Field note 22 The Long North
I went to Wales twice. The first time it nearly froze me off the bike.
November 2019, at the cold end of a long ride, and again in July 2021 on the way to Ireland. Two crossings of the same small country: one that ended a season, one that started the best part of another.From Rodrigo's road archive
The Long North
I went to Wales twice. The first time it nearly froze me off the bike.
November 2019, at the cold end of a long ride, and again in July 2021 on the way to Ireland. Two crossings of the same small country: one that ended a season, one that started the best part of another.
- Twice2019 and 2021
- Below zeroOn the dashboard in 2019
- HolyheadWhere the road runs into the sea
November 2019, at the cold end of a long ride, and again in July 2021 on the way to Ireland. Two crossings of the same small country: one that ended a season, one that started the best part of another.
The coldest day I had ridden since California.
The first time was November, which is nobody's month for this. The bike was white with frost and the dashboard read below zero before I had even pulled away, and within a few kilometres I knew I would not last: I had to stop again and again because my hands could not take it, and I could not work the phone on the handlebars without pulling a glove off.
Jacko was in his bag with the big scarf Anto had left him, wound three times round his neck, and I could hear him complaining. Behind me the sun came up so low and hard that it blinded me in the mirrors, and I pulled over just to watch it.
An hour short of Manchester I gave up, came off the motorway twice looking for anywhere warm, and finally rode up to the door of a small shopping centre and parked at the entrance. Jacko had been out of dog food for days. The shop had none, but they took one look at the dog on the motorcycle and handed over two trays of cooked chicken that were about to go out of date. He ate both.
The coldest day I have ever had on a motorcycle, from California onwards.
What the road kept
The same country twice, and it was not the same country.
In 2019 Wales was the consolation prize: Scotland was gone, winter had won, and I took the one country still within reach on the coldest day of the trip. In 2021 it was a green corridor with a workshop, a valley to camp in and a boat at the end of it. Same roads. The month decides everything.Scotland was off. Wales was still reachable.
Sitting in that shopping centre with a coffee and the laptop out, I accepted what the weather had been saying for days: the season was over. Scotland had been the plan since the start of that trip and Scotland was not going to happen. So I set a smaller target. One more country. I skipped Manchester, went into Liverpool for the Cavern, and turned down through Chester and over the border.
I arrived at Blaenau Ffestiniog that night with no fuel, no phone battery and no internet, and got there anyway. In the morning the fog was sitting in the valley and the town was extraordinary: built entirely of slate, quarried out of the hills around it and shipped across the world for roofs and terraces.
There is a quirk to the place. It sits in the middle of Snowdonia, but the national park boundary was drawn specifically to leave the town and its old workings outside, so it stands in a hole in the middle of the park that surrounds it. I rode the park for the day, through gorges and open grazing, and two mornings later I was on a five o'clock start for the Cotswolds and then a plane home.
The photographs from 2019 are not in the site archive yet. Everything shown here is from the second crossing, in 2021.
Touratech Wales, and a set of tyres that would do the north.
The second time was July 2021, in the right season, going the other way: north through Wales to catch the boat to Ireland, and after that up to Scotland.
The first stop was Ystradgynlais, in the south, where Touratech Wales sit. That kind of place is a gift on a long ride: people who know exactly what a loaded bike needs, a floor to work on, and the parts in a box behind them. The tyres came off in the yard and went back on with new rubber, and the luggage got sorted at the same time.
Then north, up the spine of the country, on the sort of roads Wales does better than almost anywhere: narrow, green, walled in on both sides and empty.
Camping in the Elan valley, and a Welsh breakfast after it.
Mid Wales is where the country empties out. Around Rhayader the road runs up into bare hills and reservoirs, and it is the sort of country where you can pull off the tarmac, ride a hundred metres and be alone for the night.
That is exactly what happened. Tent up on the grass, the bike beside it, the dog delighted, and a cold clear morning after it. Then down the road to Llangurig for a full breakfast, which after a night out is not a meal, it is a repair.
Back through the same mountains, in the right month this time.
The road north goes straight through Snowdonia, and in July it is a different country from the one I had seen in November. Porthmadog on the coast, then Beddgelert, where the road runs beside the river through thick woodland, then Llanberis at the foot of Yr Wyddfa, the mountain the English call Snowdon.
Llanberis on a summer weekend is full of motorcycles, which is its own kind of welcome: everyone parked up in the same yard, everyone looking at everyone else's luggage.
Where the road runs into the sea.
Wales ends at Holyhead, out on Anglesey, where the road stops and the ferry to Dublin starts. Loading a motorcycle onto a boat is straightforward. Loading a dog is not: Jacko went into a transport crate, with the paperwork checked twice, which is the part of travelling with a dog that nobody photographs.
The crossing put me into Ireland, and from there the route went back over to Scotland, which is the next story. Two years earlier this same country had been the end of a trip. This time it was the middle of one.
The field archive
3 more frames from the road
Everything else from the folder, in the order it was taken.
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