So I promised that we’d get back and chronicle some of our hiking trip to Wales.

(Warning: long and lots of pics behind the cut.)

Susan relaxing with our friend, Paddington Bear, as we head out for Wales from -- where else? -- Paddington Station.

After months of living in the Big City and doing lots of the city-side tourist bits, we felt a strong need to get out into the country side and see a bit of trees and grass.  Susan, our travel researcher, had found a compelling entry on the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail in Wales, so with our trusty packs and hiking boots, we set off for the west.

Sadly, we’re here without all our camping gear, so we weren’t really set up to overnight on the trail.  (And I’m not sure if there’s place for it out there anyway…)  Fortunately, a bit of web research turned up a B&B that turned out to be a startlingly good find.

I could narrate it all blow-by-blow, but I figure the pictures speak more than a thousand words.  [Roughly, they each speak about 22k words on a 32-bit architecture, using jpeg encoding at a quality level of about 5.]

Day 0: Transit

Lovely bedroom in the comfy B&B in Pembroke Dock

The train from London to Pembroke Dock is quite a trek — about 5 hours, with a brief change in Swansea — so we were glad to get into the B&B, where our hosts fed us a fabulous dinner, gave us some orientation on the local land, and sent us off to a plush bed.

Day 1: Manorbier to Bosherston

We set off in the mid-morning.  One logistical problem we hadn’t accounted for is that we had (deliberately) arrived slightly before “summer” and the real tourist season kicked off.  While that meant that we didn’t have much competition for the trail, it also meant that most of the busses weren’t running, so it was hard to get places (like trailheads).  Fortunately, our B&B hosts were super-helpful and got us on the trail.

The PCT is really long — we were only walking a tiny fraction of it (about 10 miles this day).  Our segment of the trail started at Manorbier and Manorbier Castle:

Gate tower of Manorbier Castle

We actually beat the staff to the castle in the morning, so we had to wait a bit for them to open.  But only a few minutes, and we did get in to tour the ramparts and some of the old rooms:

Manorbier Castle, overlooking the courtyard; St George's Channel in the background.

Great hall, now somewhat the worse for time and weather.

Susan and the Sea, seen from the ramparts of the castle

We knew that we had a bit of trek, though, so we didn’t linger long at the castle (much as we dearly love old piles of rock and history).  Soon enough, we were on the trail!

The trail begins for real. Be sure not to fall off the cliffs and die. And be sure not to do something incomprehensible in Welsh, either.

The US doesn’t have gorse, but it’s all through British literature, so we were excited to find some (and in bloom, no less).  We discovered that, while it is beautiful, it is also wiry, coarse, and stabby.  Better looked at than trekked through.  Fortunately, the trail is well worn and easy to follow (aside from a couple of sheep trails that distracted us off the main trail and almost over a cliff).

Gorse!

Bucolic farmland.

About 1 mile in to the trail:

Looking back the way we'd come. Manorbier is back there, I swear.

Beautiful beaches.

Paths through pastoral farmland and sheepfolds.

Sheep! And lambs. Spring is in the air!

More beautiful beaches.

Somewhere around here we stopped for lunch at a local pub.  The nice thing about hiking out here is that the small villages are close enough together that you can almost always find a place to eat about the time you’re ready to eat.

A tulgey wood.

I’ve skipped some time here, but a couple hours after lunch, we were able to get a very nice tea at a small tea house overlooking a beach.

Rugged cliffs and sea caves.

Spurs of land. (Yes, I walked out to the end of that.)

And horses with colts. (Did I mention spring?)

At the end of the day, we wearily and somewhat awkwardly made our way back to the B&B for another fabulous dinner and rest.

Day 2: Saundersfoot to Tenby

Because the first day had a moderately long hike, we took this day easier, aiming for a 4 mile hike, ending in the town of Tenby, a medieval town that the Victorians refashioned into a seaside resort town.  While the hiking on the first day was almost entirely in the open, this segment of the coast trail was much more heavily wooded:

Susan in the dappled sunlight of the trees shading the coastal trail.

Lovely forest land.

Looking back the way we'd come. We started on the other side of the spur of land in the distance.

A striking grotto. (More of the omnipresent gorse in the foreground.)

Arriving at the town of Tenby.

We had a very nice late lunch/early supper in Tenby and took a few minutes to tour a Tudor-era merchant’s house.  Then caught a train back to the B&B for an early and relaxing evening.

