Day 33
Llansteffan to Carmarthen: 9 miles
Favorite item of the day: Bed in a tent
Reason: It's a bed in a tent. Also the blanket on the bed in a tnet was super warm.
A castle here, a castle there, heat heat everywhere
OK, so after arriving in Llansteffan and having a breakfast ham salad sandwich at the old school grocery store, I wandered past the castle again, and then down to the beach. The setting for this castle really couldn't be better - up on a hillside, overlooking a beach on one side, Tywi estuary on the other, with Ferryside and it's long dock across. Very very nice.
Although there was an Iron Age fort here starting in 600 BC, this is again a Norman castle started in the 12th century, and built to protect the key waterway when shipping to Carmarthen would have been done by water. The castle was captured by several Welsh or Deheubarthian (I'm going with that word, southern Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth) kings, and changed hands back and forth several times over the coming centuries. Even Owain Glyndwr held it for a short time during his Welsh battle for independence in the 15th century.
After it was retaken, it then fell into disrepair, and in the 19th and 20th centuries became a place to admire while you were taking the charming (now non-existant) ferry from the train station just across the river at Ferryside. The natural and man-made beauty of the area made it a popular place for south Wales miners to visit during 'Miners Fortnight' - their annual vacation the last week of July and the first week of August when the mines would shut down.
In any case it's still very cute. Except for the red phone box on the beach. Which while cute on the outside, is full of cobwebs and scary rusted sharp metal things on the inside. I really don't understand letting these things get like this - if there's a functioning red telephone box on a beach, keep it tidy!
Anyway, personal gripe of the lady using pubic payphones aside, once again the only thing that happened on this walk was I again ran into a bunch of cows. Most of the day the path went from field to field around hedgerows and through roads. Then I got to this one field, and at the other side of it was a whole herd of cows and. . . Well, let's just say several of the cows were jumping on several of the other cows' backs and it made me question whether they would appreciate my interrupting them. It unfortunately took me about 25 minutes and a farmer in a tractor in the next field over making three passes by me to realize that actually the trail curved to the right of the cows, and the cows were actually behind a teeny tiny wire fence and so theoretically I would be fine.
Making it past the seemingly inevitable cow-barrier, as I got closer to Carmarthen the path stuck closer and closer to the road, and unfortunately ended up on the actual road. For most of the way there was no sidewalk, just tall hedges on both sides, and cars going 60 mph. So it was great. Really really great.
When I finally got to a spot where I was supposed to be able to turn off the road and there was a sign saying 'public access closed' I groaned. I groaned even more when I looked down the road and saw a series of blind curves where cars would never see me coming. So, after walking a bit past the closed public access road, I flung myself over a promising looking gate and ended up in a old playing field, which conveniently connected back to the open part of the path, then to some marshes, and then to Carmarthen. Super-convenient.
While I had time to look around Carmarthen's sights, the heat was a bit unbearable, and when I saw it the castle didn't look like Owain Glyndwr had left much anyway. So I stumbled upon an absolutely gigantic and seemingly very new shopping mall in the middle of town that easily could have been in New Jersey, found a clothing store that looked like it had air conditioning, and tried as unobtrusively as possible to dry off my whole body while pretending I was clothes shopping. Luckily service here doesn't dictate someone accosting you as soon as you walk into a store and saying 'Can I help you' so, considering how disgusting I was, I got away with this for quite a while.
The end of the heat?
Now, in all this heat I'd moved on to a wondrous place I'd found on Airbnb called Bronhaul Farm. Although it took me a while to get back here, it's actually pretty close to Carmarthen (it's just the buses have to make a lot of side journeys to get anywhere).
A small family had bought a crumbling smallholding in Bancyfelin (I had an impossible time pronouncing this to the bus driver - bahnk-ee-vay-lin) in 1999, and had turned it into a functioning sustainable farm. While they let you take on farm chores and have all kinds of working holiday in Wales fun, I was there for the brand new bell tents.
Because you know what? I'm old and there's nothing wrong with sleeping in a bed in a tent. With lots of purple embroidered pillows. And tastefully done silk tent hangings. And requests that you keep the door zipped because otherwise the chickens will get in. But the important point was the bed.
The bed from which I watched through the tent's screen door as the field outside went from bright, oppressively hot extremely sunny evening (it was 845 and it seems like the sun never sets in June) to twenty feet visibility and very cold damp fog in the space of about 15 minutes. But as my tent bed remained the same temperature (comfortably warm) I welcomed the temperature drop with a quiet 'Ah, welcome back to Wales!' under my breath.
I was really hopeful about seeing non-oppressive weather in the near future - and actually it turned out well, if you don't mind a little rain - which after this week I definitely don't anymore.
