Day 16
Abereiddy to St. Justinians: 9.5 miles
Regret of the day: That I didn't bring my OS map
Reason: I managed to get lost on St. David's peninsula. Somehow I managed to come up on it from the south, rather than the north east - still not entirely sure how that happened.
Rain, rain, go away
I was all set to go early in the morning (still finding it hard to sleep in here when the sun comes up at 5am), but then looked outside and decided I should wait, since it was grey and rainy again. I knew that when I chose to do the path before July and August (when it's regularly nice here) this would happen, but to see grey days like this when you know the scenery's going to be good is depressing.
Luckily when I finally got to the trail in Abereiddy, it was starting to clear - not just no rain, but downright sunny. And then of course, everything looked different.
I kept coming across rock cliffs, and coves and strange formations in the water, and hills and mountains and little islands, and better than that, everything was just covered in wildflowers. I've said it before but here it was striking because it wasn't just a line beside the trail, or a few patches, but there were blue and yellow and pink and white carpets that stretched down to the sea. And the stone walls were covered in pink.
With the sun out, the colors were even brighter than usual, and stood out stunningly against the green grass and the turquoise sea. I don't think my pictures captured it very well.
Lost
The trail was relatively easy going - although it always curves in and out of bays making it longer than it looks, the hills here are smaller than farther north. Or maybe I'm just getting more used to this, who knows.
Anyway, that's why it was surprising I managed to get lost. But St. David's peninsula juts out at the top of St. Bride's bay, and you're supposed to walk around it before you drop around into the long Whitesands beach. The scenery here got rocky and weirdly moonscapy, and then there were a million trails, none of them marked. I figured if I just kept walking straight it would probably be fine.
So then I got entirely turned around, ending up somehow on the southern side of the peninsula, on a hill on a path the size of a sheep path. I wasn't particularly worried about being lost - there were plenty of people around, it's a vacation week and there are tourists everywhere - but I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to do. The coast is very convoluted here with beaches and inlets, and Ramsey Island off the coast. Anyway, in the end I not very excitingly just scrambled down the hill towards a beach I saw, and eventually kept going where other people were going. I'm not entirely sure what I missed.
Whitesands, Welsh Bali, but with more people
Anyway, that's how I ended up walking into Whitesands Beach. This is a lengthy (for here) strip of sandy beach, again in a protected cove. By the time I dropped into it, the weather had cleared and it was gorgeously warm out. Apparently, others had noticed how nice it was as well, as the place was packed.
Not just packed actually, packed to the gills with people wearing wetsuits, on surfboards or boogie boards all one in front of the other. I stared at them from on top of the cliff and gaped at how they seemed to be managing to not kill each other.
The last time I went surfing, it was in Bali. And there were nowhere near this number of people in the water. Or, to be fair, there were nowhere near this number of people per square foot in the water - the reason Bali is Bali is it has a lot of beach. Whitesands may be a lengthy sandy beach, but it isn't all that lengthy, and as one of only a few sandy beaches, I imagine everyone flocks here.
Anyway, after watching the surfers catch not-the-best-but-still-perfectly-ok waves and getting a beach ice cream like everyone else, I headed off to St. Justinian's around the corner - I'd only originally planned to come to Whitesands, but with the great regular tourist bus routes they have on the Pembrokeshire coast for walkers, it was easy to change plans.
There are a lot of saints around here
So I wandered on, past the further cliff protecting Whitesands with its sweeping views of the beach, watching a child and his dad build a pretty impressive scale model of Stonehenge, over little coves where I watched a little kid dig a hole big enough to lie down comfortably in, past a VW bus with a pop top tent, and around the corner with great views of the dangerous waters separating the mainland from Ramsey island. The whole area is full of beautiful views, and in one of these blog posts or another I've been meaning to describe the whole thing for American readers as a cross between Maine and Cape Cod - or rather, 1970s Cape Cod as it has been described to me by others. But I think I'll take that up in a later post, because now it's time for the story of St. Justinian and his namesake town.
So, the thing you notice about St. Justinian's is it's well-photographed lifeboat station - with a track down to the water and a great big set of brown doors and red roof, set in a small cove, it's quite a nice site. There's a brand new station right behind it now that slightly ruins the effect - though it's frankly still pretty cool - and let's be honest the point here is the 300+ lives they've saved in the dangerously swirling waters around Ramsey Island, not the view.
There's also a pink roundhouse folly on the shoreline, which may have been an old ferryman's house. But then there's also a very small collapsed few walls of a chapel - and that belonged to St. Justinian.
So, St. Justinian was a 6th century Breton nobleman, who became devout, gave it all up and moved onto Ramsey Island to live as a hermit. St. David, being also in the area, came over for a visit, was impressed, and asked Justinian to be the abbot at his cathedral. He agreed, but after a while found David's monks lazy and not pious enough, so he went back to Ramsey Island.
Some of the monks who liked Justinian followed him to form a small religious community on the island - which, of course, is what every hermit just trying to get away from people loves. Justinian's strictness soon annoyed the other monks, and so he built a small chapel and house on the mainland to get away from them occasionally. I mean really, what does a guy have to do in the 6th century to just get away from all these people.
Apparently he had equally gotten on his followers nerves, because while away on the mainland one time, they plotted against him, and when he came back to Ramsey Island, they cut off his head. At which point, I would imagine while grumbling under his breath about 'ungrateful layabouts' and 'never should have left my hermitage' and throwing as much shade as much as a decapitated head can throw, Justinian then stood up, tucked his head under his arm and walked back over across the water of the channel to the mainland to his chapel to lay down and die.
Really, walking to the mainland across rapids and swirling currents and rocks called 'The Bitches' would have been a feat even if he hadn't just had his head cut off. But his feats got him placed in the ancient lists of Welsh saints, and eventually his bones were moved from the chapel to lie in nearby St. David's cathedral. Unfortunately carbon dating has placed them in the 12th century vice the 6th, but you know, niggles.
In any case, my walk ended here, and the regular nature-viewing boats out to Ramsey Island mean that there are equally regular busses. 'Bus' in this case meaning a largish van, because a true bus wouldn't fit on these roads. Using my newly acquired St. David's weekly bus pass (which was a great deal) I made the quick trip back to 'town' for a little pub spring vegetable risotto, ready to plan out my next St. David's day.
