Tonight's campsite was a farm down a series of lanes designed to get you lost, and so I obliged. They only wanted a fiver, but it had a nice, fully featured kitchen for us campers including a kettle and tea bags. A pile of fishing magazines sat on a table. The top one was called Total Carp. Surely that's a joke title. I looked through the pile to see if I could find any similar ones – Massive Pile of Carp, What A Load of Carp – but they didn't.
I made a cup of tea and sat at the table trying to write a poem, inspired by this morning's appointment.
There once was a man on a bicycle,
On his nose he developed an icicle,
'Cos The Shire was cold,
And the wind strength too bold,
But the landscape was rather quite nice-icle.
Nurse Verse was right about one thing: Most poems are terrible.
This would be my last evening in England for a while. Tomorrow I would continue west into the wind, and into the wonderful wilds of Wales.
Chapter 4: Cannibals, Satanists and a piglet or three
Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Powys
I set off towards Wales and, just up the road, stopped for breakfast in Chirk. In another celebration of Britishness I had my first ever mug of Horlicks. And probably my last too. It tastes a lot like hot chocolate but with no chocolate in it. It was invented in Chicago by the brothers Horlick from Gloucestershire. If you think Horlicks is a dodgy name, it was originally called Diastoid, a great name for a killer robot, and advertised under the slogan “Horlick's Infant and Invalids Food”.
The wind was still cold and directly in my face. I passed a sign that welcomed me into Wales, into the county of Wrexham. I wasn't far from the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, the 300-metre long, three-and-a-half-metre wide canal-in-the-sky. It's the longest and, at 38 metres tall, the highest aqueduct in Britain. It would have been nice to cycle across but if the wind was this strong down here, up there it would've blown me into the water or off the edge. I doubt even Invalids Food would have helped.
I took the quieter road beside a busy dual carriageway and went through little Johnstown. On the outskirts, the New Inn's blackboard advertised this evening's entertainment, Shagger. There were no other details. Maybe it was DJ Shagger, or a Shaggy tribute act, or maybe it was more literal and she was just a very popular local.
The town of Wrexham is, according to local councillor Paul Pemberton, “the car arson capital of the UK” and didn't seem to offer much. Its roadworks prevented me from going to the centre or at least suggested it wasn't worth going there, especially if all I was going to see was a load of smouldering Subarus.
Wrexham is supposedly the baldest town in Britain but I looked out for shiny scalps and saw none. Maybe they were all wearing wigs. Some people had clearly over-compensated. On the edge of town I saw a bloke with such a fluffy mane he could have been in the Hair Bear Bunch.
I cycled on to my second new county of the day, Flintshire. It has the highest percentage of witches and Satanists in the country, but there are still not many. Their last census figures were interesting. There were just seven Satanists, nine Druids and 117 Pagans. Much more popular were the more realistic religions, such as 374 Jedi Knights and thirteen people who simply listed their faith as “heavy metal”.
Not far over the invisible county border is the manky-sounding town of Mold. The reason for its name is unclear but it has nothing to do with curled up sandwiches. If Mold's name sounds unsavoury, so was the policing here in 1869 in an event that shaped how the force responded to future civil disturbances. The manager of the local colliery, already unpopular for banning the Welsh language, announced a pay cut. As a result, several miners attacked him, were arrested, found guilty and the ringleaders were sentenced to a month's hard labour, which, for a miner, must be a busman's holiday. A crowd of 2,000 gathered to listen to the verdict and, while the convicts were being transported away, they grew angry and started throwing missiles. Expecting trouble, the police had called in the 4th King's Own Regiment for backup. The soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing four, including an entirely innocent 19-year-old woman. An inquest was held by Coroner Peter Parry, a half-blind old dodderer who required the use of an ear trumpet to hear the evidence. After five minutes of consideration, the jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. Many of those involved in the riot were sentenced to ten years. Later, the authorities rethought their gung-ho approach and vowed to employ less heavy-handed policing techniques in future. So you've got Mold to thank for that. Now the police will only shoot on sight if you look a bit foreign.
