Wednesday August 14 2024

The Offa’s Dyke path travels the length of the Welsh-England border from Chepstow to Prestatyn. Parts of it follow the actual Offa’s Dyke built by, well, King Offa in the 8th century to separate Wales from his kingdom of Mercia. Whether it was defensive or whether it was purely “this is mine that is yours” is unknown.

The full length of the trail is 285km. We were only doing the 111km from Buttington to Prestatyn.

After the first of our many very generous breakfasts, and armed with our equally generous packed lunch, we took the advice of yesterday’s cabbie and had our host drop us at the Montomgery Canal which was slightly west of the official start of this section of the trail in Buttington. Thus we avoided walking through the (perpetually) wet farmer’s fields at the start of this section of the trail.

An inspired recommendation as walking along the canal was a beautiful way to start.

It appeared we even had a local dignitary there to send us off.

The Montgomery Canal (the “Monty”) was originally built to transport lime to the Llangollen Canal to be used as fertilizer. It was officially abandoned in 1944 and slowly attempts have been made to rehabilitate sections. It is allegedly a canoe/kayak route (as we saw several portage signs) however parts would require some serious weed whacking.

The path left the canal to continue along the Tirymynach Embankment which had been built to (at times unsuccessfully) hold back the floodwaters of the river Severn (which continues northeast to Shrewsbury before turning back south to end up at the Bristol Chanel)

On the embankment we had some peculiar obstacles to negotiate.

Childs play for a Hereford Princess.

We eventually made our way back to the canal to complete our day’s journey into Llanymynech and the Bradford Arms Hotel where Anne Hendrie was to join us for dinner.

We noticed a theme in the decor

17.7km