Reflections on the first 150 (ish…)

When I decided, towards the end of the second lockdown, to see if I could walk a mountain from home I had no idea I would, just 7 months later, find myself 150 hills and mountains into a personal mission to walk most of the hills, and all of the mountains, in Wales.

The nearest mountain to my house was Cefn yr Ystrad, a 619m mountain in the Brecon Beacons range, directly South of Pen y Fan. It was around 24 miles (my phone battery and tracking died at around 20 miles in) and the trig point gave me great views of the Brecon Beacons.

It wasn’t long afterwards I walked Allt Lwyd with my daughter, and it on this walk that I found the idea of walking all the mountains in Wales moving its way slowly to the forefront of my mind.

I then had some time off over the Easter holidays and really got stuck in, completing section after section of the Brecon Beacons on day-long walks with various conditions, but all of them kind to me.

I quickly started to realise that completing the Brecon Beacons would be fairly straightforward, given that the drive to get them is not that far for me. What was also very clear was that once the Beacons were complete the drives would get substantially longer and that past mid-Wales it would be overnight stays to realistically make any progress.

I’ve always been a keen walker, but by this point I realised I was enjoying collecting mountains, but was quickly running out of easily accessible ones. I decided to turn my attention to local hills, ones I could do in the evenings after work and quickly on weekends.

This lead to compiling lists of hills, finding them on the map and walking them, recording my tracks as I went and photographing them extensively. I compiled county tables of hills to track my progress and realised the sheer number of hills on my list.

Compiling the list I sometimes excluded all the minor tumps from a county – like Powys where there are over 800 hills with minor tumps, 330 without. Some counties I left all the minor tumps in, others I put some in that I felt worth walking, whilst deleting other hills that did not seem worth it.

So I’m left with a unique and changing list of hills to walk and gradually those hills are getting further and further away as I complete county after county in South Wales. I have now become a complete advocate for hill walking – the variety, the wildlife, the terrain, the peace of hills little walked.

I recently heard that Pen y Fan was sometimes called ‘the sacrificial mountain’ because it attracts all of the crowds of walkers and leaves the rest of the Brecon Beacons range in relative peace. But I’d go further than that and say that the whole of the Brecon Beacons takes almost walkers away from walking the hills in the South Wales valleys.

You still get some very popular hills – the Sugar Loaf, Skirrid, Caerphilly Mountain, Garth Mountain to name a few – but they are not representative of the often almost total isolation you experience on some hills – even when above and between Welsh Valley towns.

I’ve been to loads of places I never would have visited and now know the ridgeways, hills and valleys of South Wales – and beginning to stretch beyond – in quite an intimate way. I’ve seen beautiful sunsets, dramatic skies, rain, hail, sleet and snow. I’ve been blessed with amazing colours through the three seasons so far and look forward to the changes that winter will bring to the hills of Wales.

It has been a journey of many hundreds of miles, and 10s of thousands of feet of ascent and descent. There have been moments of absolute solitude, and moments of collective awe on a couple of busy mountains. I have been full of adrenaline, and absolutely empty at others, aching to finish the walk.

It has been a fantastic year so far and I know I’m only 150 summits into a list that currently stands 1,089, and with each summit ticked off the next is further away. The challenge is going to get harder, the pace will be much slower, but with each walk I’m seeing a new part of Wales, photographing it, recording it and sharing it for whoever happens to stumble across this blog.