No Way to Halfway

or

The Curse of the 4x4

A strange month for weather.  Cloudless days but the soil temperature hardly lifting enough to grow the grass, then back to near-freezing at night (April 2021).

Good walking weather, though.  We started at SN 808325, where a short track takes you down to the Llandovery-Trecastle Road at Halfway – which of course it is.  (Drovers used it, on their way from the south-west up to Epynt.)


Takes you down and lets you down, with a bump.  After being ensnared by brambles, we found manmade barricades.  “Why?” we asked the farmer at Troed -y-Rhiw.  The answer was ATVs, All-Terrain Vehicles blasting their way up & down hills all over Wales, wearing the tracks down to bedrock and scaring the sheep.  And there's the noise…  Anyway, hence the barricades.  (#1,2)

We found ourselves growing as angry as the farmers; one of them had piled a mountain of rubbish on the track to stop them.  The only way to stop ATVs spoiling the countryside is to spoil the countryside, it seems.

What to do?  Calthrops or mines are out so I thought mammoth-pits… until I remembered that farmers used ATV's as well; they're the modern shepherd's tool. 

One good thing happened: Chris found a cottage (tucked behind the houses on the north of the road) that might have come from the Middle Ages.  One half for the huge fireplace & chimney; the other for the animals, with a ladder leading to sleeping quarters above them.  Only furniture missing was the ladder.  (#3-5)

We returned to the car by a different route, naturally and I was still thinking.  Airgun?  Bow & arrow?  Sugar in the petrol tank? ....such thoughts are madness, I suppose.