North Wales Pilgrims' Way - Stage 1 (Greenfield to Trelawnyd)

And we're off!

Basingwerk - a ruined abbey at Greenfield near Holywell in North Wales. It belonged to the Order of Cistercian monks and was founded in the 13th Century. These guys owned lands nearby but were also granted stewardship of a significant part of north Derbyshire, notably Glossopdale. In 1536 the Dissolution of the Monasteries put paid to all that and the abbey was abandoned and its assets sold. The ruined abbey is now the starting point for a long distance footpath called the North Wales Pilgrims' Way which stretches for over 130 miles from Greenfield on the north-east coast near Holywell in Flintshire to Aberdaron at the end of the Lleyn Peninsula. Most people walk this route (usually in the summer months) but Skip and I decided to run it commencing this morning. Here we are at the very start of it, Vicky dropped us off and left us to it. We were somewhat optimistic at this stage, well you have to be don't you?

The path makes its way in the early stages through Holywell which is the home of St Winefride's Well and this is one of the first significant staging posts of the pilgrimage. This is a remarkably well preserved example of a medieval holy well. I couldn't get any closer than the gate and the men in the photo were working on some essential repairs. Mind you there were no hordes of disgruntled pilgrims standing outside missing out on their dunking in the well. However there would have been in the Middle Ages, St Winefride's was renowned as being the 'Lourdes of Wales' and pilgrims galore thronged there, some of them undoubtedly setting off on the long haul overland down the Lleyn Peninsula and over to Bardsey Island.

Our route out of Holywell was upwards and more upwards on rather muddy paths. We crossed several slippery stiles and gradually we became shrouded in a thick wet mist. The little round Pilgrim's Way markers on stiles and gateposts are all very good on stiles and gateposts but in large open fields they were non-existent. In the enveloping clag all hope of using the features of the countryside to get our bearings was lost and I had to follow my OS map and use a bit of guesswork. I felt we were making good progress shuffling up the hills and jogging down them but Pantasaph was reluctant to appear. Had we taken a wrong turn? No the spectacular church and friary eventually loomed out of the fog - we'd made it. The buildings date from the middle of the 18th century; the first to be built was the church on land owned by the Earls of Denbigh. The 8th Earl of Denbigh was one Rudolph Feilding, he and his wife converted to Roman Catholicism.  The church and subsequent friary buildings for many years housed a chapter of Cistercian monks. In case you think that Feilding is a spelling mistake, it's not and Rudolph's brother William Feilding in 1874 founded a town in New Zealand named for him. Just to provide a convoluted link we stayed in Feilding New Zealand a few years ago being hosted by our brother-in-law's uncle who, after 40 years abroad, still has a rich Derby accent!

Feilding has won New Zealand's Most Beautiful Town Award and here's a picture of Manchester Square in the centre of town; you can see the clock tower with The Feilding Hotel in the background. This iconic hotel dates from 1875 and sadly it may have to be pulled down because it doesn't comply with the latest earthquake protection regulations.

So, carrying on through some lovely woodland and along ancient green lanes, we resumed our stroll/run. I began to realise that we were not going to have a chance to visit many of the points of interest during our trip as it would have taken numerous diversions off route to catch them all. In the mist we missed the Pen y Ball monument, at over 800 feet above Holywell it stands on an important medieval smelting site - a odd location perhaps but the strong winds on the summit would have been just right for fanning the flames to help extract lead from the ore mined on Halkyn Mountain to the east. We didn't take in the Coed y Garreg Watchtower, thought to give warning of pirate attacks in the 17th century, Maen Achwyfan, an impressive stone cross at Whitford eluded us and on a fine day I wouldn't mind exploring the Pantasaph friary grounds a bit more. 

Llanasa church - Asaph was here!

There's a bit of a thread linking some of locations along this early section of the Pilgrims' Way. After just a few miles the village of Pantasaph is reached with its magnificent collection of ecclesiastical buildings. Once into Denbighshire the way passes through St Asaph (although we didn't quite get that far this time). St Asaph is one of the smallest cathedral cities in the UK and although it was named for Asaph who was the first bishop of the diocese, the cathedral was founded by Kentigern who was a Scottish saint (he was also known as St Mungo the founder of Glasgow cathedral). Towards the end of today's ramble we encountered Llanasa, one of the ancient parishes of Flintshire, Llanasa in Welsh means the village of the church of St Asaph. The church, which dates from the 6th century, is actually named St Asaph and St Cynderyn. And who was Cynderyn you might ask! Well this was another of Kentigern's pseudonyms, perhaps he was on the run from the Scottish Constabulary.

