Ian Hardacre

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Landscape day in Wales in November 2018

By Ian Hardacre

Penmaenpool

We stopped on the south side of the estuary of the River Mawddach to have a closer look at the toll bridge and the George III hotel.

The old railway line is now a cycle trail – the Mawddach Trail. At the side of the old railway signal box I found this plaque. It celebrated when a ferry hit the toll bridge and fifteen people died. The hotel’s owner and barman helped save all the others on the ferry.

I learnt from a plaque along the Mawddach Trail that this are had been a busy ship building area. The wooden ships being built at the side of the estuary and then taken down to Barmouth to be rigged with sails.

I found this painted stone in the car park on top of a sign for the Mawddach Trail.

Here are Steve’s images as we crossed over the toll bridge to go over to the norh side of estuary and on to Barmouth.

Barmouth

Our guide book (page 130) gave us more details of the Mawddach Estuary and Barmouth. We drove into Barmouth and found double yellow lines all along the road overlooking the bridge to our left.

The day was getting late and we decided to limit ourselves to getting views of the bridge providing we could find somewhere to stop safely.

On our way out of Barmouth we spotted a row of houses and some empty parking places. I am interested in this particular bridge after having seeing it on one of Julia Bradbury’s railway walks. She had gone down the Mawddach Trail and then crossed over the bridge.

We drove a little further and then we came to a lay-by on a bend and we crossed over to get another view of the bridge.

Barmouth Bridge

On our way back we stopped briefly at the car park below the ‘Bwlch’. We were the only car there and the skies looked as cloudy as when we had left the Red Lion at the start of the day.

Dinner at The Red Lion

Here’s a quick view of my en-suite room. It had a bunk bed in the corner opposite the window which was useful for all my ‘stuff’!.

I had a shower and then a rest for a cup of tea with a bit of catching up on emails. In the front bar I moved on from the local beers to have a Staropramen.

We chatted to the locals at the bar and discovered that one of them spent a lot of time on the hills photographing planes. We listened ( a little enviously) to his stories about all the planes that he had seen going trough the loop.

He then confirmed the news that we had heard about the RAF ban on low level flying through this part of the Mach Loop.

A Typhoon had broken the safety guidelines passing through Cad. The incident had been captured on video and then posted on Twitter (now X).

To our untutored eyes the vertical climb looked fantastic and we would have been been very happy to post images of it. The landlord commented on the impact that the ban had had on his bookings for the last few weeks. The cancellations had even extended to the local holiday cottages.

I chose scampi, chips and a salad. Again this was excellent.

We arranged to pick up our packed lunch early in the morning as despite the ban we were determined to get out onto the hills on Tuesday.

Here are my images from our day on the Bwlch.