Knocking on Heaven's Door, the Skirrid 2018

Click here for the 2018 gardens index.

Half a lifetime ago, I worked as a chemistry teacher at Abergavenny in the Welsh Marches (border country). To the north-east of the town was a brooding hill, the Skirrid (or Ysgyryd Fawr) that rises steeply to some 450 metres, it's an outlier to the Black Mountains to the west. The latter is the host to the Grwyne Fawr reservoir, which is well sited as the area has one of the highest rainfalls in the country. Some 50 plus years ago I collected first hand evidence for this when I hiked past it as part of my Duke of Edinburgh's Silver Award. For the railway enthusiast it is notable for the temporary narrow gauge railway built to assist construction which reached the highest point for an adhesion only railway in the UK; the rack assisted Snowdon Mountain Railway is naturally rather higher. The story of the railway (and dam) is told in the book "Stone and Steam in the Black Mountains" by David Tipper who was the vicar at Aston Ingham near our home. I remember going to a talk he gave on the subject in the 1980s when he described how steam traction engines got bogged down completely on the muddy tracks.

Anyway, not long ago Yuehong came back from one of her regular expeditions to local charity shops with a loose leaf coffee table book called '1001 Walks in Britain'. Published by the AA in 2004 at a mere £30, naturally she had paid about 10% of that. Now we had a car, it was wheeled out and I was told to choose something suitable. Much of the time the hill is wreathed in clouds or mist and is said to be muddy at best or boggy at worst but since we are currently experiencing an extended dry spell and it was a cloudless day in June, this walk was a 'no brainer'. There is a copy of the map in the book at the bottom of the page.

Knowing the area, a bonus for the visit was using the B4233 from Monmouth out and the B4521 back via Ross on Wye which pass through quintessentially English countryside even if the area is actually in Wales as the place names make clear. The National Trust car park charges non-members but there's safe shaded parking about 200 metres on the Abergavenny side.

We cut through the field to avoid walking on the road to the official starting point and joined the 'avenue' which leads to the hill proper.

There's a gate here and we continued slightly right and up. The instructions seemed a little complex, all that was actually needed was to tell us to go straight up...

... until we reached another gate. Straight up was the direct ascent where we would come down later. Instead we turned left and followed the well used path which at first climbed a bit...

... but then followed an undulating route through woods and patches of ferns.

To the west we could see the Sugar Loaf (596m), (assumed) Pen Cerrig-calch (701m) and Waun Fach (811m). All looked totally benign today, but at any time of year they demand complete respect. 

Again, most of the instructions were superfluous, all that was needed was to bear right just after the pass with a small hill hill on the left and follow the barely defined track round below the cliff.

Before we did that we posed one more time each for the camera (the IPhone colours are awful).

This is the steep climb to the top, it's a good job it is only lightly used by hikers...With our training in Penang, it wasn't much of a challenge, just pure enjoyment.

Inevitably, there's a trig point at the summit and number of visitors can be gauged by the condition of the ridge path.

Not much grows well in this exposed environment. I am told by my wildflower 'go to' man John Crellin that these are a wild Thyme (Thymus polytrichus) and Birdsfoot Trefoil. 

This is a view of Abergavenny with the Blorenge behind. The green area just above and to the left of the brown area is Bailey Park, home of the annual May Bank Holiday Abergavenny Steam Rally. Long ago when my son played mini rugby for Monmouth, we used to come here and I think even though they were rather bigger than our boys we always came out on top. It didn't take long to walk down and rejoin our outward route and return to the car..

It was a good rabbit to pull out of the hat and satisfied a long ambition as I had never got round to climbing it when there were so many competing steam locomotives to 'bag' instead. There are endless further walks in this area, my job will be to identify those which will not inflict too much pain on our rickety knees.

Click here for the 2018 gardens index.