Day 85
Church Bay to Llanfachraeth: 7.5 miles
Curse of the Day: [ *** Begin Rant 1 *** : For people who let untrained dogs harass and terrorize livestock on other people's land (not by mistake, as sometimes it just happens and everyone's really trying and it's nobody's fault)
Reason: If your dog needs exercise, there are plenty of livestock-free spaces available. Use them. Otherwise you're making life worse for everyone else out there - dog owners or not - and your also going to get your dog killed by a cow or a farmer. *** End Rant 1 *** ]
More of the Unknown Northwest Coast of Anglesey
After having turned the northwestern corner of Anglesey yesterday, I started to feel like I was starting back on the west coast again. Although there are obvious differences between the west coast of Anglesey and the mainland (this part of the west coast of Anglesey, at least, seems much more low-lying than the vast majority of Cardigan Bay, for example), I do feel that similar sense of isolation and being on the far edge of the country here.
Another similarity is the number of National Trust sites I walked through. In only a few miles I passed through Swtan, Plas Gwynt, and Trwywn Gwter Fudr. Frankly, besides Swtan - which is Church Bay, and includes a historic 16th century thatched cottage - it was unclear what exactly each of these sites were. I couldn't find any of them in my National Trust guidebook, so I just assumed that the National Trust maintains the beaches - frankly, it sometimes seems like the National Trust owns the vast majority of the West west coast, for the number of unexplained signs and properties you see. But anyway.
The walk itself was actually incredibly easy - very little rise and fall, and occasionally along roads and through a caravan park. The only two difficulties were when I ran across a bull and his family (who luckily just stared me off into the direction I was going anyway) and when I walked through a gate into a field of about 30 sleeping cows. Despite my best efforts to walk around them, I managed to wake every single one of them up and of course because calves were involved they all got very nervous until I was well far away from them.
Mostly though, the walk was a series of charming coves with small beaches, set to the backdrop of Holyhead with the somewhat incongruous giant ferry to Dublin sitting in its port. The whole walk was pleasant but fairly uneventful.
Since it took me less than 2.5 hours to go nearly 8 miles, after passing a cute green metal bridge spanning some marshland, I decided to end the walking day where P was waiting in Llanfachraeth.
The rest of the day off-trail
I also decided to cut the day short for two other reasons - first, although Anglesey has the highest concentration of ancient sites in Wales, we hadn't seen very many of them, and second, P had been spending his time reading for his dissertation while waiting in the car for me to finish my hikes (for reasons I'll explain below) and I think he needed to get outside.
So we made an attempt to go see one of the ancient sites that was slightly inland - the Presaddfed Burial Chamber. Being as we were on the northwest coast of Anglesey, it was the closest thing to us and P usually loves rocks in fields.
After getting stuck behind a wedding procession led by a real life, exceedingly slow horse an buggy, we got the the Chamber relatively quickly, parked, and made our way out to the 5,000 year old communal burial chamber. As it turned out, however, the bullocks currently occupying the field in which the burial chamber sat did not seem to want us to visit it. Possibly because P started talking to them (which is NOT what you're supposed to do), they all started walking straight towards us and so I gave up pretty quickly. But we got kind of close enough to say we saw it, so good job us.
Anyway, after realizing we were giant babies and that Anglesey, like the rest of Wales, suffered from a serious infestation of cows, we decided to head back to our tin hut. Because it was far away and driving there was kind of a pain but being there was awesome.
Let me explain.
So you see, this is Anglesey in August. I'd showed up with absolutely no bookings made, and four nights booked to stay in the Eisteddfod campground. Unsurprisingly to anyone but myself, after this point pretty much the entire island of Anglesey was booked to the gills. Although it's a tourist destination, there aren't massive hotels or huge accommodations pretty much anyway - it's largely B and Bs, small inns, and campsites and caravan parks. And so when it's booked, it's booked.
And when I looked at the last minute to try to book something in my price range (and at this point my only requirement was a bed because of how much I'd thrown my back out at Eisteddfod, which was not supposed to have been a contact sport), the closest thing P had found was a tin hut south of the Menai Bridge. Which, so we're clear, isn't on Anglesey. But it's only a ten minute drive to the bridge.
So P agreed to bring his master's dissertation to me, and drive me back and forth between our tin hut and wherever I was walking that week - basically because I didn't have any other option. As it turned out, however, this place is absolutely fabulous, and I'm really glad we found it.
