Hiking Day 3 – Wales Coastal Path Aberystwyth to Llanon

Today’s hike leads us out of this fabulous town past the castle ruins of Aberystwyth.

Today we’ll have a couple of steep 500 feet ascents and descents, but overall a significant amount of relatively easy and beautiful miles.

When you expect this path can’t become more breathtaking, it does. Breathtaking and remote. Along this 12+ mile stretch, we saw few other hikers and no local folks. The path along the sea was meditative. Then, walking the crest of Allt-wen and the Penderi Cliffs took us to beautiful and a bit nerve wracking overlooks.

If the height isn’t scary enough, a scene from the film Far From the Madding Crowd, based on the Thomas Hardy novel, pops into my mind. Remember the spooked dog, herding sheep over the cliff to their death? Rather than the imaginary dead sheep on the rocks below, I expect there is sea life worth seeing, but I’m not going close enough to the edge to check it out. So much for my meditative state.

We trek along in almost complete isolation. The few buildings visible along the way, but far from the path, include the Morfa Bychan Holiday Park, a caravan vacation area surrounded on three sides by pasture and the fourth by a pebble beach that reaches in the distance to the high cliffs.

For most of this twelve-mile section, it was just us, the pasturing animals and the sea.

The only other buildings were a few stone structures that seem to have sat in this ancient landscape over time. We looked around unsuccessfully for some clues about the buildings but not a human in sight.

A tongue in cheek remark from a fellow hiker “the Wales Hiking Path where the sheep are marked but the trail is not.” That comment was based on the occasional places where trails converged and markings weren’t clear. Fortunately, our leader and several members of the group had great mapping devices, both paper and electronic, that kept us on the true path. Sheep in Wales are frequently flagged with a paint color for different uses, but those we saw were likely roaming in common areas and may intermingle with another flock thus marked for identification.