It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday here in Wales today. This doesn’t happen very often. Mr. Darcy, Baby X and I decided to take a long walk, first along the nearby canal, then up into the hills. We went up to Keeper’s Pond, in Blaenavon.

This whole area is absolutely fascinating. The Welsh valleys were big mining and industrial areas, so parts of the hills look like scenes from Mordor, with great heaps of old slag. Keeper’s Pond was actually the pond that supplied water to an enormous forge that produced hundreds of tons of iron. This is what it looked like in the nineteenth century:

Now that entire forge and the village that came along with it are completely gone.

We sat and had our sandwiches looking out over the pond to the bleak moors beyond. There was hardly any breeze but plenty of haze, and the sunlight intermittently breaking through. Mr. D. searched for predators, checking for footprints and investigating ‘scat’ (thankfully just lumps of soil…), while Baby X stared around with wide blue eyes from the safety of his buggy.

It was Mothers’ day over here in the UK, too, and the boys did a fantastic job of choosing a Mothers’ day present (a lovely heart necklace).

We’re all worn out, but it was a fantastic day.