THE SIGN HUNTERS

WALES: The Conwy-Chirk walking adventure

Written by Laszlo, 26 September 2018

The previous post I shared with you was about Conwy which is a market town in North Wales situated in a beautiful environment and is known for its stunning Edwardian castle, the Suspension Bridge designed and engineered by Thomas Telford, the Aberconwy House, and the Smallest House in Great Britain. You can access the post here.

In that post, I also explained that my plan was to carry out a walking adventure from Conwy to Gobowen. The trip was eventually drafted and I set off for the adventure on the 17th September 2018. As I was walking and reaching new places on the way, after two nights and three days, with some modifications to the plan and some add-on bus trips, on the 19th September I successfully arrived at Chirk. I eventually decided to complete the journey in Chirk which was only about 3-4 miles away from Gobowen, but it felt more convenient to stop there, so the entire adventure remained within the boundaries of Wales.

First of all, I took the train from Shrewsbury to Conwy and I spent a few hours there and explored some of the sites that we missed last time. This was a good idea as I have been able to enrich the collection of my photos of Conwy which are presented in the following section.

There are almost 300 photos in this selection now. I have organised them in chronological order, so the photos are arranged daily and in the timely order as they were taken during the trip. I could talk a lot about them, but I would end up with an essay here and I personally prefer to preserve this blog for its original purpose: more photos, less text. The only thing I would definitely highlight, however, is that during the trip, during all three days, there was a Yellow Warning issued by MetOffice for strong winds.

The wind made most of the trip really tough and half of Day 2 was not so pleasant at all as I had to make my way in the rain whilst had to put up with the strong wind blowing the rain into my face. This is one of the reasons that there were sections that I chose to take the bus instead of walking. It worked out better and the bus trips nicely broke up the monotony that walking trips naturally develop after a while.

By the time I reached the Horseshoe Falls near Llangollen, the weather conditions had improved by the end of Day 2. Still, one of the most exciting and challenging parts of the entire journey happened on Day 3 when I crossed over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. The wind was so strong that people were holding onto the bars. The crossing narrow boats were also tilted on their sides, their operators had to push them against the wind with their own hands. Now that was something! During Day 3 weather was fantastic though which made up for the wet and windy Day 2.

Scroll down and check out my photos of this epic walking adventure. Enjoy!