My Morning Walk
This post started life as a simple photo of a bridge for the Micro.blog photo challenge, but I ended up documenting the whole walk. Because, why not. 🤷🏻♂️
My morning walk with the dogs is one of my favourite times of day. It’s so quiet where we live, and at this time of year, all the wildlife is out with plenty to see.
This particular route is around 3 miles (5 km) and takes me out of the village, up into the hills, and back down the other side. Going up the hills gets the heart pumping too, so it’s decent exercise. Anyway, here’s the route we took this morning…
First, we walk out of the village and head under this beautiful old bridge. This is where we start our ascent into the Welsh hills. On the way back down, we’ll go under a viaduct as we return to the village.
Apparently, this bridge and viaduct date back to Roman times (obviously they’ve been improved or rebuilt since then). A popular history show in the UK, Time Team, actually did an episode in our village:
Anyway, I digress. On with the walk…
We start heading up the hills. The dogs are starting to pant and I’m starting to sweat, but it’s worth it once you see the views.
On the way up, we see some of Carl’s sheep (he’s the local farmer). We always stop to say hello, but I was too busy scratching an itch between one of the ewe’s ears to take a photo – sorry!
As we head further over the hills, we notice that Carl has some of his calves out in the fields too. So we stop, and they wander over to see what we’re doing. Both dogs and calves have a good sniff of one another. I’m even subjected to a couple of sniffs myself.
All sniffed out, we continue onto a bridle path and start heading down the other side of the hill. We go past the wonky tree (that’s what our kids call it). Lots of horses use this path, but we didn’t pass any today unfortunately.
As we come out of the bridle path, we’re greeted with more lovely views of the Welsh hills, and Barnie, the local Shetland pony, comes to say hello.
We’re well on our way down from the hills now, moving onto a fire road that winds down through some woodland.
Halfway down there’s this lovely house with an old canal boat in the garden. I always gorp at this house as it’s so gorgeous. I didn’t take a photo of it though – that felt a bit rude. But trust me, it’s beautiful.
At the bottom of the fire road, we head under the viaduct and back into the village.
As we head back in, I hear one of Carl’s cows mooing in the distance – probably mum to one of the calves we saw earlier, and likely related to the cows he put on our land a couple of years ago.
That’s a lot to take in on a relatively short 3 mile (5 km) walk, which is part of why I love living here. It’s just so beautiful. Imagine how much we see when we do the much longer walks at the weekend!
Anyway, the dogs are tired, I’ve done some exercise, and it’s time to sign on for work as my first meeting starts soon.