Brecon Beacons, 26 August 2022: Redefining “crazy Friday nights”

August was a sad month owing to the long-put-off but inevitable sale of Björn, my beloved campervan. I felt tethered, having tasted the freedom that comes with van life, so I was looking forward to a bank holiday weekend spent camping with friends in the Brecon Beacons.

Ryan and I headed up in an accidental convoy with Gus (who has featured in my blog previously) and his girlfriend Dan, after realising 20 minutes from home that they were in the car behind us. The journey was uneventful apart from a long-awaited McDonalds and a stunning sunset as we crossed the Prince of Wales Bridge. We entered Wales, got past the drabness of Newport (sorry Newport) and drove across the National Park, which became darker and wilder as we moved further west. We crossed a moor, navigated the steep, snaking, dead-end road to the small car park for Llyn y Fan Fach, hauled our crammed rucksacks out the boot and set off hiking just after 10pm.

I already felt immersed in the mountains. The car park sat in a narrow valley between high, rugged hillsides whose jet black silhouettes stood beneath a star-spattered sky, and the air was still and quiet. Our plan was to hike up to a bothy by Llyn y Fan Fach, spend the night there, and set off early in the morning for a 14.5mi/23km loop around the Camarthen Fans, the distinctive flat-topped mountains of the western Beacons.

To reach the bothy we walked up a gravel track that ran parallel to a river between long, high hillsides for 2km. At one point we turned our torches off (curiosity is a strange thing) and were plunged into a blackness so thick that it was quite disorientating. The path was uphill all the way but easy to follow and we reached our accommodation after about half an hour.

The bothy is a simple stone hut on the flat northern edge of Llyn y Fan Fach. I have a feeling that within bothy circles it’s known as being one of the less pleasant ones to stay in, probably because of its prominent location by a popular lake and its slightly disconcerting graffiti. At least “english BASTARDS”, which was sprayed on the wall last time Ryan and I stayed there, had been mostly removed.

Its single room is big enough to sleep about 12 people (if you like each other) and has a squat wooden door held in place by a rock, benches along two walls, a small fireplace in the corner and a beamed ceiling that we attached a lamp to. We were immensely relieved to find it empty as we didn’t fancy spending the night with strangers, let alone ones who might consider us “english BASTARDS” – if it had been occupied and we didn’t like its occupants, we’d have had to hike back down to the cars to get the tents. We dumped our bags, set up our mats and sleeping bags on the floor and went out into the night to assess our position.

We climbed just above the bothy to the wall of a large concrete dam overlooking the lake. It was shockingly empty, presumably as a result of the summer drought; I’ve only ever seen it full of glassy, dark water, which in daylight reflects the colossal escarpment stretching high above and along its far bank, so I was a bit sad to see only a huge, deep crater of mud and concrete. In addition there was a load of construction/engineering work going on along the path up and along the edge of the lake, but that didn’t really bother us as we couldn’t see the temporary fences and assorted debris in the dark, so it was wild enough.

The dry lake and construction debris were more than made up for when we looked back towards the valley we’d walked up, over the roof of the bothy. We’d gained about 220m elevation on the hike up, which meant that the silhouettes of the huge black hills all around us had shrunk – apart from the huge, dark escarpment towering over the lake – to reveal a wide, clear, impossibly starry sky. We stood and stared, feeling incredibly small, then went back inside to try and get some sleep.

We shared Gus’s mead and settled in, four in a row. I felt a bit like a kid at a sleepover. Just before we turned the light off there was an exclamation from the vicinity of Gus that went something like “there’s a bat!”, which I giggled at and put down to his excitement, until I too spotted a shadow flitting across the ceiling. For some reason this was very funny and we watched it fly around for a while, although just for good measure we reassured each other that even Welsh bats don’t suck blood and no harm would come to us from sharing the bothy with a bat. The light went off about midnight and none of us slept much, but at least we didn’t come across any bothy-dwelling murderers.