Well that was a breeze!

And thence almost to the end of the first stage of our pilgrimage, we were on Y Gop or Gop Hill above the village of Trelawnyd, this is the mound behind me in the photo. It's impressive on a number of counts, it's the second largest neolithic mound in the UK after Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, itself one of the largest monuments of its type in Europe. It dominates the landscape for miles around and whereas there is no evidence that it was a burial mound it may well have been some sort of watchtower, the amount of stone found in the vicinity suggests that a large edifice of some type crowned the mound at one time. A quick drop down to Trelawnyd and we met our lift home. Trelawnyd has its own fascinations, it was renamed Newmarket by a local entrepreneur in 1710 who hoped that this modest village would grow into a major trading town to serve North Wales. This didn't happen and it was renamed Trelawnyd in 1954. Secondly Trelawnyd is home to a very successful world renowned male voice choir. I'd have been happy to sing along with them after our gallop over the hills but Skip needed to get home for his supper.

Coalmines and parkruns

parkrun in Wales is slow getting up and running again and our local parkrun in Prestatyn isn’t going to start before September at the earliest. So a week ago (14th August 2021) we took a drive to St Helens to the Sutton Manor parkrun. We didn’t know until we arrived that this was in a park that had been created when an old coal mine had closed. This was Sutton Manor Colliery in the Lancashire Coalfields, a productive mine that was deemed unviable despite having an estimated 40 years of work coal still underground. The park is now in a beautiful setting, wildlife has returned, trees are growing and a parkrun is thriving there, this is an undulating pleasant run on gravel paths through gradually maturing woodland. The parkrun meanders around the footpaths on a circuit that took us twice round a remarkable 66 foot sculpture of a person’s head.We arrived to run in the 18th event at Sutton Manor and found a lovely bunch of volunteers ready to guide us on our way - what fun!

Trying another tri

Cluck!

 The hens have established themselves at the back end of our garden. Izzie and Lizzie - one of them is laying an egg a day but the other one is eating all she can get without producing - I'm not sure which one of them is the passenger. Having now added an extension to the run they have more space to run around in and to attack anything that tries to grow within about six inches of the netting of the run. A quick thrust of the neck combined with a vicious peck and bingo - what violent creatures!

Another newcomer to our household is this swish looking, light-as-a-feather racing bike. Amid the global cycle shortage we managed to locate one of the few bikes available in the right size in order that Mrs C can shave valuable seconds off her triathlon time. In fact this was one of the only road bikes in store - the shop had dozens of mountain bikes in stock however - I wonder why? Of course the machine that you can't get now for love nor money is an electric bicycle, particularly the newer styles that don't look as if they're electric!!

And indeed the two wheeled investment paid dividends - in the Chester Deva Divas Triathlon Vicky swam the river, hurtled round the lanes on her new bike and ran along the river bank, all with a big beam on her face oblivious to the fact that her race number was upside down! Remarkably after over an hour and a half of vigorous swimming and cycling, she stepped off her superbike and completed the 5K in a time not far short of her parkrun 5K average. Vicky's enthusiasm in amazingly infectious and for this event she was joined for three of our local ladies for their first triathlons and more of them have promised that they'll join her for the next stage of her incredible journey. You might think that she'd rest on her laurels for a few weeks but no.....two days later she won the monthly Out-Fit Moel Famau fell handicap on a lovely warm summer evening.

Just to round things off nicely I had a go at the above mentioned handicap race and completed the event finishing as first male runner - the husband and wife team achieving this for the second month on the trot! The handicapper will no doubt be making things a lot more difficult for us in August!

High there!