Not only is it a tiny house covered in tin in a field on the edge of Snowdonia with superb views of the mountains, it comes with it's own wildlife and a fire pit. Now at times these things haven't mixed - once we came home and the cows had knocked over the firepit and pooped on it just to make the (exceedingly large) point that we weren't welcome, and another time the farm cat that had adopted us clearly didn't realize a sheep with horns was directly behind him until it butted him across our front porch. Also we learned that cows can shriek. But for the most part it's been the domestic farm animal equivalent of watching 'Wild America'. If you replace America with Wales, obviously.
The cottage itself is a ton of fun - everything you need is there but it all folds up into other things and it's like living in a Transformer. You have to get water from the bathroom attached to the farm itself (but the bathroom's like a fancy slate covered paradise with a maroon farm sink and a crafty ceiling) and walking there at night requires a headlamp and a keen ability to dodge poop and giant slugs. But again - firepit and waking up with views of Snowdonia literally at my feet at the end of the bed - not bad at all.
We talked to the owners, and they're planning on expanding a bit and are in the process of building a few more tiny houses, potentially one in a sailboat and one that's all interesting angles, but setting them up in the field so they don't infringe on each other's space. We agreed that part was key, because the only problem we'd had here had nothing at all to do with the awesomeness of the property, or the owners but had to do with other guests. Because some other guests (in the self-catering cottages they keep) had decided to walk into our field to let. their. not well-trained dog. run. free.
[*** Begin Unnecessarily Persnickety Countryside Code Enforcer Rant: ***Now, to be clear, things I don't normally care about are people walking across land I'm technically staying in because who really cares - you're in the countryside and want to enjoy it, fine. You're with a dog and you want it to run free - fine, if you're not an idiot about it, we used to let our dog go crazy in the woods in Maine whenever we went there. But that's if the place you're in is empty, it's public land and you're keeping an eye on the dog - in Wales I've run across a ton of well behaved dogs and very attentive owners doing just that and everyone's been happy.
But given that this particular field was full of livestock, and Wales is literally full of signs warning people (from cities, I assume) about NOT letting dogs out, this seemed an incredibly idiotic and terribly rude thing for this couple to be doing. Yes, this dog was small. But yes, this small dog still acted like a dog, through no fault of its own, naturally would - and spent the next 30 minutes chasing 200 terrified bleating sheep in circles around a field. What was particularly annoying about this fact is that P and I thought it was a problem. And so were running around trying to catch the dog to protect the sheep (Because dogs are descended from wolves. They kill sheep. And farmers have a right to kill them if they're loose in a field - so if your dog isn't a trained sheepdog you really shouldn't allow it to run crazy around livestock). Meanwhile, the owners of said dog kind of quietly and pretty unconvincingly said 'oh sorry' to us, and 'I guess we should keep him on a lead', while calling the dog's name halfheartedly and seemingly hoping the dog might decide of its own volition to stop trying to grab the sheep by the throat. When the dog finally chased a sheep into a corner right in front of their cottage, they caught it, and looked over at P and told him they'd keep it on a lead, smiling and trying to be conciliatory. P responded (kind of amusingly deadpan, because we are the sheep-police now) that these weren't his livestock, and it wasn't our land to be policing, and there was no need to be apologizing to us, but really they shouldn't be letting the dog out of the cottage without it being under control.
Frankly, I've seen enough pictures of dead sheep mangled by dogs, enough threats to dog owners that their dogs will be killed, and enough farmers annoyed with walkers because of the very few people who don't take care of their dogs around livestock despite the vast majority of people who do, to last me a lifetime. So while this might have gotten on my nerves a little more than it would other people (I actually fumed about it for hours, asking P what people would think if I let an entirely untrained dog loose in their office in the city and it started running around in circles breaking company property - because livestock is someone's livelihood, etc etc etc), I did in my fuming occasionally try to give them the benefit of the doubt because maybe the owners had told them they could let their dog run free, and so it wasn't their fault - but that seemed kind of unlikely. *** End Unnecessarily Persnickety Countryside Code Enforcer Rant ***]
But then P gave me the bottle of Prosecco that the owners of the tin hut had very kindly left for us during our stay. And we lit a fire and stared at the mountains from our front porch on our currently sheep-free field (as the dog had chased them several fields away). And then Tigger our adopted cat came by and decided he lived in our bed.
And all was right in North Wales.
