Training Walk: The Severn Way

I am no longer a Swansea resident.  Of course, I forgot to take my meter readings before I moved out and left a pot plant forgotten on the kitchen windowsill, but other than that the move back to my parents' was uneventful.  Unlike today's walk.

First: it is very nice to have someone else to pack your lunch for you.  I am even more pleased with my decision to always click "yes" when offered a packed lunch with my hostel/B&B booking, regardless of the cost.

Second: I used my usual strategy to plan today's walk, which has always panned out well for me in the Gower: log onto OS maps, pick a starting point, follow any selection of green dotted lines until you've hit your distance target, ideally in a rough circle, walk.  This worked significantly less well around my parents' house - I should have been suspicious when the houses across the road didn't appear on the map but it would seem to have been quite some time since the Ordnance Survey Man last came to this part of mid-Wales.  Lots of paths didn't exist.  Or, rather, may have existed, but there was no way to get to them, on account of all the fences and  hedges in the way with no stiles or gates across them.  At some point shortly after lunch my Mum called to find out how I was getting on and got an earful about how this was yet another path which looked like it was fine and then had a barbed-wire-topped chicken-wire fence right across it.

It did mean I got to do an awful lot of road walking, however, which, as we all now know, is my favourite.  I did eventually hit the Severn Way, which was the intended second half of today's walk, and other than a slight hiccup at the beginning where I happily marched off down a clear track in the direction indicated by an arrow on a fence, which ended up with me walking around two-and-a-half sides of a roughly four-sided field, it was pretty well sign-posted and reasonably well maintained, although much like the Wales Coast Path, there was quite a lot of it which was nowhere near the thing it was named after.  There was also quite a lot of very squelchy wet field with the suspiciously omnipresent sound of running water despite no running water being visible, which I always find ominous - but at no point did the mud come over the top of my boots, so that was good.

There was still a dead sheep, but it was being loaded onto a trailer by the farmer (I assume, could have been a random guy stealing a clearly dead sheep for all I know) and was driven away, so in all: Powys: not as good as Swansea at maintaining footpaths, but definitely dealing-with-dead-sheep champions.

I also got to nervously walk past a cow and her very-new-looking calf (very sweet, brown with a white face and feet), got mobbed by a pack of six very friendly dogs - which was good, as it wasn't clear as they took off towards me whether their intention was pets or bites - and generally wandered around some very nice Welsh countryside in the sunshine.  Then, when I ran out of water, I cut the walk short by three miles, came home, and ate cake.

Boot cost per mile: £0.94

Distance today: 17.13 miles

Time by Naismith: 6h54

Time walked: 5h27