Day 15: Ceibwr Bay to St Dogmaels

Weather: Mostly sunny with strong south wester Distance covered today: 12.2km (7.6mi) Last night's B&B: The Golden Lion Country Inn % Complete: Cum distance:100.6%:301.8km(187.5mi) GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 15 (click!)

Home again! Veronica is off to her Pilates session, and I’m back behind my netbook, my desktop and my tablet, and it’s all as if I never went away. Except for the suntan….

May I first apologise for the late publication of the final post, but it is my wont to analyse these things in nerdy detail, and for that I require the software on my desktop, so I had to get home first.  Also Veronica and I were splendidly entertained by Fiona and the Grumpy Hobbit, Julian, in their beautiful Welsh long cottage in the Welsh hills, and being a hobbit, such things as wifi have yet to breach his portals.

The Hobbit did though join me for the final leg of the journey, a short walk to the end of the trail in St Dogmaels.  Many walkers do the penultimate and final day’s walk of the coastal path in a single day, but at 27km (17mi), and incorporating the highest cliffs of the journey so far, that would be a very demanding day and the less enjoyable for all that. Equally, previous experience has suggested to me that it is always delightful to end the walk in a reasonably refreshed state to enjoy the reunion and to celebrate its conclusion.  The guidebooks are always most unsentimental about the last steps, somehow suggesting that one should already be planning the next walk, but don’t tell Veronica!

In fact, the final leg was very much a walk in two parts. The first half, to Cemaes Head, involved an exhilarating climb up the highest cliff of the journey (570ft, 175m), made exciting by the strong and gusty onshore south wester climbing the cliffs and hurling itself at us on the edge.  Fortunately, the cliffs are not steep on this leg, but the views are spectacular.

Once again, very few people seemed to be taking advantage of this wonderful resource. We met one mad Irishman, who looked as if he had very many miles under his belt; we passed Adrienne, now joined by her partner, Nigel, on the point of completing her very first long-distance walk, for which many congratulations; and finally we met a highly animated and rather concerned little group of four amateurs, with the females of the group seemingly terrified at the prospect of facing the cliffs in the strong wind.  Then the walk sort of petered out with a long and rather boring descent on a tar road into St Dogmaels.

And that was it! The End!

Now, though, for the exciting bit, the stats!

First an overview of the route. The numbers indicate the Waypoints at the conclusion of each day's walk. I uploaded the waypoints into Google Earth. For individual daily tracks, see the relevant GPS section on the top, right hand side of the blog

The weather is always an important element of a hike. I was yet again incredibly lucky in a very wet spring to select the only dry patch we've had since the beginning of winter.

The trail was surprisingly hilly. At an average of 2,720 ft/day the trail was "steeper" than the Pennine Way (2,450 ft/day) and only a little less than the dreaded Offa's Dyke (3,020 ft/day)

Most guidebooks argue that the trail is "easier" in the South than the North. These statistics suggest otherwise, though combining days 14 &15 would certainly top the difficulty stakes! 

The same data in English units. Now for a few last pictures of the final day's walk

Setting off from Ceibwr Bay, joined by Julian, the Grumpy Hobbit himself!

A lovely clapper bridge; the first I've seen since the Highlands

That's Cemaes Head, the last headland of the journey and the half-way point of today's walk

Amazing folding on the rocky headland

Adrienne on the right, with her partner, Nigel

More of those incredible folds, with a cathedral-like cave door at the base

Julian struggling against the wind to close a gate

A new foal for Veronica

These are lazy, but erudite sheep. I see one of them is reading "The Girl with a Pearl Earring". Either that or they like Vermeer! 

One feels one is returning to civilisation!

And suddenly, it's the end!  There's a plaque to prove it!

A lovely reunion with Veronica

And a last little lamb for Phyllis. (I was cheating a bit. I snapped this at the hobbit-hole)