Tuesday, October 13th, 2015
We said goodbye to Sandra our lovely host, from the wonderfully nice, and a little different ‘Lancaster Arms’, after breakfast and hit the trail just before 8am. Did I need to mention that it was a lovely, bright morning, with the sun just peeking from behind the hills? The weather again held the whole day, with sunshine for most of it, with only some overcast skies in the early afternoon. It never got really cold either.
The day’s walk started off through rolling farmland, through the hamlets of Llangattock-Lingoed and Caggle Street, before passing White Castle, which was very disappointingly closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Onwards through more rolling fields and faremland, with some stretches on tarmac, to Llantilio-Crossenny and Llanvihangel-Ystern-Llewern. Nope, I never mastered pronouncing these names correctly. The guidebook’s warnings about possible boggy or saturated sections of The Path weren’t relevant to us as the surface was pretty dry. No rain, remember ;). More fields of the rolling kind until we made it to King’s Wood, the last stretch before reaching the outskirts of Monmouth. There was a detour on The Path through King’s Wood due to felling and safety. Mmmm, it looked a bit longer than we’d have liked… Since we didn’t hear any machinery or other noises we decided to stick to the through Path. Didn’t see a soul. Nor a machine. There was also the promise of a bit of an uphill to ‘the summit’ in the wood, but when we got there we almost missed it as being the summit. Wasn’t that much of a climb afterall. We reached the outskirts of Monmouth and arrived at Myrtle Lodge just before 4pm.
We relaxed, freshened up and then walked into town proper in search of an evening meal. On the way back to Myrtle Lodge Luc fancied a pint at the pub – being his first ever visit to the British Isles and all.
