Coast Walking (Wales): Bangor to Caernarfon 17/6/2013****

We parked in the small streets where the coast path goes down a dead-end road to the shore. The shore was stony, largely shales from the low cliff. The walk along here cannot be undertaken at high tide, but a new footpath has been created just above the shore as an alternative, passing the other side of the belt of woodland that occupies the cliffs, most of which is the nature reserve of Nant Porth. From the shore we could observe the usual birds of the coast, including noisy oystercatchers, as well as the trees above. The latter included aspen, a yew, many common whitebeams, and the recently discovered “Menai Strait whitebeam”, not yet scientifically named, which can be distinguished by the roundish leaves having small regular serrations, not biserrate to partially lobed like the common species. A path goes up into the reserve woodland, which is dominated by ash, hartstongue and soft shield ferns, great woodrush, and species of old calcareous woods like woodruff, tutsan and sanicle, some of the latter unusually large. Open parts of the cliff have other calcareous species like glaucous sedge, rockrose and burnet rose. A wet flush had an impressive patch of butterwort all in full flower. We encountered a friendly spaniel along here and found it a rubber bone that another dog had lost, with which it was so immensely pleased that we had a job persuading it to go back to its owner! From the shore we had good views back up the Strait to Bangor pier and forward to the Menai Suspension Bridge. We climbed through the reserve to the coast path, which went round several fields through long grass and eventually reached the A5 road briefly before a path descended again by the university buildings to the shore, where brooklime grew in a stream. The tide comes to the top of this shore and there is plenty of seaweed to negotiate. Across the strait is Menai Bridge town. A moon jellyfish had been washed up here, and a cormorant was fishing in the sea. Just before the suspension bridge railed steps led up to a grassy track with many marsh plants like water figwort, meadowsweet, hemp agrimony, and yellow pimpernel. This path led to a lane that took us to the traffic roundabout for the bridge, where it was difficult to get across streams of traffic to a lane going west through a small business park and woods that are part of the grounds of Treborth Botanic Garden. These woods are good examples of Atlantic woodland with many ferns and sessile as well as pedunculate oak. We eventually reached a pair of old Lucombe oaks where the path turned down to the front. Their boughs swept right to the ground in places. The woodlands had presumably been part of a large estate at one time, as there are many introduced species like winter heliotrope, Swedish whitebeam, snowberry, Portugal laurel and rhododendron. Much of the latter had been cleared to stumps. There was however still much native flora like wood anemone, scaly male fern, narrow buckler fern, butcher’s broom and marsh cinquefoil. The latter had hybridised with the wood avens that also grew here to give large yellow open flowers only slightly cupped like the cinquefoil. The track led on to the newer Menai bridge, Pont Britannia, built in 1978 to relieve the original suspension bridge built in 1850. We went under the A55 here and then up beside it on a concrete track which returns underneath the booming traffic again to a lane with bistort in the verge. This led to the village of Ty’n-y-lon, where there was rustyback fern on a wall. We were now at the A487, which we took west under the A55. Fortunately the roads had pavements beside them and it was easy to walk through here to the less noisy B4547 and an official cycleway beside it, which eventually diverted to an even quieter lane into Y Felinheli. We rose to the road to take a narrow footpath on the north side behind the houses, parallel to the road, past a field of fox-and-cubs, and beside much ramsons, now going over. It passes beside a stream to enter the docks area and Plas Dinorwic, where we found a convenient seat beginning to be over-run with bramble to eat our lunch looking out over the moored boats and families of mallards. The ascent west of here was marred by building and road-works, but we were eventually able to join a cycleway beside a minor road just above the coast. Banks here were covered in ox-eye daisy, cat’s-ear and grass vetchling, presumably from a wildflower seed-mix. These attracted many flies and beetles (like Oedemera and nettletap moths) and a few butterflies. This is a very straight tarmac way heading directly for Caernarfon and made an easy walk, but we tired of its monotony after a while and took the opportunity of a track to the shore just after the row of houses called Waterloo Port. This was stony and not very salubrious but at least gave us a chance to record a few marine plants such as sea-beet, sea-mayweed and sea campion. After a few hundred yards of these awkward stones we were glad to find steps back up to the cycleway again! The track passed a stretch of three-cornered garlic. We kept to paths close to the shore here, coming into the centre of Caernarfon, passing a large stand of Himalayan knotweed. We rounded a new development of apartments and then the harbour to pass by the huge edifice of Caernarfon Castle and well-preserved medieval city walls. North of the castle were old streets where we found the hotel Black Boy where we are staying. A short walk to the bus station enabled us to return quickly to Bangor to collect our car.