The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Take the UK’s greatest road trip
Kerry Walker gets behind the wheel in the Vale of Ewyas, where you won’t mind if you get stuck behind a tractor
What a welcome: cross the Severn Bridge and the Brecon Beacons soon raise their sails in greeting. Rippling across 520sqmiles of national park, these peaks aren’t the country’s highest, but they certainly are dramatic. Dive in at the deep end and you’ll find heather-misted moors, glacier-sculpted valleys and the past imprinted in Iron Age hill forts, ruined castles and dashingly romantic abbeys. Pen y Fan and co get all the fuss, but there are less-traipsed, equally ravishing mountains to hoof up in the drizzle, getting more remote the further west you go. And given the park’s Dark Sky status, the stars are a treat at night.
There’s no need to muddy your boots if you don’t want to. The single tracks swinging through these hills are roadtrip heaven, with views to make your heart sing, restaurants with smart cheffery and glorious coaching inns full of real ales, beams and medieval swagger. So you’re stuck behind a tractor or sheep again? Who cares? With scenery like this, it would be rude to rush.
Few Welsh peaks outshine the Skirrid for views, and as I climb to its ridge, a red kite circles on the breeze and a big tease of a sun emerges from clouds to illuminate a rich tapestry of chequered hills. Sweeping up like a dorsal fin, this 1,594ft crag marks the eastern fringes of the Black Mountains, where the Brecon Beacons take a turn for the wilder.
The Skirrid is the gateway to the old mountain road to Hay-on-Wye, a remote single track that dives into the deep end of the Black Mountains: the Vale of Ewyas. History, folklore, spiritual enlightenment, wild moors and mountains are all crammed into this 35-mile, 90-minute drive, one of Britain’s most unforgettable. It is a valley replete with myths and rare beauty, with views to gawp at on every bend and upland walks on heathery moors that tempt you away from the wheel, forcing you to linger for longer than you’d planned.
Before beginning the drive north, I made a post-walk detour to the Skirrid Mountain Inn (skirridmountaininn.co. uk), a 900-year-old pub claiming to be the oldest and most haunted tavern in Wales. It’s a dark fantasy of an inn, full of woodsmoke-blackened beams and ghostly goings-on, with a fireplace where Shakespeare allegedly dreamed up the character of Puck for A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. A hangman’s noose reveals its past life as a courtroom.
Many a medieval wayfarer undoubtedly took a wrong turn after too many pints here and wound up in the steepsided valley of the Vale of Ewyas unfurling north. The River Honddu flows through this lonely, shadowy valley, the narrow, twisting road the kind you travel along saying a silent prayer that you won’t have to reverse.
Many have worshipped at the altar of my next stop: Llanthony Priory, a 12thcentury Augustinian abbey whose ruined nave and cloisters are now exposed to the sky. The great medieval clergyman and chronicler Gerald of Wales found it “truly suited to the monastic life” in a “wilderness far removed from the bustle of mankind”. His words ring as true now as they did then, and the view of the dark-browed Black Mountains is little changed. It’s a view that drove Turner to Romantic raptures as he captured the scene in typical stormy style back in 1794.
Now, travellers wishing to unplug and relish the air of quiet contemplation can stay the night in a rustic room with four-poster bed in the priory hotel (capelmonastery.co.uk), and enjoy real ales and hearty meals by an open log fire in the original prior’s cellar.
Hunkering down by the river is a much humbler manifestation of devotion: St Mary’s Chapel, one of Britain’s smallest churches, all whitewash and lopsided bellcote. The Reverend Francis Kilvert, the diarist, neatly described it as “short, stout and boxy” and like a “grey owl among its seven great yews” in his 1870s reflections on rural life.
Back behind the wheel, the road became increasingly steep and narrow as I pushed on towards the drive’s climax: the Gospel Pass, where the singletrack road whips its way through open moors. Winding like a ribbon through a corset of pleats and folds, this is Britain’s highest mountain pass, topping out at 1,801ft and with an average gradient of 5 per cent. A lone cyclist battled the stiff incline. Several sheep dallied on the road, oblivious to the little passing traffic. I was in no hurry either, and pulled over for views of Hay Bluff to the right, Twmpa – more wittily nicknamed Lord Hereford’s Knob – to the left, and beyond the Wye Valley.
Dorothy and William Wordsworth raved about their walks here, and there is indeed a certain poetry in the way the landscape unfolds. Hay-on-Wye, of literary festival fame, is just a few short miles north, but it’s a world away in spirit from this silent valley, where winds whisper through the moorland grasses and fleeting sunlight picks out the golds and greens of the Black Mountains like a revelation.