We set off from York on Wednesday 21Sep at about 0930 in fine weather, ie it wasn’t raining, and without much fuss and without a reservation ahead were soon on our chosen route, heading SW. Mary was the designated navigator today and was initially a little wary of the spaghetti junction of motorways facing us but she soon gained confidence as the excellent signage confirmed we were on target.
Sooner than we expected we had left Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester behind and were averaging 100kph as we hit the M6 to head south. With no traffic problems at all and only about two hours into the trip we passed the bi-lingual “Welcome to Wales” sign and were checking the detailed map of Llangollen for one way streets etc to plan our arrival.
Whenever we roll into a town without an accommodation reservation we look for a Tourist Information Centre and at Llangollen we drove past it in the main street while entering town. Now all that was needed was to find a parking spot (sorted, about 100m away, side street) then to saunter into the Information Centre and hopefully organize accommodation.
Fifteen minutes later we were being shown to our £50 per night B&B room in a nearby establishment, car parked securely on the premises, off the road.
Five minutes after checking in we’d asked if we could stay an extra night, as we both felt this place had more to offer than we’d expected. The flexibility to do just this had been built into our itinerary so we were delighted when we found that the same room was also available the following night.
It was by now just lunch time so we set off on foot to explore the town, which straddles the beautiful River Dee, flowing west to east, just where several natural small rapid areas occur and to find a hot soup and cold beer for lunch.
From the bridge, where the above photo was taken we could see a possible suitable lunch venue, on the left, overlooking the river so that’s where we found our cold beer and soup, enjoyed out on the deck, overlooking the rushing stream.
Mary opted to hit the numerous shops while I hung about the lunch spot a little longer to finish my pint. To my delight a white water kayaker appeared upstream, heading straight for me so I readied the camera and managed to get a nice shot as he deftly managed his tiny kayak, much smaller than either of my two, through the rapids about 15m away from me.
How I’d have liked to have paddled a kayak in that stream, but the local kayak operator had no activities set up for the next couple of days. So I went for a hike instead -- along the narrow canal, which runs alongside the north edge of the west-east running river, starting about three kilometres upstream of the town, and was presumably initially constructed to allow water-borne cargo to be diverted around the rapids ahead. It’s no longer needed for that function so now it is chiefly a recreational facility for locals, to walk along, to paddle on, to fish in, and a source of employment for “Geordie” a rather small draught horse, who spends his days dragging a narrow canal boat carrying bored tourists up and down the 4 metre wide canal.
But there are other occasional users of the canal. At the eastern end there’s a sort of terminal for narrow boats and I encountered some of them at the end of my six kilometre return hike.
Tomorrow, Thursday, we plan to take a drive into the Snowdonia NP to the west of here. That’ll be the main feature of next episode of the blog.
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