Ardudwy Way
Snowdonia 24 miles
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER with a waymarker is how we discovered this one: it was serendipity for this is a cracking little trail. Firstly, the logistics have been thoughtfully designed, with train stations at either end and at each stop along the way too. The main trail runs 24 miles from Barmouth to Llandecwyn, but there are detours to villages for overnights, making it eight miles from the start to Tal y Bont, 13 miles from there to Harlech, and 12 more to trail end.
Good logistics alone won’t sell a walk of course; the scenery does that. The way treads through the western foothills of the Rhinogs, the wildest, ruggedest, loneliest range in all of Wales, while on the other side lies the sea and the great sweep of Cardigan Bay. And it walks a perfect line between wild and friendly. It tickles, rather than tangles with, the rough old Rhinogs and those waymarkers – marked with a buzzard – guide your way. Yet it’s little-trodden and lonely in the best way, with just the spring breeze whispering across the moors for company.
It fairly drips with history too: tracing old drove roads over Bwlch y Rhiwgyr, crossing lonely packhorse bridges like Pont-Scethin that stagecoaches once clattered over, passing abandoned manganese mines on Moelfre, and a spectacular ring of stones at the Bronze Age burial site of Bryn Cader Faner, visiting Llandecwyn Church with beautiful views across the Dwyryd estuary, and there’s that famous castle at Harlech too.