Walking: Aircraft Crash Hunting (or planning to but not actually making it in our case)

This is a walk that I actually did with others, my husband Ed and a friend of ours, but to say that it didn't exactly go to plan would be a complete understatement.  The plan was to do a route I had found on my OS map app which was supposed to take us by a WWII plane crash site and then pass a lovely waterfall that I thought would probably look quite pretty at this time of year.  However, this is what actually happened.

We started off from the car very near a pub just outside Glyntawe, which would hopefully have meant that we ended at a pub as well.  Then it was up towards the Black Mountain (though that wasn't our final destination), past a farm, and onto the mountainside.  So far so good, but then I managed to take us on a wrong turn which meant we were heading uphill a lot sooner than we should have been. However, it did mean that we missed a river crossing that looked a little tricky when we looked at it later on and a really steep walk up which we later walked down at the end.  Whilst a bit of a mistake we decided to just carry on up, joining onto the Beacons Way path that is on the route and doing the walk backwards instead.

Once we had gotten back onto the path we did have a really good view north, where the clouds were rolling over the hilltop, and to the east where you could see some signs of old settlements on the other side of the valley.  A little reminder of how different things used to be.  We then followed the route off the main path and southwest towards the waterfall, stopping off at the remains of a shepherd's hut to have our lunch sheltered from the wind.  The waterfall was definitely worth stopping to have a look at, especially with the icicles that had gathered around it, and we spent a good few minutes just staring at it despite it being a little bit chilly out of the sun.  

The guys didn't want to take the route recommended on the app to cross the water as there was a lot of vegetation in the way, it was very boggy, and they weren't wearing wellies like I was.  So, we found another route that took us above the waterfall to find a crossing there.  Then we carried on southwest, weaving our way around all the shake holes there until we hit an actual footpath again.

Once we were on that we had a look at the time and the amount of daylight we had left to explore and decided we didn't really have time to safely go looking for the crash sites.  There wouldn't really have been enough light to see it properly anyway.  So instead we headed off to a rocky outcrop to have another look at the landscape from there before heading back to the footpath and down the hill past the largest crab apple tree I've ever seen to the car.  

So, not exactly as I had planned, but still a good walk.  And if I'm being entirely honest, if I was to pick which one I would rather see it would have been the waterfall, so I'm glad that we ended up doing the walk backward.  Will definitely be back to try and actually find this crash site next time around, though it'll probably just be a direct up and down that time.  One thing I did learn on this walk was that though it is nice walking with other people, I definitely prefer walking on my own.  It's much more relaxing, there's less pressure, and I get to walk at my own pace.