Path went up to the top of the bank, but we decided to stick to the beach for as long as possible.  The beach got stonier and stonier as we progressed, but it only got bad enough for us to seek out the real Wales Coastal Track when we were almost in Pwllheli.

We passed the Golf Club and on to the end of a brand new prom.  The wild roses smelled wonderful, but Colin couldn’t enjoy their scent because he has lost his sense of smell.  There was loads of free parking along the waterfront in Pwllheli, we were very impressed.  It made us feel welcome.  Pwllheli was proudly displaying a blue flag for 2014 — a clean and healthy beach for watersports.  The visibility got very poor, it was almost a mist though it didn’t rain.
When we got to the end of the road where our car was parked, we decided that the spit of land leading to the harbour entrance on our side of the river was a dead end we didn’t have to walk if we didn’t want to.  It would have been a two-mile round trip, and we were already tired and fed up.  Later we were pleased we’d made that decision because it wasn’t long before the rain started in earnest.  The public conveniences were locked, so I used my RADAR key for the second time today — I’d used it this morning before we caught the bus because the ‘Ladies’ was locked.  (Good job we have these keys, they have saved us a lot of discomfort and embarrassment.)  We walked up to the car which was parked by the harbour — which was just a mudflat with the tide out.

That ended Walk no.356, we shall pick up Walk no.357 next time by the harbour in Pwllheli.  It was half past five, so the Walk had taken us six hours exactly.  We had our tea and biscuits, then returned to our caravan.