{"id":2140,"date":"2012-01-03T22:49:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T22:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2022-04-11T21:33:44","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T20:33:44","slug":"new-years-eve-jaunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/new-years-eve-jaunt\/","title":{"rendered":"New Year’s Eve jaunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

A broken boiler meant that I wasn’t able to make the trip to Scotland which was scheduled for New Year, so instead I ended up working. It wasn’t all bad news, however, as the need to visit my Dad’s garage to get an MOT done meant that I had an excuse to nip over to North Wales. Dad kindly leant me a Porsche from the forecourt as a courtesy car, so the logical thing to do seemed to be take it along the back roads and eventually up to the end of a singletrack road into a remote cwm at the back end of the Carneddau.<\/p>\n

\"The

The road to Cwm Eigiau stretches ahead of my toy for the weekend. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

I had a couple of hairy moments on the incredibly steep hairpins coming out of the Conwy valley, but got up and through the gates unscathed. It did indeed seem remote, until I arrived at the jam-packed car park. I managed to fit the car in somewhere, and set off on my run.<\/p>\n

\"Heading

Heading up towards Craig y Dulyn. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

The ground was really swampy on the way up the valley, and I resorted to walking on the bits where each step caused me to sink up to my ankles! I passed the Dulyn reservoir – a dark and foreboding place – and went along the side of Melynllyn, then onto the broad ridge of Gledrffordd.<\/p>\n

\"View

View down the valley from the miner's path between Melynllyn and Dulyn. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

I’d considered going up onto Carnedd Gwenllian and Foel Grach, but it looked a bit manky up there, and keeping east had saved me getting rained on so far.<\/p>\n

\"Nice

Nice on the tops. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

It turned out to be a good choice, because the drop down into Cwm Eigiau and the main path proved to be a really fast run. Soft ground and few rocks meant an all-out speed descent, with some ponies present on the valley floor to applaud my performance (they actually just stared impassively, which I thought was a bit rude).<\/p>\n

\"Wild

Wild Carneddau ponies and the bottom of Amphitheatre Buttress. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

From there it was back along the track, past the breached dam which used to hold back Llyn Eigiau<\/a>, and to the car. From there I went to spend a very enjoyable New Year’s Eve with friends, and visited Llandegla the following day. That turned out to involve meeting an old school friend, and going for a ride with a load of people wearing bikinis, but that’s another story entirely…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A broken boiler meant that I wasn’t able to make...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[831,420,390,539,276],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-outdoors","tag-cwm-eigiau","tag-fell-running","tag-llandegla","tag-new-year","tag-riding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}