Welsh mountains, lakes and weather

Week 2 of Sabbatical:

Have just returned from 3 days in stunning scenery around Lake Trawfynydd in Wales.

Libby, Esme, Fergus and I enjoyed a packed few days of outdoor activity and indoor loafing.

We experienced welsh weather of both extremes - beautiful sunshine on the day we got there, followed the next day by lashing wind and rain which beat us back from our attempted ascent of Snowdon (in trainers and coats more suited to Redhill town centre).

Trawsfynydd is also the site of a now decommissioned Magnox power station, which sounds grim, but even that has its own beauty when viewed from the lakeside cafe!

When it was active the power station produced sufficient output to provide for a city the size of Manchester.

The final day included a trip to the Slate Caverns and a hair-raising, death-defying, scream-inducing ride on Titan - the worlds longest zip wire! Travelling at speeds of up to 60mph over a distance of 2,000M, hanging from a harness clipped to a zip wire c.80M above a slate quarry. Memorable stuff!

Thanks to Alistair and Kath for letting us stay at The Beehive!

Trawsfynydd has a famous son in the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in battle at Ypres in 1917 aged 29.

His Christian faith made him a reluctant soldier, believing that he could not kill a man, and for a while he remained in a reserved occupation as a shepherd. Eventually the family had to send one son - Hedd Wyn was conscripted and was killed after only 3 months on the battlefield.

His poem 'War' contrasts the horror of Passchendale with the peaceful life he lived in Trawsfynydd - the seemingly godless experience of the battlefield compared with the relative peace of his former life.





Why must I live in this grim age,
When, to a far horizon, God
Has ebbed away, and man, with rage,
Now wields the sceptre and the rod?

Man raised his sword, once God had gone,
To slay his brother, and the roar
Of battlefields now casts upon
Our homes the shadow of the war.

The harps to which we sang are hung,
On willow boughs, and their refrain
Drowned by the anguish of the young
Whose blood is mingled with the rain