 

Man in interesting shorts

End of an era. This is Ron Hill in his heyday. He passed away in May after 82 years most of which was spent running. In his twenties he lived a few miles away from my home near Stockport, often we'd see him pounding the streets and, on occasion sprinting up Brabyns Brow, a steep hill which I'd have to climb every day to catch the school train. I have to credit him with providing my early interest in running. As might be guessed from the photo he was somewhat of an eccentric however he had an analytical mind regarding running and realised that one potential avenue for improving times lay in the development of specialist sports clothing. He was the first to run in a string vest in hot weather and then, using his experience as a textile chemist, went on to found the very successful Ron Hill Sports. Many runners focus on one particular aspect of competition - Ron did a bit of everything, track running, marathons, fell racing, cross country, breaking plenty of records along the way. I recall racing at a very windy Salford Good Friday 10K where Ron sheltered behind me from the gale and, turning back with the wind, racing away from me to the finish. He told me afterwards that he always keeps an eye out for tall runners (like me) on a windy day for that very purpose.

The Cake Race - the general idea is that entrants bring along a cake to the fine town of Diggle, run eight miles over Saddleworth Moor to Yorkshire and back and have a cake fest when they return. Well it worked very well except that this year we weren't allowed to bring our own cakes due to the risk of cake poisoning or something. Instead the organiser decided not to have a prize giving and spent the prize money on baker's cakes - any excellent cakes they were too - I had a mini Victoria sponge, a chocolate brownie and an iced bun and a nice natter with sister Mary and Emma C at the end. I had a good run too coming first in my age group - might have won a cake in a normal year!
 

What's up Duck!

 

First time away from home since November. A pleasant but not comparable alternative to Malta or Tenerife (or even Brisbane!) is South Derbyshire. Here's Vicky sitting on the steps of the bandstand in Crossley Park in Ripley. Sunday afternoon in late summer listening to the Newstead Brass Band must be one of the finest ways to spend time - hopefully after a year's break this will come to pass in 2021 - we must go back.  Ripley is located in the East Midlands and was very much involved with the early stages of the industrial revolution. Crossley Park is a piece of land close to the town centre that was donated by James Crossley in 1901, he was a local businessman who made his money in a variety of ways including supplying the town gas and building a textile mill. Other earlier entrepreneurs took advantage of the plentiful deposits of coal and iron locally and the area became known for its advanced (for the eighteenth century) steelmaking techniques. 

The bulk of the industry has now disappeared and the surrounding countryside has reverted to woodland and farmland criss crossed by an astonishing network of footpaths which must be those that the factory workers from the local villages took on their way to work. During our short stay I donned my running shoes and explored the plethora of paths and bridleways. On my return I looked at the satellite map of the route I'd taken; I'd run alongside a large cowfield with splendid acres of lush green grass waving in the breeze. Looking at this scene from above however there's clear evidence of human activity from long ago. Could there have been a Roman villa here? Or maybe a much earlier neolithic settlement? I would think the less romantic and more prosaic explanation might be related to the industry of the past few hundred years.

In this part of the Midlands visitors are very often puzzled and surprised to be called 'Duck' It's a local term of endearment and people slip it into their everyday conversation all the time. Our accommodation for our short stay was above a small supermarket and I popped down for a few bottles of ale to go with our supper. The chap behind the counter called me 'duck' three or four times during our brief conversation and having known what to expect I wasn't in the least bit put out. What did surprise me was the name of the local brewery from just down the road in Derby:

On the Run once More

 So here we are back at it - first proper road race this year was the Mid Cheshire 5K - starved of competition runners came from all over the place - there was even a top runner from Devon and the overall winner on the night was from Morpeth. And what a high standard - 27 runners managed to break 15 minutes. Unlike normal events where everybody runs together here we set off at intervals so it was difficult to get an idea of how the race is unfolding. I was happy to see one of my rivals, who'd set off before me, come into view in the final stretch and I crept up on him and surged past. (He didn't stay to congratulate me!) Here I am sprinting for the line to finish in my best time for a while of 20:44 just 8 seconds behind the age group winner in my category. Woo, hoo!

Just like buses, after waiting for hours (months in this case) one run comes along and another arrives shortly afterwards. This was the Moel y Parc fell race four days later. My personal route is shown here and it looks like a pleasant loop on hilly terrain - it took me 55 minutes and was recorded as just over 8K. To my surprise I finished in second place! I was aware that something had gone wrong when, to the north of Moel y Parc, I came across other runners wandering around not knowing where they should be going. I decided to contour anti-clockwise round the mountain and got back on track. What should have happened however was that the runners should have returned from the summit on more or less the same route in reverse and completed the recommended route of 5K. These things happen more frequently than you might think - runners, me included, tend to be like sheep and follow the one in front even when it looks like they're going wrong.

