The Crash of Bottle Banks

The Crash of Bottle Banks: Six Episodes From a Twenty Day Walk Over the Mountains of Wales in January

When Llandovery still lay under a down of mist and I was standing in the manner of an ice cream seller with a drawing board hanging from my neck, ‘you are looking very professional,’ someone behind me said. I smiled proudly.

‘Oh, I thought you were a surveyor,’ she said. ‘I thought your paintings were maps.’

The lady was wearing a quilted jacket and had aged more elegantly than her King Charles Spaniel. When I told her I was from London, she looked at me with pity. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least you are seeing some greenery now.’

She told me she was born on a farm on the Beacons, and as a child she would walk the five miles to school in Llandovery with her brother, though sometimes her father would drive them in a pony and trap.

‘My father knew all the flora here,’ she said. ‘The other children would laugh when we arrived at school with special grass wrapped around our grazes. You know willow bark has the same anti-inflammatory action as aspirin? Isn’t nature wonderful.’

The morning mist turned the hills to islands, deliberately it seemed, and I thought of Myddfai, a village I’d walked through the night before. It had a tourist sign that read The Village of the Physicians, and I asked her its meaning.

She brightened back to childhood, and told me a local myth about the Lady of the nearby mountain lake. ‘My father saw her once, disappearing into the lake. Show us Daddy, show us, we’d say, and he said you have to wait till the sunset light is just right.’

She told me how the Lady of the Lake passed her knowledge of medicinal herbs to her sons, and the villagers of Myddfai were said to be their descendants.

‘In medieval times the kings used to visit for their cures. Those doctors knew Arabic and Greek medicine and wrote their own medical text books in Welsh. I suppose my father was part of that tradition.’

She went on to study Botany at Bristol University. ‘But even with all my education, I was surprised when my brother sent me a link to a new paper written on the antimicrobial properties of the same grass our father used to tie to our grazes. He knew all along.’

‘Anyway, enjoy your walk. Good luck with the painting. And when you’re bored back in London, you can google the Physicians of Myddfai.’ And she said goodbye with a Welsh word I didn’t understand.

You begin your walk from Merthyr Tydfil on a rainy January night. That is not quite true. You catch the bus to the Red Cow Inn and the driver knows the names of the passengers. You have been eating only vegetables and rice in London and have not had a drink for a month but with the freedom of travel you order ham, egg and chips, and two pints of Guinness. You leave the pub into a misty rain. As you enter Brecon Beacons National Park, the change of diet gurgles in your guts, and you have to squat amongst the stubble of a cut pine forest. Your mind suddenly lifts. You are higher up now and the stars come and go as the mist thins. The air smells cold and peaty. You sleep under your tarp above the reservoir.

Next morning, you climb the ridge of Corn Du through a cloud. A school boy looking soldier with full combat kit and a rifle runs past you and every hundred meters he turns to hear a shout from his superior, a man in tracksuit and trainers, a former SAS member you imagine.

Your route to Conwy is over the mountainous moorland that runs South to North through Wales, so you are plein air painting and plein air sleeping, and drinking water you collect from rivers. The walk will take you three weeks.

The winter days are so short, on the first day, you only manage one painting as you slog over the mountains and bogs of the Brecon Beacons. You then begin measuring your walk by paintings rather than miles, and you find three or four paintings per day to be a good speed. Over the first fifty miles you make three paintings of the Beacons - they look more like seascapes; another of RAF training planes tumbling through a valley near Llandovery; and two more of a remote farm below a razed pine forest - branchless pines silhouette the hilltop, and a buzzard tilts below. It had not rained since the first night.

‘That bag’s bigger than my house,’ a man said when I stopped into the hotel bar. I had been walking for five days now and I felt I deserved a pint. The man was wearing a suit, and another man, tall and cheery, asked me if it wasn’t a bit of shit show out there this time of year. The Edwardian hotel hadn’t changed much from its heyday except the beer was now from the hotel’s microbrewery, the barwoman told me. She had a blonde bouffant. There was also a young man messing about with the fire, making the old place smell of coal smoke. It was Friday afternoon, and he was drunk. ‘Paaydaay!’ he informed me, with a thumbs up and his head on the table. From behind his back, the barwoman scowled, picked up a log and mimed hitting him with it. For some reason, he kept saying sorry to everyone. He began rolling bits of brie into balls, offered me one, and bought us all drinks. Then he fell back in his corner and turned up the Eastern European music on his phone. He looked lonely there, rolling his brie, and while I was chatting at the bar, he threw me another one. It looked like a little prosthetic globe.

An Italian man, sad as the hills, came in.

‘They’ve slashed my tyres again, do you know anything?’

‘Poor soul,’ said the barwoman, ‘that must be the third time they’ve done it to you. Meredith had her tyres slashed just the other day, case of mistaken identity, I believe.’

Back in the great outdoors, the greying dusk was turning to drizzle. I slept in a pine plantation on the edge of the Cambrian Mountains, and rain drummed on my tarp all night. Then at 6am a wonderful silence, then a light tinsley noise. It was snowing. From under my tarp, I painted the storm through the pine trees, until I realised the cold had got inside me, and I scrambled to pack up and get walking.

The oaks were thumbprints now, and up in the last field before the moor, each sheep had an extra fleece of snow. They watched as I walked through the blizzard, onto a hill that rose like a turquoise moon.

