Blorenge

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”
Henry David Thoreau
A long planned walk with J today after several false starts, mainly due to weather but also weddings, funerals and his travels – nearly made it last week but he was off to Sofia (Bulgaria) for a few days.
Forecast was good for a walk, cloudy with some sunny spells and so it was. Stopped off briefly at Keeper’s Pond to admire the view over to Crickhowell, then headed for Foxhunter car park to begin our walk. J had a map, given to him years ago by someone who wondered if he’d be ok attempting the steep climb up from Llanfoist to the Punchbowl, our destination today. So today we decided on the downhill approach, although we’d still have to get back up later. Just over half an hour later, after the downhill ramble along the narrow road and through the woodland track, we came to the Punchbowl, a Cwm left over after a small glacier carved its way through the upland massif. J told me that it got its’ name as a “popular venue for illegal bare knuckle boxing matches. In 1889 a fight between David Rees of Nantyglo and William Williams of Brynmawr went on for 42 rounds and lasted an hour and 42 minutes, all for a £10 purse.” Today it's a peaceful mountain pond surrounded by ancient beech trees.
Rather than retrace our steps back to the car we decided to continue on in a circular route, trusting my map reading skills (oo-er) to get us back up to top of Blorenge and a fairly level path back past the trig. Point and Iron Age burial mound. Brought back memories of K2 panicking when I puffed and blew my way up Snowdon, threatening to keel over at any minute and getting redder and redder in the face. Yes, it was a steep uphill slog for about an hour but when we got to the top J was exultant – “I’m nearly 80 and I’ve made it up here”; ten years his junior I was happy enough too! I think I was helped by the black beetles I saw on our path, never stopping in their lives, beetling on, I told J it was the Beatles, I’d forgotten who the fifth one was but there were even more at the top.
The walk across the top on the return to the car park gave us a much better perspective on how it must have been for our ancestors, hauling limestone across this bleak windswept landscape for the forges at Garnddyrys, Sirhowy and Clydach. Easy to see where the inspiration for Lord of The Rings and the like comes from, looking across to the grey outline of Pen-y-Fan in the distance and the quarries at Trefil across from Mynydd Llangattock, with the Black Mountains in the distance. Nearer to us were the “black mountains” of Canada Tips, spoil heaps from opencast coal mining during WWII and the Hushings of the industrial past evident everywhere.
Plenty of food for thought as we headed back for lunch and my post prandial doze to relax, my legs are going to be stiff tomorrow!