The foreign country on our doorstep. With wonderful singing, beautiful landscapes, sandy beaches, castles, neolithic artifacts, mountains, pleasant green hills, and narrow guage railways.
Home of authors like Dylan Thomas, R.S Thomas, O.M Edwards, Vernon Watkins from Swansea or Eric Madden who has written stories based on Snowdonia folk tales.
I would love to go back and have Bara Brith, a type of friuty bread, or Welsh cakes full of butter, and a nice cup of tea. Other delicacies include lava bread made with seaweed.
Driving through the country is sometimes slow. A lot of the roads are ‘scenic’, narrow and twisting. But they are beautiful. Driving over a pass and into a new valley with different field patterns, or plantations of trees is a pleasure.
There are waterfalls like swallow falls near Betwys Coed, the wooded hillsides which gradually become moorland, covered in slate as you drive into Snowdonia.
Snowdon is the tallest mountain in Wales. There is a footpath to the top, or you can take the mountain railway. Great for views, except on the day we went up when everything was enveloped in fog.
North Wales is closest to where I live, but there is a lot to see in Mid and South Wales too. In Mid Wales there are places like the national centre for alternative technology at Machynlleth and towns like Aberystwyth where there is a funicular railway and a narrow gauge line up to the Devils bridge waterfall. In the south you can visit Tenby which is a tourist attraction, Laugharne where Dylan Thomas wrote, and the capital of the principality which is Cardiff.
I’ve only included places we have visited. There is so much more to see.
The strangest thing, as you drive into Wales the signs on the roads are in Welsh and English. I find myself trying to pronounce them!
We all agreed after completing the thirty day challenge that London Urban Sketchers had put together that we would like to continue. We have a new list of about 37 challenges, which may well see us out of the lockdown.