It was a quiet Sunday in Mold, certainly quieter than it was in 1869, and lacking entertainment I cycled on to Hendre, the location of this evening's muddy field. From my tent I looked out over the Clwydian Range, a lovely low bunch of nicely rounded hills dominated by 555 metre Moel Famau with its derelict Jubilee Tower on top. I sat there and admired the view for what felt like hours, a beautiful, tranquil space.
I wonder how Shagger was getting on.
*
It rained all night and from inside my tent it sounded like I was in the middle of a tornado. I knew I didn't have far to go today and so I waited it out. Yesterday's hills were shrouded in low cloud and a dark sky hung just inches over my head, like a big, wet hat doesn't.
The bike was a little lighter this morning. After our discovery of the Om, the super-omelette staple of our £1-a-day ride, I'd brought the ingredients to recreate it on this trip but I'd only made it once so far and decided to ditch the ingredients, including a big bag of flour, in an attempt to trim a few pounds from my load. As I rolled down the lane away from Hendre, I caught a whiff of roadside ramsons – wild garlic – a great green to add to an Om, but now I'd no reason to collect it.
Within seconds of setting off, the heavens opened and within five minutes I was drenched. This was the Wales I was familiar with. Through the seeping cloud, a burger van appeared. It was run by a smiling father and son team. The dad explained their mission statement.
“We do it for a laugh really,” he said chuckling, then changed his mind, and became more serious. “Well, not a laugh. We just...do it.”
It didn't bother me. I didn't need a jester, just a black pudding, mushroom and cheese sandwich and the rain-denying overhang of their van. I'm not sure this business was really a two-man operation. The son's job seemed just to be buttering the bread, but they seemed happy enough. I said I was heading for Rhyl, the unemployment capital of Wales, but dad warned me off.
“Don't go. It's a shithole,” he said.
I sort of knew that already. On his coastal tour of Britain, Mike Carter described it in One Man and His Bike as “plug ugly”. Plus, I'd been there before.
I decided to change my route. The rain eased and with pig grease on my face I continued on to Denbighshire, the bit of Wales with the most ancient inhabitants, like Catherine Zeta Jones's pants when Michael Douglas is in town.
I arrived in St Asaph. It's Britian's newest city, only attaining that status in 2012. With its population of 3,355 it's also Britain's second smallest. Its little cathedral is rather lovely except for a life-size crucifix containing what looks like the dried, decomposed body of Christ, a sculpture by Michele Coxon. I was surprised the Church allowed such heresy in a cathedral. After all, if Christ had rotted like that, it suggested He was never removed from the cross and was therefore never resurrected. Which of course He wasn't, but you'd think at least a cathedral would stick to the official fable.
Two minutes after entering the town, and having passed the sculptural tribute to local lad Henry Morton Stanley, the man who found Livingstone in central Africa, and which the local residents want removed for being “hideous and phallic”, I was out the other side.
At the edges of my sky, blueness was appearing, accompanied by the odd white, fluffy cloud. With a howling, freezing wind in my face, better weather was coming in my direction. I opted not to go directly to the coast – surely it would be windi
er there – and found a nice, straight B-road on my map. Normally such straightness would imply a flat road, but not here. I wound my way up the hillside, in the process entering the county of Conwy, until I'd had enough. I got off and pushed and then spotted something very British, a soft-core porn mag in a hedge.
I turned my bike coastwards and rolled into Abergele, a townlet between the tourist centres of Rhyl and Colwyn Bay. I hadn't been sure where I was going to end up today and so I knew nothing about Abergele. I went online to see if there was anything interesting here, and there was.
I set up my the tent on the town's campsite, fighting the gale. Inside, I put a pannier in each corner to prevent the whole thing from blowing away and walked into town. My first stop was the graveyard attached to St Michael's church that contained an undated gravestone for a fella who “had his dwelling three miles to the north”. Elsewhere, this wouldn't be curious, but Abergele is on the north coast of Wales. Maybe he was originally going to be buried somewhere else and so the headstone was incorrectly inscribed, or perhaps he was just very good at treading water.
