We drive on south through rolling countryside: low hills, white sheep dotted in the fields between khaki hedgerows and stands of woodland. The Brecon Beacons are ever present on the horizon, hovering behind the landscape. As we rattle on towards Brecon, they grow bigger, their peaks and wide curves coming into view. Unlike the north, these mountains are not craggy, littered with rough, hoary scree. They are fresh and green, smooth and rounded. Whole. This place hardly feels like the Wales I know. It’s somehow less secretive – more open.
The road to Pen y Fan from Brecon is tiny, barely a road at all. We are forced to slow for convoys of backpackers and a swathe of roadworks. The machinery is so large that I wonder how it made it down these steep and narrow lanes in the first place. We clatter over a cattle grid and pull up in a field beside a stream. A few tents, little humps of blue and red, are nestled to the right behind a drystone wall. A makeshift clothes line has been fashioned off the side of a van, dripping with wet swimming shorts and jeans and shirts.
We pull on our walking boots and follow the trail up the mountain. It’s fairly busy with teenagers and families traipsing up and down, an elderly couple, bent almost double over their walking poles, taking the path at more sedate pace. The stream I’d noted before ends at a splashing waterfall a little way up, down a slope carpeted in heather and ferns, and the path itself alternates between stones and grass. The sun has come out and I regret my leggings, my tiredness, and wishing for some warmth. Sweat rolls off my nose. It’s so quiet that I can hear crickets chirping in the long grass. We plod along, up and up, stopping frequently – although it isn’t all that steep. I’m just not in any shape to be climbing mountains that day. The views are spectacular though, opening up around every turn to give a vista right across the hills and farmland.
On the way down, we take a path off the beaten track and find ourselves in some woodland. Birds call in the thick clatch of trees. We find a pretty stream, fed by the glacial lake further up, trickling merrily over heaps of grey and brown pebbles. The stones have arranged themselves in such a way as to form pools and mini waterfalls. I plunge in without a thought for whether my clothes will get wet. And it’s bliss.
We leave later than intended for the long drive back to Cheshire, following the roads back in the twilight. There is a curiously anticlimactic feeling and, despite looking forward to my own bed again, a resistance to returning to real life. A resistance to crossing the border. I wonder if everyone feels like this when leaving. If all the other people in the other cars are thinking the same thing.
