A breezy day in the Welsh border hills near Knighton, 8 miles approx. December 2006

Walks with a Camera © Geoff’s Pages 2011

As ever, we'd intended to have a day out over the Christmas period, but the weather seemed against us, with fog, mist and murk for day after day. We pencilled in the last Thursday of the year - it might be the only day we could manage anyway - and,

amazingly, the weather was fine after the overnight rain. A steady breeze, white puffy clouds, sunshine and blue sky - what more could one ask? (a slightly greater proportion of blue sky to white puffy cloud, perhaps...) Beguildy (or Bugeildy, to use its Welsh equivalent) is a hamlet on the B4355 from Knighton to Newtown, and it was here we left the car. Our route would be, more or less, a circumnavigation of the watershed of the Warren Brook which joins the Teme a few yards downstream from Beguildy. A quiet surfaced lane up past the church makes the ascent to these high, windswept grasslands relatively easy. Leaving the lane at Cefn Pawl, we join Glyndwr's Way - we've walked a stretch of it before, a couple of years ago, on the last few miles into Knighton - see Glyndwr's Way. We did another walk in these remote hills two years before that - Moel Wilym - and as we headed southwards across Warren Bank to Black Mountain, we could clearly see some of that walk's higher points, just a few miles to the west. Further south again, on the shoulder of Stanky Hill, a faint path cuts away to the left and heads for the trig point on Beacon Hill. Two ladies descending the path warned us that the view might not be great - a patch of mist had formed on the higher ground - but it cleared sufficiently for us to take in the panorama of rolling hills in all directions. At 1796', this is one of the highest points in the area, although the 2000' plateau of Radnor Forest, a few miles to the south, tends to limit the view in that direction. There aren't many paths in this area. For our return route, I'd planned to follow a marked footpath to the Rhoshay ridge - but the only feet that had used the paths we found, after a struggle through deep heather, were attached to round woolly bodies... A good track then follows the ridge, before a final descent through fields to the farmyard and the Warren Brook at Pantycaragle - and the final ¼mile along the road back to Beguildy.