Pwllheli to Criccieth 26/6/2013

 

Frosted orache   Cuttlefish bone Sepia officinalis   Row of oaks Bont Fechan   Criccieth Castle

From the centre of Pwllheli a road goes east just below the railway station, along the top of the harbour and marina, with an esplanade and shelters for holiday-makers.  Here mute swans floated in the main stream and a pair of shelduck with young ones searched the mudflats for food.  Crossing the peninsula beyond we gained a long beach of sand and shingle which stretched for some 5 kilometres.  This was not as shelly as yesterday’s beaches but still had a good variety and there were a lot of cuttlefish remains.  The dunes at the top were not generally good for plants apart from marram, sea holly, sea spurge and sea bindweed, but the upper shore at the very beginning had both frosted orache and saltwort.  Further along, the bottom of the dunes was marked only by sea sandwort.  At the far end the beach reaches a low rock outcrop.  Here we climbed up what was now pure shingle, with some different plants like yellow horned-poppy, English stonecrop and even bell heather.  The path led over Pen-y-chain headland, with typical heath vegetation.  There were several parties of people here, it being close to a large holiday park by Pen-y-chain railway station.  We walked past on the seaward side, the paths being well tended, and the park’s situation seemed very pleasant until we found that immediately neighbouring it was a sewage farm!  Past here were meadows full of yellow rattle, common eyebright and catsear, colourful but of low diversity, forming an unusual community that was presumably artificially sown.  Soon we came to Afon Wen.  Further access along the coast is blocked by the railway running right along the edge of the land, while inland is very marshy.  After a lunch on the beach, where there was a little sea rocket, we walked through scrub up the west bank of the river, seeing both whitethroat and blackcap, until we reached the A497 road, which provided the only means of progress east for over 3 kilometres.  There was a wide pavement for walkers and cyclists, but it was very boring and unpleasant with loud traffic.  The only point of interest was just before a cemetery at Bont Fechan, where there was a line of strange white-trunked pedunculate oaks of grotesque shapes, stretching back from the road.  There was quite a toll of road-kill bees and other insects, including an emerald damselfly.  We finally crossed the River Dwyfor by Llanystumdwy, where Lloyd George is buried, and then turned off the road gratefully on a track by a few houses at Aberkin, past which was another large collection of white stunted and deformed oaks, perhaps affected by the salt air or excessive pruning.  We then crossed the railway and followed the bank of the Dwyfor as it bent eastwards for at least a kilometre before it emptied into the sea.  Along here was a great crested grebe with a string of chicks in tow and a similar family of mallards.  We eventually descended to another beach of sand and shingle, with rocks below, where shells were infrequent but included a few more common gastropods that inhabited the rocks.  Along here were good views of the approaching Criccieth Castle on a hilltop right next to the coast, with the brightly coloured houses of the seafront below it.  At the end of this beach were scattered hundreds of grey boulders with shingly spaces between.  We eventually walked by the road above the final section of beach that was crossed by obstructive wooden groynes.  Walking beneath the castle we found a pleasant footpath through the town and its parks to the railway station, but we were an hour early for the next train (which only runs every two hours) and so continued to the main road where there was a bus-stop and only 7 minutes to wait (in theory) for the next bus, which arrived a quarter of an hour late.  The bus took us back to the centre of Pwllheli, where we got a snack at the same café where we got ice-creams the day before, sitting outside in the sun on a wickerwork settee beside a traffic roundabout, before returning to our hotel.