Thursday October 6th

Wow, last night the wind was howling and never stopped once!  We weren’t scared though – it was just nice to be snuggled up in a nice warm bed hehehe!  This morning we were on our way to Cilgerran Castle, but I spotted an Abbey not far from the town so we stopped off to investigate.  It turned out to be St. Dogmaels Abbey which was an open access site of ruins.  I’m sure it would have been impressive if more had survived, but it looked pretty big going on the foundations.

So, onto Cilgerran Castle we went, and before we got into the reception hut we had to duck under some ropes – they had some people there doing some extreme weeding – scaling the sides of the wall surrounding the Castle on the outer edge.  The Castle itself was quite fun, although small and the wind was VERY cold today!!  Especially up high in the Castle itself! Brrrrr!  I explored everywhere as usual of course, but I didn’t stay in the open areas for very long – and I had my thermals on!!

Next on our list of things to do today was a walk along the Teifi River trail.  I had discovered this one on the internet and I thought it looked quite nice, and we thought a nice little potter along the river would be a nice way to spend the afternoon, as we weren’t feeling like doing anything strenuous today.

So, we started off and walked our way through some woodland to get to the Wildlife Centre which was basically ON this trail.  It took us around an hour to get to it, and before stopping off there, we found a “Badger Trail” which we explored and found a HUGE picnic bench where we decided to have lunch.  In the Wildlife Visitors Centre, we then decided to have a coffee upstairs in the “Glasshouse Café” which looked like it served some really nice food, but we had already had lunch.  Oh well!  We didn’t know anything about this visitors Centre and it was in the wrong place on Mathew’s map – which turned out to be about 15 years old haha!  Well, we found it eventually and although my decaf cappuccino was quite strong, it wasn’t too bitter and it went nicely with my apple and cinnamon bar.  I spent much of the time in the café wondering if the guy who served Mathew was either wearing  a wig or had used and entire tub of hair gel.  Seriously – his hair did not move at all!!

After our stop at the café, we continued on the Teifi River trail, and although we were on the lookout for Otters, we didn’t see any – no Kingfishers either!  Hey ho.  Along we went, and finally we had reached the river and we could see it quite well.  We saw plenty of birds in the water, and some people canoeing, but no Otters, Kingfishers or Red Squirrels which were apparently living in the trees around here.  We expected to take roughly an hour or so to get back to the car…..but oh no.  The trail had other ideas!!  Mathew said at the point where the trail split into two, we should follow the lower one because it was not only closer to the river edge, but it would come out in the car park where we started.

It was a good idea, and at first it seemed like it was all going our way and then things started to get a little more challenging.  The trail started to go up and down much MUCH more than we had anticipated, and I was SO glad I had my sticks with me otherwise I would have got into a right old grump!! The ground was sloping up and down, there were steps here there and everywhere, once we’d gone up it was time to go down again, and the walk was turning into one more strenuous than we had wanted to do.  Even so, it was quite fun tackling the foliage, ducking under and hopping over tree trunks.  Admittedly this trail seemed to be fairly overgrown and unkempt, but Mathew’s map and the maps which we had seen before we got here all stated BOTH routes were available, and we saw no signs telling us not to go along certain trails.

Suddenly it got even more strenuous, involving climbing over tree trunks rather than just ducking under and hopping over, and we had to start watching where we were putting our feet as we became seriously close to the river edge and one wrong footing could have ended up with one or both of us in the river!  Finally we got to a point where we scrambled up some lose ground using the tree trunks, an after Mathew had gone ahead to have a closer look at the trail, we decided to go on.  But we hadn’t gone very far until the trail eventually stopped and we had no option but to turn back.

This was a little annoying as we had come all this way and we were having fun with this trail, sometimes wondering if it was actually THE trail we were meant to be on or not.  We were disappointed that it defeated us, but it was probably for the best – who knows how long we would have been going on for, and who knows where we would have ended up?!  We turned back, and fortunately it only took around 10 – 15 minutes to get back to the split in the trail and we went up.  This time on the higher trail, it was more of an obvious trail, although it went up and down SO many times I can’t remember, we were starting to get sick of having to go down just to come back up again.  Unfortunately the rest of the walk was uneventful other than having to go up and down all over the place, as we were much higher up than before – so much so in fact that we couldn’t even see the river.  Was this really a RIVER trail?

We returned to the car exhausted, and went back to the cottage just outside Fishguard.  On the way, we stopped off at Newport to have a look at the restaurants there for tomorrow night.  We looked at three before randomly seeing a chef eating a banana walking in the other direction, so we decided to follow him to see where we’d end up – it was The Royal Oak and the menu looked just right for what we were after, with a HUGE list of fresh fish specials.  We thought we would take the phone number and reserve a table tomorrow for the evening, if we don’t find something in Fishguard.