Over The Hill And Round The Bend by Richard Guise

Author:Richard Guise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2011-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Shouldering Tetley, I climbed a flight of steps to regain the upper track and from that point had to admit that the route was a good one. After hugging the Menai shore through Port Dinorwic – the old outlet for slate exports from Dinorwic Quarry and now reborn as an area of trendy waterside apartments and renamed Y Felinheli – NCN 8 had found a disused railway trackbed to whisk me all the way to Caernarfon. Various information boards told me that NCN 8 was also Lôn Las Cymru, a 250-mile cycle route right across Wales from Holyhead to Cardiff and Chepstow. Throughout my time on NCN 8, I saw only one sign visible from a road that tempted the passing motorist with a ‘Cardiff’ sign pointing down a quiet cycle track.

This shore-side route along the old railway gave me an excellent start to the day. For four miles I crunched along the gravel track, on my right the waters of the Menai Strait, now calm after overnight rain, on my left a mixed landscape of rich green pasture, isolated white farmhouses and low wooded hills, beyond which the rising flanks of Snowdonia disappeared into the low cloud. Though the rain had stopped, more looked likely – and I felt I’d better enjoy the conditions while I could. The cycle track brought me into Caernarfon beside a giant new block of flats, from which the views over the Menai Strait must be fabulous, but of which the view from Anglesey is, I can assure you, ghastly – since Julie and I had driven down the opposite shore two evenings before. With Edward I’s magnificent Caernarfon Castle having dominated this end of the strait for nearly 700 years, twenty-first-century man has managed to blot it out inside a decade with a tasteless lump of concrete that, I predict, will be enthusiastically demolished before the end of the century.

For 2,000 years Caernarfon has been an important administrative centre, from Roman Segontium to county town of Gwynedd, as it is now. In 1954, when Welsh local authorities voted for the first official capital city of Wales, Caernarfon finished second, with eleven votes to Cardiff’s 136. Of its 10,000 population in 2001, eighty-six per cent spoke Welsh, the highest proportion of any large community in the country.

I’d already visited the town several times, but on the last occasion, four years before, I was sorry to see how dilapidated it had become – and therefore especially pleased to note its apparent renaissance this time around. Castle Square was being pedestrianised and I sat outside a cafe there, happily supping a cappuccino. There’s something about arriving in a town on a cycle track that puts you in a good mood, and the way the rays of the watery sun played on the handsome façades of the square reminded me for some reason of the old cathedral square in Barcelona. Must have been something in the coffee.

As I walked over to examine the statue of David Lloyd

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