I walked down the high street and did a bit of window shopping. A sign outside a butcher's offered “home killed beef, lamb and pork”. His living room must be a right mess.
My next job was to find a house called Linor on Gele Avenue, which, when I originally found the story, was called “the most haunted house in Britain”. In the late 1800s two sisters kept their brother prisoner in their attic for several years. Eventually, the brother escaped and, seeking vengeance, killed his sisters and then, probably feeling a bit peckish after his prolonged incarceration, ate them. The ghosts of the women supposedly told a more recent owner of the house where their bones were buried.
The odd thing about this story is that, since I read it on Wikipedia at the end of April, it's been removed from the page and the only place I could find any mention of it when I looked later was in a cached copy. Today, even that cached copy has disappeared. The story doesn't appear anywhere else on the internet. And so maybe the ghosts have removed the story because it made them look bad. Or perhaps someone was dicking around on Wiki the day I arrived.
Whether true or not, I found the house. It was an unassuming place with a dark blue door on which hung a sign. I walked closer to read it. I assumed it was going to say, “Piss off and stop bothering us with your stupid ghost nonsense” but it didn't. It ordered visitors not to press the bell because their baby was sleeping. Probably Rosemary's baby.
Around the corner is the George and Dragon, a surprisingly English name for a pub in Wales. An old man sitting next to me had a question for the barmaid. He held up the menu.
“This fish dinner with hand-battered fish?”
“Yes?”
“Is it any cheaper if it's battered without the hand?”
He was joking, but maybe the escaped brother wasn't the only cannibal around these parts.
*
The night stayed dry and the freezing wind seemed to have eased but the hedge I'd camped behind gave a false impression. I quickly realised the gale was as strong and as cold as ever. Had conditions been better I would have popped along the coast to the town of Conwy itself but, this being a spontaneous trip, I decided to use the wind to my advantage and have it carry me up the hills towards Snowdonia National Park. Short of the brief flurry of hailstones, the forecast wintry showers didn't arrive but it never stopped being as cold as an Inuit's icebox. The fourteen-mile climb to Llanrwst, a village that looks like it's been mugged of some vowels, would have been enough to warm me but the route completed with three steep, frozen downhill miles. The temperatures though were a mere distraction. Bright green fields dusted with lambs were backed by brown forests and topped with snow-capped mountains. Wales is effortlessly beautiful.
Although it's only a dot of a place with a population of just over three thousand, in 1947 Llanrwst applied for a seat on the United Nations Security Council as an independent state within Wales. The town has a history of independence. In 1276 it was granted the title Free Borough of Llanrwst by the then Prince of Wales. Its motto was the divisive “Wales, England and Llanrwst”. Unfortunately, the UN turned down their application, which was a shame because maybe England would have found a football team they might beat. But then again.
In Llanrwst I decided I needed heat and found a fish 'n' chip shop that had a single, small table for two by its window. The sun shone through the glass and warmed the wooden furniture. I gathered my chicken and mushroom pie and chips soaked in salt and vinegar and took my place. An old fella approached and asked if he could join me.
He was a nice, smiley bloke, lacking a particularly strong Welsh accent, but whose speech was made mostly incomprehensible by his muttering, although he started off fairly lucidly.
“The problem isn't the English,” Glyn said. “It's the Welsh, the ones that leave and then come back again. They think they're Welsh but they can't speak the language.”
“Is Welsh your first language?” I asked.
“Aye, lad.”
“And you've lived here all your life?”
“Yes. It used to be something here. You could get whatever you wanted.”
“But not anymore?”
“No.”
He looked soulfully out of the window and then contradicted himself.
“See that electrician's. You can buy anything you want there.”
I tried my best but lots of what followed seemed not to form a coherent whole.
