Mid-Wales August 2017

A trip to Wales is starting to look like an annual fixture in my diary.  After managing to ‘avoid’ visiting for several years, the promise of a good discussion about rewilding lured me to North Wales last autumn, and now the promise of an even better workshop on rewilding drew me back again last week, this time to mid-Wales.

The main event was at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth - there’s a separate blog post about the excellent workshop I was doing there.  

The Centre for Alternative Technology is well worth a visit if you are in the area - it’s an inspiring glimpse of many ways of living more greenly - and there’s a splendid water-powered cliff railway if the walk up from the car park to the centre looks too daunting.

CAT Water-powered railway

Centre for Alternative Technology 

CAT isn’t the only attraction in the area. The Dovey Estuary is beautiful, and has the RSPB Ynys Hir reserve on it’s southern side.  

Dovey Estuary 

Ynys Hir

A bit further south gets you to Aberystwyth - a mix of holiday resort and university town looking out onto Cardigan Bay.  And it’s got it’s own cliff railway too - the landscape in this part of the country seems to lend itself to cliff railways. 

Aberystwyth marina

Aberystwyth

Aberystwyth Pier

Aberystwyth cliff railway 

Looking onto Cardigan Bay

On the north side of the Dovey is the rather sleepier (at first glance at least) town of Aberdovey.  Is this where one retreats to when the bright lights of Abersytwyth become too much?

Aberdovey Beach

And the weather.  It’s fashionable to make jokes about the Welsh weather, and indeed the idea of a water-power cliff railway would be of limited use in a drought zone. It did indeed rain (and rain very heavily) for some of my time in mid-Wales, but the sun also shone.  In fact the sun managed to shine brightly pretty much any time that my timetable required me to be outside, so all in all, I really can’t complain about the Welsh weather

Whatever next? Maybe south Wales next year!