Monday morning, we stoked up with a good breakfast at the Courthouse. The dining room is actually the old court room. One of my walking guides recommended a route that would visit a few of the mountain lakes near Betsy and let us completely ignore the car for the day. After all the driving the day before, this sounded pretty good. Looking at my map, most of the route seemed to make sense. We touched base with Jill on the way out. She was dubious of our ability to finish the route and gave us some advice about bail out opportunities and a card for the local taxi service. Having already walked further than I wanted to walk back from, I appreciated the card. She also warned us that we would find the paths unevenly marked.
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Removing any suspense, we did walk the whole way around as planned and didn’t need to catch a cab. We’re in the middle of a national park right now and are essentially here the week before the beginning of the crowded season. As a result, most of the facilities have woken up, but we have vast stretches of the park practically to ourselves. Our route started out near an almost empty parking lot just on the edge of the village. It climbed through forest with occasional evidence of mining.
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There are basically three layers of human occupation here. It started out as agricultural territory with some plowed crops and lots of sheep and cows. The higher country we’ve seen often has ruined farm buildings and field walls left over from this layer. After that, a lot of the country was given over to mining and quarrying – lead, copper, iron, and slate mostly. The abandoned mines and mine buildings we passed on Monday came from that, and the mining period left a lot of the hilltops in bad shape. Just in the last handful of decades, a lot of the mine torn land has been reforested for the most recent primary industry – tourism. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place> has been a vacation destination well back into the 19th century, overlapping with the end of mining. Reforesting the most ripped up areas has helped create new tourist opportunities.
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Certainly it had worked for us. The few places where the mining heritage showed through just added interest. The foliage has thoroughly taken back the hills above Betsy, and there are nice paths linking the different lake cradling valleys. Jill was of course right about the waymarking. The funniest thing is that there were a fair number of markers, but they were only in places where the trail was unmistakable. Anyplace there was a decision to make where it looked like our route could go one of several ways there would be no marks.
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Fortunately, there are numbers of roads and tracks through the forests most of which diverge and remeet. Even when the real paths didn’t quite match the map, we could always find something that kept us going in the right direction and get to all the destinations we wanted to find. We didn’t see any other walkers out on Monday. We passed or were passed by a few cyclists on some of the forest roads, which are perfect for intermediate mountain bikers and clearly attract quite a few. A few times we passed park operated picnic areas and often saw a few couples at each one.
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Our big social stop for the day was a tea break at the Crafnant Lakeside Café. When we showed up at mid afternoon, there was one woman running the place, and she was in a panic as she had us and two other customers to deal with. We ordered tea, sandwiches, and scones – traditional afternoon tea for which we were well ready after 8 or so miles of walking. While we (and the other two who had ordered before us) were waiting, we chatted with the other customers. One of them was a fellow who was born in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> then moved away to the midlands to make a living and had recently moved back to semi retire. He gave us his view of what was best to see and do around <st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place>, much of which we have since done. He made me feel very good to be a visitor here. He made it clear how much the area relies and has relied on a long time for visitors for business. He also gave me the impression that the Welsh have survived for so long by figuring out how to simultaneously take things seriously and lightly.
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Eventually, our food and drink showed up. We ate at a table on the lake shore and amused ourselves watching people and birds fish. Several other parties came in with whom we visited a bit. Everyone was gratifyingly impressed that we had walked there from Betsy.
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Fed and refreshed, we walked back to the village by way of a few more lakes then a walk along one of the many rivers – I can’t remember and couldn’t pronounce or spell which one. Some of the way, we followed a rough path that clung precariously to the steep bank. Other times, we got tired of that and climbed up to a forest road that was just above that path. We walked by and got a nice view of a waterfall called <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Swallow</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Falls</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.
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Garmin Facts: 15.8 miles in 6:05 walking and 3:00 resting for 2.6 mph moving and 1.7 mph overall with 821 meters climbed.
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