Twenty Eight - Flintshire - Moel Famau (554m)

View from near the top looking
down Offa's Dyke path

“Moel Famau” means “Mother mountain” in Welsh, and it’s the highest summit in the Clwydian Range. In our ignorance we’d never heard of these mountains and their country park , which are part of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but lots of people clearly knew it well. With it being a glorious cold and sunny day and the last Sunday of the school holidays, the car parks and the mountain itself were busy with people and their dogs and children, all having a lovely time. (Apart from the poor soul who had to reverse back out of the Moel Farnau car park at the rear of a convoy of cars queuing behind him because he didn’t have £2 for the barrier.) Missed our dog today – as we were on our way back from a stay in Manchester we’d left him behind, which was a shame as he would have enjoyed this one. 

Trig point at top - although not the highest point

We made our way steadily up the path to the summit – very easy to follow between the frosty fir trees , with views of the Dee estuary beginning to emerge to our right. At the top we join the Offa’s Dyke Path and everyone else who has come up to admire the views of Snowdon from the Jubilee Tower .It’s actually just the base of the Tower – the money ran out before it was finished and then high winds demolished the bits which had been erected, but it works pretty well as a viewing platform with room for everyone to charge about appreciating the scenery from different angles. Eventually it was too cold to stay up there any longer and we made our way back down along Offa’s Dyke until we get to Bwlch Penbarra, from where it’s a short walk back to the car along the road. 

Jubilee Tower - the actual highest point

Twenty Seven - Warwickshire - Ebrington Hill (261m)

Radio transmitters near the top

This is supposed to be part of a potentially glorious walk, but today I can’t say we really did it justice. In our defence, it was wet, cold, and extremely misty, and we had somewhere else to be (next to the fire in the bar of the excellent Kings Arms – although coffee and hot choc were the order of the day on this occasion).

Trig point on a wet & misty day

Flooded paths

So we did just have a swift yomp up the track from the car park at Hidcote Manor (also absolutely lovely, we were later informed, so we’ll have to go back to visit here too) towards some radio transmitters and up to glumly inspect our goal – an unexciting ploughed field on the other side of a gate, with no prospect of lovely distant views. We do find a proper plum coloured “Restricted Byway” arrow sign – which according to our daughter, who is undertaking her Gold D of E award, are apparently quite rare. And that is genuinely as exciting as it got!

Highest point is just through the
gate in the ploughed field

Twenty Six - Cardiff - Garth Hill (307m)

View down to Taff's Well

This is a lovely spot so close to the city, though incredibly windy on the day we were up there. It’s quite a pronounced “lump” so you can see why it was the inspiration for the book (and later film) “The Englishman who went up a hill but came down a mountain”.

Trig pillar at the top.

Visibility wasn’t great but on a clear day you can see Weston-Super-Mare and Devon across the Bristol Channel.

Cardiff city, the Bristol Channel, & the
Somerset coast just visible in the distance.

Twenty Five - Vale of Glamorgan - Pantylladron (137m)

Catching some rays! Sheep grazing
 under "solar farm" panels

We did get this a bit wrong – don’t follow the low walled stile with the yellow footpath sign (in the second photo), as the path you need for the “peak” is slightly to the right across the neighbouring field through a gate.

Gentle farmland rather
than rugged terrain!

A path took us alongside some solar panels and some obligingly photogenic sheep up to the highest point which is in the middle of the field. Not exciting, but quite easily done.

Trig pillar with St Hillary
TV mast in distance

Twenty Four - Newport - Wentwood (309m)

Trig pillar visible amongst
the felled conifer plantation

We parked at Cadira Beeches car park with lovely beech woods taking the place of scruffy pine plantations up here. There also seem to be lots of white van men here today – including a posse from Western Power tending to the comms mast and getting their 4x4 stuck in the mud in the process. But regardless, this is a nice walk and if it hadn’t have been getting dark we would have spent a bit more time wondering around these pretty woods.


J checking her bearings!

At the trig point there’s a great view across the Severn estuary, although today the visibility wasn’t great. No pub today – we have some shopping to do and work in the morning so promise ourselves a pint next weekend instead.

Bristol Channel & the Second Severn Crossing
just visible in the late afternoon mist

Twenty Three - Leicestershire - Bardon Hill (278m)

First sneak peak of what
lies ahead on the climb up

“Well I can safely say we would never have come here…”says W, as, in the East Midlands, far from home, we park the car on an out of the way housing estate. But actually this is quite impressive; we’re walking through woods and then up the side of what used to be a volcano.

Trig pillar at the highest point
of what remains of Bardon Hill

At the top, just beyond the trig pillar, peering into its crater, the dust is now emanating from a quarry. Apparently volcanic rock is just the thing for tarmacking roads.

The view beyond the trig point

Looking right down into the
quarry workings

Quite an impressive "hole"!

The sun came out as we watched the trucks and diggers charging about like a humungous toy set. I look at the nearby houses and wonder if this might be a good place for a window cleaning business.

Enormous Caterpillar trucks look like
kid's Tonka toys from this height!

Twenty Two - Swansea - Mynydd y Betws (373m)

Betws Wind Farm

Turbines in low autumn sun

This one was monumentally boggy – it started off on a tidy little track but eventually you have no choice but to strike out across the tussocks - though it is quite impressive to be quite so up close to the bottom of the turbines up here. We also got to scramble around the ruins of the medieval castle of Penlle'r Castell.

Walking directly below a turbine

View from highest point