Coast Walking (Wales): Conwy to Llanfairfechan 8/7/2012**

From the Castle Hotel in High Street, Conwy, where we were to stay for the night, we walked down to the harbour and turned west, past “Britain’s Smallest House”, just a narrow window and door wide, and through a gate in one of the old medieval walls that still seem more or less to contain this concentrated little town. We followed the shore of the river estuary, with plants on the embankment wall such as polypody, English and thick-leaved stonecrops, navelwort and sea fern-grass. Around Bodlandeb Wood we continued along a side creek, with a patch of great woodrush at the edge of the path. A few saltmarsh plants cropped up for the first time, such as sea purslane, but on the narrow sands above there was sea holly. We came out on a road where we turned right, as does the official coast path, over the A55 towards the marina. Here the coast path turned left, but we went on around the marina, beside a golf course, where there was Virginian rose in the hedge, along with other aliens such as Mediterranean spurge and opium poppy. This road ends at a car park where a path continues straight onto the estuary shore with dunes forming a nature reserve, Morfa Conwy, specifically for the rare belted beauty moth (which flies April/May, and whose larvae feed on birdsfoot trefoil). We saw no evidence of this, but there was a huge colony of ivy broomrape and patches of yellow rattle. Like yesterday on the opposite side of the same estuary, there was plenty of sea bindweed, and some rush-leaved fescue. The sandy shore was soon replaced by rough stones and we only found one tiny plant of sea rocket. Overcast weather meant that no butterflies were in evidence today, although we did see a solitary silver Y. Most of the former dunes are covered by the golf course. At the end of the estuary we turned to face the sea, with a view of Anglesey and Puffin Island. There was a wide sand beach above a seaweed covered rocky section where a large number of oystercatchers were feeding along with the herring gulls. We continued west along the beach, trying to get round Penmaen-bach Point, but the tide came in and we had to backtrack to a colony of chalets and find a way up through the dunes around it to get back to the road and the coast path. The dunes included sheepsbit and crow garlic. The path then uses a cycle-track-cum-walkway alongside the noisy busy A55, not ideal, but there were common centaury and yellowwort in the verge. This continued to Penmaen-bach Point where the road and the parallel railway proceeded through tunnels, the hills coming down steeply all along here, leaving little room to get round the coast. We were able to get a view down to the beach where we had tried to get round the point and saw a heron standing in the sea in our place. On the shored-up and concreted cliffs kittiwakes had still managed to find a ledge on which to rest. We were again beside traffic as it emerged from the tunnels. We were now passing Dwygyfylchi and there was a little more space between our tarmac path and the traffic, continuing in this way past Penmaenmawr. Large areas of pale toadflax and kidney vetch blossomed at the edge of the sea-rocks. We stopped to have a brief lunch on the jumbled sea-defence rocks as the mist came down lower, blotting out the high hills and beginning to spot with rain. We walked to a new bridge taking the trail across the other side of the road and the railway. Spoil from blasting away what had been a good botanical habitat on the cliffs had been deposited below by the shore and this was now advertised as a nature reserve called "Brundrit’s Wharf" on the basis that it had been colonised by heather and attracted “rare” bees, although the only heather we saw here had obviously been planted in cleared areas of soil surrounded by a rings of stones! As we progressed on the other side of the transport routes we were beside the remaining cliffs with heather, bell heather, slender St. John’s-wort and lady fern. All along this stretch, too, bushes of tall tutsan were naturalised. We left the A55 and entered the streets of Llanfairfechan which we followed to the centre and then took the road north under the A55 to a section of the village left by the shore and the railway station. The little patch of dunes here had a few plants of sea kale, the first of the day. By then the rain was descending more steadily and we took a train from the station back to Conwy.