| Flight details: | With apologies to anyone under 50, to whom this will mean nothing, and with big, big apologies to Idris Davies, Pete Seeger and the Byrds:
Do you want to go further?
Said the hills behind Merthyr
What d'you want from me?
Said the thermals of Rhymney
Careful, you're too eager
Said the rough air of Tredegar
Here's wind in your sail
Said the town of Ebbw Vale
I'll give you a shiner
Said the turbulence from Blaina
And that's all your havin'
Said the slopes of Blaenavon
Matt Pepper and I drove up early on to Merthyr Common, where he cooked us a fry-up among the sheep, ponies and old sofas. It soon came on soarable, then died. While Matt made a gallant effort to scratch back up from down the slope, I chatted with a couple of late-arriving locals. The wind picked up, so back into the air. An unknown raptor confused me greatly: it seemed to be crap at thermalling, even by my standards. It turned out to be a tame bird out for a play under the supervision of its owners.
After a lot of abortive semi-climbs, a local on a yellow Alpha found me a proper one, and after a couple more false starts, I could feel that I was in a proper, going-to-cloudbase one (though he pushed out front again). I could see wings on the ground at Fochriw one ridge back, and feared I might join them, but climbs kept appearing where the topography said they should. They weren't great -- it seemed hard to find any air going up consistently for more than about 20 seconds -- but there wasn't much sink in between, either. And the wonderful thing about the South Wales valleys is that there are so many of them, and in such quick succession. If one into-wind slope doesn't work, the next one probably will, and I had no need to scratch over the plentiful crags and quarries.
But then I made my big cock-up. Over the last valley, containing the town of Blaenavon with lots of industrial estates, the lift was badly broken up, and I dribbled on to the plateau of the Blorenge (thinking that high |
