Blogs from Brecon, Powys, Wales, United Kingdom, Europe - page 2

Hi Friends & Family, I'm back and not before time it seems. Sorry for the long delay...! Today, we decided to go on our own personal trek. Bwlch is so well situated and even has its own trekking route which starts just behind our hostel. Its called the LLANGORS LAKE CIRCULAR TREK. Its an energetic walk of 12.04 miles or 19.26km and basically took us all day but what a walk....! The weather was so-so but good enough for me at any rate. Thank goodness for our very reliable Jack Wolfskin jackets LOL as we were constantly having to take jackets off when it got too warm and then struggle to put them back on again when it started to rain. Layering at its finest! Suffice to say, it was excellent trekking weather and the views ... read more

This is not so much a travelblog as an event blog. The 4th July is usually associated with American Independence Day, but now there is another reason to remember the date. Jenks and Jane were married on this day. And also, by happy chance, July 4th is when Jane's son Dave has his birthday: so it's a multiple celebration. All that cake !! Jane had done the traditional wedding eve thing of staying away from the groom: in her own house with her good friend Ann-Marie Morgan (no relation) and partying with her son Dave, daughter-in-law Kim, granddaughter Rosie, daughter Caroline and future son-in-law Louis, and Kim's parents Pam and Trevor Burdett. Gareth and Liane stayed with me at the Chateau Jenks. The wedding day began not too well with a heavy drizzle in Cardiff that ... read more

Friday 27.11.2009 Day 44 Brecon Beacons National We went to a River and saw the cenarth falls and the salmon leap and a 17 century mill it was a very pretty place. We then we had lunch at the west end café which was a motorcycle hang out and there was a castle and sculpture of a knight in the car park. We then when to the Brecon Beacons National Park that has that lake in it that is said to the birth place of the wizard Merlin and Llyn y Fan the home of the Lady of the Lake. We could not get to the lake as it is only accusable by a 4 mile walk and it was sunset. We went home and had a home baked salmon dinner, maybe the salmon lived in ... read more

The Brecon Beacons mountains located in south-east Wales are not exactly known to be a hotbed of shamanism - at least not in this day and age. Or are they? Primarily, the beautiful and wild Brecon Beacons National Park is a revered hiker's paradise with an abundant range of outdoors activities. Yet, if you dig a little deeper you will find that the area has a long history with evidence of Neolithic habitation dating from about 5000 BCE. Throughout the most rural areas you can find piles of stones marking cairns or burial chambers, as well as standing stones. The Brecon Beacons themselves take their name from the ancient practice of lighting signal fires (beacons) on mountains to warn of attacks by the English. When we think of shamanism, it tends to conjure up images of ... read more

We love Wales! So when we had another free weekend, we decided to head back to the Brecon Becons for another weekend of walking, this time with Prehn and Rich for company. This time we headed to the west Brecon Becons (an area sometimes overlooked by walkers - so much so that the guide the tourist office gave us said "We'd like to thank you for coming to the area, an region of the Brecon Becons not often visited"). We felt happy to have helped. The trip there was not entirely eventless - the traffic was terrible and a 3.5 hour drive ended up taking 7 hours (shocker). We had planned a walk around the 'Black Mountain' (not to be confused with the 'Black MountainS', which are in the East Brecon Beacons - talk about unoriginality ... read more