An Evening with Frank

Another day, another storm.
I’m sure the amount of storms that have hit the UK has increased tenfold since they started naming them. This evening ‘Frank’ was on it’s way bringing wind and rain.

We parked up near the church in Cilcain, a small village near the foot of Moel Famau, reached via a single track road off the A494.
Armed with the Coleman CHT 15 headlamp (and plenty of batteries and a few spare torches!) we walked East, past the church, following the road to the left. We took another left at the next junction where the road eventually became a muddy track heading South East.
The climb here was gradual but the work rate soon increased as we joined the Offa’s Dyke path to the South towards Moel Dywyll.

So far, the navigation was fairly straight forward but, with the pitch black skies and various routes becoming available, the GPS became a very welcome bit of kit!
It’s  disorientating walking in these conditions, even on hills visited numerous times previously, however, the views over to the twinkling lights of Wirral, Liverpool and beyond are fantastic. Sadly, this photo doesn’t do it justice.

There are tales of ghosts who haunt this part of the Clwydian hills and sightings of UFOs flying overhead.  Personally, I don’t believe such stories, but, it might have been fun to see a spirit or alien though!
You can understand how such stories come about when you turn off the head torches and look out in to the silent, inky blackness.

Once we reached the first cairn the wind had really got up making walking quite difficult. By the time we had got to Jubilee Tower we concluded it would be unsafe to stay there for our coffee break given that the wind was gusting around 45mph!

We dropped down and took the Clwydian Way path to the North which had become very muddy and slippery. I managed to stay on my feet….unlike others (-:
It was here we fired up the Jetboil to get a welcome brew on.
We returned to the car a few hours later, slightly windswept and extremely muddy but an enjoyable walk!

This 6 mile route can be downloaded from ViewRanger.