Mist

Heavy frost overnight and then a damp cold mist that seemed to rise from the valley and swallow the hills.  At the moment I can see about thirty metres in front of me.  Everything is wet, dripping, silent.  I love late-autumn days like this.  

With driving across to Aberystwyth I have come to see the Radnor Forest hills as the start of the hill country over to the coast, which in a way it is.  One reason the journey starts for me at the Kington roundabout - even though that's another five miles or so beyond where I live - is that the hills start there, and the journey across to Aber is a journey through hill country.  The treeless Radnor Forrst, then the seemingly-endless rolling hills visible from the road between Llanfihangel and Llandeglau, the lower hills between there and Rhayader, then the higher hills towards Llangurig.  Between Llangurig and the coast is quite high hill country, the wild centre of Wales.  There comes a point near Eisteddfa Gurig of  'weather watershed', where the weather changes from the hill weather to a climate influenced by the coast.  Often I have left here in rain or mist and arrived at the coast in mild sunshine.  

Losing the Leaves

I am ploughing ahead without images and may well remove the earlier ones, as the computer system and the Blogspot system don't get on.  

Recent journeys to Aberystwyth have been through a darkening autumn landscape, and I seem to have taken lots of pictures of moody hills and low cloud.  The year is turning, the autumn is passing.  September seems a long time ago.  The light has changed; often now we do not see sunlight at all and the branches are black against a grey sky.  I had forgotten this monochroming of the landscape, as in six months the slow greening of the hills will also surprise me.  

I realised recently n a way this journey begins or ends at Kington.  There is a neat roundabout - plastered with hoardings for festivals and 911 conspiracy theories - where the A44 comes out of the hills and onto the English plains of Herefordshire, as if Wales stands still or stops in surprise.  Beyond that the road crosses the Midlands to Oxford.  This is a neat defining point for me, as I was looking for markers for the journey.  I finish my journey on the steep hill above Aberystwyth but one day I will walk the family journey along the promenade and lay a stone in the sea.  

Birdscape

Last week I treated myself to the mountain road between Rhayader and Aberystwyth, through truly wild and empty moorland.  It was a journey defined by birds.
Goldfinches in Old Radnor

Buzzards near Llanfihangel

A merlin on the mountain road

A red kite feeding on the road ten feet in front of the car above Cwmystwyth

Seagulls in Aberystwyth

A rookery on the university, roosting as I started the journey home.  

Milestone

Apologies for not posting - the weekly visit presents difficulties of its own.  

One area I'd be interested in exploring is milestones - here is one measuring distance from/to Presteigne and Rhayader.  Each one hand-carved, and one every mile for how many hundred miles?  I keep my eyes open for them and wonder about stopping and inching my way back along the A44 to record them.  Perhaps local branches of The Milestone Society have already done this.  There is a poetry about milestones; recent monoliths, tilting, ignored, slumped in ditches.  In the future they will be as valued as wayside crosses.  They also help me recognise the modern stretches of the road because there, of course, there are none.