“Took it to Cockermouth and left it there...found its way back home here.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. He continued for a bit and finished one ramble particularly strongly.
“Oh yes,” he said,” and parsnips!”
“Parsnips?”
“What?”
“You said parsnips.”
“No, I didn't.”
I decided to sit back and just let him speak
“They were true Driscolls. How can you tell? Easy. Piggy eyes. They all have piggy eyes. Ha! Took some Sellotape and fastened one eye open and one eye shut.”
What the hell was he on about? It didn't matter. He sat there chuckling to himself. It was time for me to move on. I said goodbye and he seemed to wave but the conversation continued without me.
I'd expected a four mile climb to Betws-y-Coed but it was delightfully flat with a trailing hurricane and a brightening sky. The town Betws-y-Coed is a lovely spot on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park, surrounded by hills and mountains and built from slate with a river trickling through it. Its shops are a bit samey though. It's serviced by about 25 outdoor stores, all selling jumpers and hats and walking paraphernalia. People walk about the place using poles, even if they're just popping to the little supermarket.
The centre of town has a small railway station, an attractive, solid-looking, slate building covered in ivy. It looks like the sort of station people recreate when building models. And model railways are what this place is all about. On the station platform is a model railway shop that also houses the Railway Museum and £1.50 bought me entrance to a world of miniature wonder.
The rooms were loaded with train memorabilia but the fun was in the model railway towns built and displayed in what looked like huge fish tanks. The devil was in the details. A quick look at a complex scene showed an industrious, functioning town with hundreds of tiny, five millimetre-tall figures captured in a frozen moment of time while milling about their daily business. But look more closely and you could see the chaos that lurked just beneath the surface. A woman, a nurse perhaps, had collapsed outside the entrance to the main shop and yet no one was rushing to help her. A horse pulling a large load was in the middle of a stroke and tumbling to its left, about to carry its cart with it. Even worse, a tiny dog had done such an unwieldy piss against a lamppost that its entire structure had collapsed, taking out the man on the ice cream bicycle who now lay on his side in the road. And it wasn't just the people. At least two of the trains were derailed. The
town was falling apart and death was everywhere. It was as though Quentin Tarantino had just turned up. Don't take your children. You'll give them nightmares.
After such horror I needed to calm my nerves. I took myself to the Royal Oak Hotel and had a pint of Snowdonia Ale while all the walkers around me had tea and cakes. Fine, I thought, but they hadn't been to the Railway Museum.
Back at my tent I cooked up some food. A robin came for a fallen piece of instant noodle. I think he was disappointed it wasn't a worm. And then it started to hail great pea-sized stones. It sounded like they were trying to blast holes in my tent. I didn't have a hope in hell of hearing the radio. I opened the tent flap to look outside. The world had turned into a Nick Griffin wet dream; everything was completely white.
*
I awoke to a bulging roof. Was it possible to suffocate under the weight of hailstones or snow gathered on top of a tent? I checked online in a mountaineering forum. Someone said they'd never heard of anyone suffocating in such a way. Another asked how likely it would be that you'd hear from someone who'd actually suffocated. He had a point.
Last night's hail had been replaced by the default setting for Welsh weather, light rain. I set off towards Dolgellau, but hail quickly returned and so I took refuge in a trailer café full of truckers. During a chat with one of the guys I realised I wasn't on the road I thought I was. If I turned right at the next opportunity though, it would put me on a quieter and less hilly route to Dolgellau. I sipped my coffee and waited for the weather to improve, but this was Wales and so it didn't.
I set off again, made the turning and headed across naked moorland beside the River Conwy. The road was entirely free of cars. And then the weather went a bit bonkers. First, heavy rain came, the sort that hurts your head, and this was followed by hail and then snow, a proper blizzard, powder swirling confusedly in all directions. My fingers, or at least the two exposed by my gloves for doing fiddly jobs, were getting numb. I had visions of arriving at tonight's destination with blackened stumps.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 8
