Steve Eddy enjoys discovering local paths
FOR ME, the joy of Welsh lockdown has been revisiting local walks, and sometimes discovering paths on my doorstep that I never knew existed. Occasionally these have to be navigated with a machete, but not the walk I did on a particular balmy day in early spring.
I set out from my back door, up the road to the start of a steep lane mysteriously called ‘The Freedom’, where the Cleddon Brook tumbles down a wooded ravine. My path followed the brook at first, crossing it twice before climbing steeply and then zig-zagging through Cuckoo Wood. Snowdrops were still bowing their heads demurely by the brook. Looking up the ravine over a criss-cross of fallen trees, I could just
pick out the white flash of the falls at the top.
When you eventually reach them Cleddon Falls, or Shoots, are a little gem. The stream gathers the water collected a mile further west in Cleddon Bog. In the summer it can be a trickle, but today it was a healthy rush. Tiny Cleddon’s claim to fame is that the philosopher Bertrand Russell used to live in Cleddon Hall.
I headed north along the edge of Cuckoo Wood on the Wye Valley Walk (WVW) to a confluence of paths on the edge of the wood, and took the straight track, or ‘ride’, along the top of the valley. There are good views here to the English side, and even a seat halfway along from which to enjoy them.
After a couple of gates I reached a lane. Here a woman was carrying a pair of legs. “I found these in the woods,” she said by way of explanation. They were the kind of improbably long legs ending in high heels that graced women’s clothes shop windows in the 1950s.
Passing a small pond, I branched off to the right, still following the Wye Valley Walk, and soon reached the almost non-existent hamlet of Pen-y-fan (like the mountain). It has no pub or shop, but it does have an ancient mounting block in the middle of its rough village green.
Leaving the WVW, I took a muddy path signed to Bigsweir through scrubby woodland. There were so many deer prints it must be like a deer superhighway at night, and there was evidence of a lot of badger action too. I emerged at a boggy stile with a panoramic view of the Wye, descended to another stile, then turned up into Firhill Wood, and down to cross the road near Bigsweir, where a tiny island in the river is said to have been home to a medieval hermit. From here it was a stroll along the bank back to Llandogo churchyard. Despite the spring weather, almost the only person I’d seen all day was the lady with the extra legs.