Day 3: Pembroke and Return

We had a late return train on our last day in Wales, so we had some time in the morning.  After another luxurious breakfast and bidding farewell to our hosts, we caught a morning train up to Pembroke, where we got to tour the Pembroke castle.  This is a larger castle than the one at Manorbier, but dates to the same era.  They’re both late Norman, during the conquest of Wales.  The Normans swept through, smashing resistance and building a ring of 29 (IIRC) castles to hold the territory.  The Pembroke castle was one of the more significant ones out on the Welsh peninsula, apparently, and was in the keeping of an Earl, I think.  Reading a lot of the history text gave a picture of just how rough an era it was, back in the day.  For example, when this Earl had a tiff with one of his peers about a piece of property, what was the recourse?  Courts?  Parliment?  The King?  No, the Earl just grabbed his opponent and tossed him in the Pembroke Castle dungeon for seven years, until the chap was broken in body and spirit.  Yeah.  Nice guys, those.  And a nice era, when the royalty were warlords, answerable only to those with more might.  It’s nice to live in an age that’s a bit more civilized.

In any case, the castle was fascinating:

Panorama inside one of the watch towers of the gatehouse. (Apologies for the crappy compositing.)

One thing that I found particularly thought-provoking was the historically-plausible mock-up feast that they had laid in one of the tower rooms:

Dining hall, with mocked-up Thirteenth Century feast.

This is c. 1250 AD or so.  Note the decorated pottery flagon in the foreground.  This was the valuable, show-off piece of tableware.  Check it out: these are among the richest and most powerful people in the British Isles at this time, and one of the prized possessions is this flagon, imported all the way from France.  A far cry from the gold plates that we think of the royalty dining on, isn’t it?  That had to wait about three hundred years, until after the discovery of the New World and the plundering of its gold reserves.  In the meantime, pottery like this had become widespread, its manufacture and trade driving economic and cultural development across Europe.  It really struck me with a sense of the tides of history: this object that was the prized possession of nobility in the Thirteenth Century, two hundred years later would sit on the tables of middle-class, and two hundred years after that would be commonplace in lower-class taverns.

A garderobe (i.e., medieval toilet) behind the dining hall.

A maze of twisty passages, all alike.

I was also struck by the sense of age and the ravages of entropy on the place.  To date, we had largely toured either well-preserved castles, palaces, and fortresses (such as the Tower of London, Versailles, the Palacio Real in Madrid, and so on) or else castles that had gone almost entirely to ruin.  This castle was somewhere in the middle — it was clearly being cared for, and had been preserved somewhat, but it was also clear that the tourist pounds out here in the far corner of Wales were just not enough to maintain it at the glory that places like the Tower of London can afford.  Oddly, the contrast of the well-maintained and the aging highlighted the sense of age and history even more forcefully to me than I have felt in completely abandoned fortresses.  Something about the sense of fighting the tides of time and the encroachment of the environment highlighted the futility of our battles for eternity much more than do the graceful decay of ruins abandoned altogether to time’s millstone.  I was particularly struck by the keep — once the defensible heart of the fortress and storehouse of most precious goods:

The keep -- once the best-defended part of the castle. Now hollow and aging.

Now, inside, you find just the hollow shell, with post-holes for beams showing where once floors were.  Now, birds roost in the windows of nobility and their calls echo through this lonely space.

Interior of the keep.

An interesting find that the staff pointed us to was the cave below the castle:

Cave in the cliff beneath the castle. Home of swallows, swallow dung, cold stores, and smugglers. For scale reference, that's Susan at the back there.

A decaying Norman window.

The gatehouse, seen from the battlements opposite.

The town of Pembroke, seen across the inlet that defends the Castle.

As we trekked across the sun-washed stone battlements, my eye was caught by a flowering moss growing from the limestone.  I was entranced by the juxtaposition of the ancient and the ephemeral, and the knowledge that ultimately time and the inexorable tide of life, would win against even the hardness of the stone.  This thing, all things devours…

Flowers growing from the rock of the battlements.

There is little to say after Pembroke Castle.  We had a delicious light lunch at a small church-run café in Pembroke, enjoying our home-made, locally-sourced, eco-friendly soup and sandwhiches while we read the posters calling us to submit prayer requests (“We guarantee that at least three people will invoke your prayer every day for two weeks.”)  The irreverent part of me wondered what they would do if I submitted a request for a prayer for the end of prayer requests…

We caught an earlier train than we had planned and made it back to London in the early evening, with time to relax after travel and savor our experiences before work the next day.