Cob a Coalin'

There's a fine cycle path along some of  the North East coast of Wales with views across the Dee Estuary to the Wirral in England. There's not much to indicate all the industry that existed here for many years. For well over a century coal was mined here at the Point of Ayr Colliery where substantial deposits were found - here were the Two Yard Seam, the Three Yard Seam and the Five Yard Seam! The mines closed in 1996 and all evidence seems to have disappeared - but there's an engaging wooden sculpture of a miner and pit pony pulling a real wagon on a real section of track. The bike is mine.

Prestatyn is to the west of Point of Ayr and the villages stretching inland from here were homes to miner and other workers even before the early days of the Industrial Revolution. This photo is of the Clive Engine House a short walk from where we now live. This was built in the early part of the 18th century and housed one of the newly developed Newcomen steam engines which pumped water out of the local mines. This particular building is actually more typical of the Cornish landscape where this technology was taken up early on by the mining industry down there.

The hill at the back of the engine house is Craig Fawr, a prominent limestone feature towering over the Meliden area, which was the epicentre of North East Wales mining from Roman times. Lead, silver, copper and coal were all extracted from the rich seams. The red cleft in the side of the hill in this early painting is supposed to indicate mineral deposits - I've not been able to see anything reddish on my walks up the old railway line which was built to carry ore down to Prestatyn for shipping further afield.

I'm not sure now where I got this horse photo from but it's a somewhat larger animal than the ones they used to send down the pits in these parts.

Bet the horseshoes are on the heavy side!

Ghosts and grasshoppers

We've been closely examining the local tide timetables recently. The tide goes out a fair way where we are leaving vast areas of sand on which to run. This is a photo of the lighthouse at Talacre at around 4:30 pm on New Year's Eve. It seemed very dark at the time but my phone camera has picked up the available light and come up with a fairly good snap, the lighthouse is no longer operational so that lighted window is more likely to be evidence of the ghost of Raymond, a former lighthouse keeper who is reputed to haunt the building and its vicinity. I did read somewhere that one of those Dulux adverts from many years ago was filmed here with an Old English Sheepdog running around the lighthouse - however the paint is peeling a bit so it was clearly quite some time ago. Here's a young English Shepherd dog sniffing about in the gloom.
Apparently the tide can come in quite quickly so we've always been very careful to time our runs well before the tide is turning, there are parallel channels through the sand bars that fill with fast flowing incoming water - my Strava plot here shows how I had to backtrack several times to avoid getting wet!

Zig-zag beach running!

I recently found out the reason that there are no more giant grasshoppers around - they've all been shot! I thought I'd not seen any for years and it turns out that the last one was bagged by a farmer in Yorkshire on a hot summer's afternoon in the 1980's. I couldn't find a photo of the Yorkshire Grasshopper but here's one from the USA which is a record of their largest catch in the 1930's. It seems that the 'dust bowl' conditions of the Mid West where grazing dried up and farms were abandoned was, in part, due to the predations of these creatures. They didn't even make particularly good eating!

Last one of the day - I'm all out of cartridges!

Virtuality and running!

Can't stop!

Virtual is not what you might call an accurate descriptor by it's very definition. It usually means something along the lines of almost. Hence virtual meetings where technology such as Zoom is allowing people to 'almost' meet each other. Virtual running has also become popular as a means of allowing runners to compete whilst not actually running alongside each other. (Although why we should not be allowed to run together out in the open air but we can 'virtually' rub shoulders with strangers in supermarkets seems bizarre to me.) However I guess we'll have to continue to go along with this for the time being. Realising that my Billy Whizz legs might be losing some of their speed over the long lockdown months I felt I should join the fun.

 

It's a bling thing!

Thanks to some enterprising organisers we've been lucky enough to 'compete' in some 'virtual' events. Vicky and I ran part of a marathon relay and picked up some nice medals as a result. And more recently I clocked 42.51 in a Virtual 10K coming 3rd overall - I did take advantage of the fact that I could choose my own course and I selected a slightly downhill route - so that I could get back home earlier on a cold day (of course). So to get back to the definition of virtual - is a virtual 10K almost a race? It didn't feel like it really, but I did manage to sum up a bit more oomph and adrenalin than I would normally do on a training run so yes it must be doing me good!