Finally, it was time for a walk in Llanfyllin, as up to recently it has only been a place I’ve driven through on the way to elsewhere. Yet every time on the approach up from Llandegwyn over Bwlchyddar I felt the urge to walk there, especially because I’d seen on the map that there was a ‘fort’ or settlement marked below Bwlch-y-Llan and within easy reach of the town. I’ve always been drawn to hillforts from being a child growing up near Mam Tor in Derbyshire. My fascination with them even led me onto writing a book about all the hillforts of Shropshire when I lived there, so it seemed only right and proper to start exploring the ones near to my new home in Powys and one early spring morning the perfect opportunity arose to do it.
Following the little road towards the Glynie, I headed off up a beautiful track through a wooded valley to the left of the stream into Derwlwyn Coppice. The ground here was abundant with an array of wildflowers all opening up to the promise of sun, light and warmth reaching down through the mixed tree canopy. The path below was still really muddy in the valley floor after heavy rains and sudden spring showers but the bluebells, dog violets, wood anemones, celandines, stitchwort, lords-and-ladies and dog mercury had all thrived from it. The morning was perfectly accompanied with bird song all around creating that absolute clarity and enveloping profusion of a growing spring dawn chorus.
Hollydog was racing excitedly in front of me as we reached a point in the path and zig zagged back to the left to reach higher ground. Nearing the top, Grave Hill came into view on the right. (A walk for another day though!) Then we picked our way along the narrow track through the trees and arrived straight at the unmistakable bumps of ditches and ramparts. I always get very excited as I cross the threshold into the inner area of a place of ancient settlement as I love visiting these places where our ancestors lived in these fortified encampments on the top of hills.
This hillfort is probably Iron Age like all the ones I visited in Shropshire. It uses the contours and spur of the hill with a natural steep-sided drop off defence in the north and east to the valley bottom and it still has a well-defined ditch on the west and south sides around the sloping central area. I found I had the place all to myself that day and was greeted by the songs of great tits, blue tits and wrens with a buzzard calling high overhead. I felt a sense of being enveloped in the surrounding landscape with views that we all crave. It was easy to imagine living here amongst this beautiful little wood of beech, ash, rowan and silver birch as the birds sang and the sun shone around me.
Heading off down the steep path in dappled sunlight through wild bilberries and a carpet of common cow-wheat we jumped the trunk of a fallen tree back into the deep leaf mulch of the valley floor where soft fronds of yarrow were emerging by the little bridge at the bottom over the water. The first leaves were coming out on spindly rowan trees, hazels, hawthorns and sycamores with wild roses and honeysuckle growing along the fence by the brook. The trees were jostling for light and space on these darker banks of the valley bottom and suddenly it was a different world again with trees leaning gently over the brook covered in moss and lichen like an arboreal rainforest. Picking my way back along the path, shafts of sunlight landed on the bright yellow petals of globeflower buttercups growing by the water to form my lasting image of the walk. It was altogether one of those perfect days in life.