The sub zero temperatures lasted for the next five days as I crossed the boggy Cambrian Mountains; a mountain range worn down to rounded hills that were now patted down with snow. This region of Mid-Wales is so unpopulated, the RAF feel it’s a polite place for their low level flying, and through those long nights, supersonic jets gyroed the snowy moors.

For three hundred square miles, there are no trees, and the hills repeat themselves for as far as you can see. The grass is sparsely grazed by a few sheep farms, but if you want solitude in this island of Britain, the Cambrian Mountains is your place.

Fifteen miles into this region, I’d arranged to meet a photographer friend called Huw at a bothy before nightfall. There was no phone signal, and by 8pm, three hours after nightfall, I was worried. It wasn’t a difficult path, but at night, alone, hypothermia creeps up if you rest for long - it was well below freezing - and finding the bothy in the dark and snow wouldn’t be easy. I loaded the bothy’s fire with an old fence post I’d been sawing up, poured some hot water into a bottle, and set out into the snowy night to look for him.

After an hour, a herd of wild horses swept by lively as a storm cloud but eerily quiet. Then I heard a tiny crunching. A red pinhole light floated down the far hill. ‘Gwdihŵŵŵ!’ it called out. Huw is from Brecon. Gwdihŵ is an onomatopoeic Welsh word for an owl.

‘What happened to 5 o’clock?’ I said.

‘Ice!’ His words formed numbly.

‘Why are you using the red light on your head torch?’

‘Ice, so I can see the bloody ice!”

I’d walked that path the day before, when the ice over the marsh was breaking underfoot. He says it was now frozen solid and required pigeon steps to cross it. He also says a fighter jet locked onto his torch beam, the only light for miles, and kept tearing over him.

We followed the North Star back to the bothy. I’ve known Huw since school and we are as competitive as brothers and when I offered to carry his rucksack, with all his camera gear, I found it much heavier than mine, though I didn’t tell him that. He didn’t tell me that he’d also loaded it with Belgian beer, until a couple of bottles appeared after we finished our freeze dried meals.

The next day was a day of crunching through snow, painting and filming, all the time sifted by the frozen wind, and the sway of endless hills. I found my watercolour washes frosting on the paper.

Huw headed off to catch a bus back to Brecon in the evening. I was halfway over the Cambrian mountains and it was still freezing cold, so I aimed for another bothy for the night. I found it well after dark, an old farmhouse set into a river valley below a pine wood and quiet as a tomb. Downstairs, the walls were thick and whitewashed. There was only a table, a wood-burning stove and a chandelier stand of candles. Upstairs, there were no beds, just empty floor boards.

The bothy has a tragic history. Quadruplets were born in the house in 1856, to the Hughes family. Within days, the babies were dead from cholera, along with their two older brothers and father. Their mother, Margaret, took her own life soon after.

I didn’t sleep well. The walls were too thick, and the rooms too silent. But I woke in the morning unusually happy. I later read that the ghost of Margaret is said to have a benign power over the place, and it was with a sense of ingratitude that I resolved not to stay another night. It was too spooky. I spent the day touching up the paintings I had made so far, and when it grew dark again, I headed out, and bivied around midnight below Plynlimon Fawr, the highest point in the Cambrian Mountains.

Next morning, the sheep fences were furred with frost. I followed one to the summit, a great rounded nub, where an icy wind blew and a white sun burrowed through the cloud. If the Welsh mountains have a centre, it is here. Below me, lay Machynlleth, Wales’s 15th-century seat of independence. It stands nearly at sea level on the river Dovey and marks the end of the South Wales leg of my walk. Over the river rose North Wales, where Cadair Idris and the rugged mountains of Snowdonia were jade-white with snow. Behind me you could see all the way to the Brecon Beacons. I made only drawings that day.

It was a long walk down the mountain. As soon as I arrived in Machynlleth, I stopped at the kebab shop. For the last ten days, I’d been living off freeze dried food, and I was craving nutrients, so I ordered a salad. A rugby team piled in after me. My order was called out. Enraged, one of them shouted, ‘Salad!? Which cunt ordered salad!?’

You become ridiculous as you sleep in the bracken under a low mood. In the moonless night, there are so many stars they feel abrasive as sandpaper. The following day, a YouTuber buzzes a drone all the while you walk up and down Cadair Idris, and by evening, you are lying by the glacial lake, and the constellations become heavy lanterns setting behind the mountain. And then the madness of mountain streams begins. It happens every time you sleep by them. Tonight you hear the hammering of next door builders, and a radio tuning in and out of music stations. Tomorrow, below Rhinog Fach, you will hear the crash of bottle banks, and a tannoy prattling at a country fair. Previous nights have been Hindi music on an overnight coach, a nearby rave, women quarrelling, the shouts of angry men searching for trespassers. You turn in your sleeping bag, blind as a grub. Is this the meaning of a babbling brook you think, but these babblings crowd with purpose. You think of river spirits and moth coated tribes tracking up retreating glaciers. When the children laugh, you pull your hat over your ears. Then in the morning the rivers return to their gurgles and roars, and you are alone in your Gore-Tex, with your Ordnance Survey maps and pastoral watercolours. You crawl like a weevil down the glaciated vale, past the shepherds’ quad bikes and abandoned boulders, past the dry stone graveyard, the raucous pub, and up the next mountain, and then the next, and the next, until you can see the sea to the North. You do not make another painting. In Beddgelert a pub landlord gives you a free meal, in Conwy, a child tries to stamp on you. Your weevil limbs scuttle you off to the station, and you catch the next train home.

oliver dorrell