I found myself in Cardiff for a LIGO meeting, but with a weekend between parts of the meeting. So the only logical thing to do was to leave the confines of Cardiff on Saturday morning and head straight for the hills. Things started with a little confusion on my part over bus times, but I sis eventually work things out and got a bus to Merthyr, and then changed onto another which would take me to the Storey Arms, at the bottom of the most popular ascent route for Pen y Fan.
THe initial climb up Pen y Fan is steep and up a (very) well engineered, and well trodden path, which resembles a cobbled road more than a mountain path. It goes over a smaller initial hillock before the pull up to Corn Du, a slightly lower summit on the same section of the main massif as Pen y Fan, which is the tallest hill south of Snowdonia. The weather was pleasant and I made good speed on the climb, so headed out over Cribyn, and onwards to Fan y Big. The latter started to feel increasingly remote and the paths became softer and wetter.
With two Hewitts down I decided to continue on to a third, Waun Rydd. Up to this points the summits had been high points on headland-like protrusions of the massif, standing over glacial cwms, bit this one was a high point away from the path on an expanse of boggy ground, the summit marked only by a small cairn. From here I dropped down slowly to an old reservoir which has had the dam removed, and then back up onto the massif in order to reach the descent path close to the original climb. I made it down with 50 minutes to spare before the 1630 bus back to Cardiff.
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