Martin McDowell's Blog

My mother came over from Slovenia to visit me and I took the opportunity to see a bit more of Wales than I did till now. One of the things I wanted to try out was the Venture Jet speed boat trips. The one we took is called Wet’n'Wild where we did a whole lot of high speed stuff but also saw a bit of the wildlife, including some inquisitive seals. The trip involved the Ramsey Island.
The next day we stayed at the impressive Brynafon Hotel in Rhayader. If you ever get around staying there I would strongly suggest booking an evening meal there as the food is absolutely fantastic. And just as an example I can tell you I ordered the Smoked haddock fishcake with a lightly poached egg with a messine sauce as a starter and the Chestnut & wild mushroom roulade with a white wine and tarragon sauce for the main meal. And to top it off I had a very good and very simple dark choc truffle. Yum

Click on the picture above to see the whole photo album.

The next day we saw quite a bit of the Elan valley that is just about 15 minutes away by car. I would suggest that you see the place after a good rainfall as the artificial waterfals flowing over the dam are very impressive. Also I suggest going to the visitors centre and walking up to the dam (this one is called the Craig Coch dam) and then walking up either side. If you go up the right side you will end up where the road meets the dam wall and you could reach that by driving by car – but what enjoyment would you get from that However if you continue driving up this road you will see most of the other dams and their reservoirs in the Elan valley.

At the end of the road you join up with the Ystwyth valley (Cwmystwyth in Welsh) or as it is originally called “Vale of Ystwyth”. This is a spectacular valley taking you from the sceneries you see in the Elan valley to deep grassy valleys with streams you see in Scotland to an old mining village and ending in a more wooded part that looks remarkably like Slovenia.

If you follow the road you end up at the Devil’s bridge where you can see the local attraction of the three bridges (it is actually bridges built on top of each other, each wider and, of course, higher). They didn’t see a reason to demolish the old bridges and you can still see much detail of the bridge in the middle with its metal railing fence.
Picture on left courtesy of William M. Connolley, August 2005

Below the Devil’s bridge is actually another walk that takes you to some very nice waterfalls. There are about 600 steps on the walk and I am not sure if the number relates only to the ones going up as there are quite a few going down. I actually managed to hurt my knee on the way up with no particular reason or obvious injury.

The Devil’s bridge village is knows for its three attractions, the third one is the little narrow gauge steam railway that climbs through the verdant Vale of Rheidol from Aberystwyth, twelve miles away to the west, on the wets Wales coast.

After that we took some quick refreshements at the Hafod Hotel we returned to Rhayader to look at the feeding of the nearly extinct “Red kite (Milvus milvus)” – a bird of prey. It also has a Slovene name: “rjavi škarnik” (also known as “rdeči škarnjek” or “rjavi škarjek”, but it doesn’t live in Slovenia. First we thought we were late as we arrived at a quarter past three and the feeding started at three. But it all started to happen after about 15-20 minutes, there we more and more kites in the sky and in the end they filled the whole sky like a swarm. Most of them picked up the scattered pieces of meat mid flight but a few actually landed and had a nice relaxing feed. There is a photo about it in the album, but you cannot see the red kites very well as they were always on the move – and the camera I use is not very sophisticated. There were people that took much better photos and you can see them on the Red kite website.

Here are also some videos taken from the trip. They were all shot with the same camera as the photos, so the video quality is not so great.
Video 1: The Caban Coch dam (1):

Video 2: The Caban Coch dam (2)
Video 3: The Caban Coch dam (3)
Video 3: Elan Valley Pen y Garreg Dam
Video 4: Cwmystwyth vale of Ystwyth
Video 4: Devils bridge waterfalls