My walk this week is at a place I have visited on a number of occasions now, and in a variety of weather conditions. The Waterside – Felindre is a beautiful space in the South Wales valleys at which I will be presenting the StillWalks package for businesses and organisations on the First Friday of February.
If anyone is interested in coming along to this regular open day at The Waterside, please check out the website above and contact us in advance.
My posts this week are about a recent walk along the cliffs at the end of the Gower Peninsula. Gower Landscapes Partnership and Swansea Walking Forum have been organising a series of walks on the Gower peninsula this year. As a member of the Walking Forum I have been taking part in these Tastes of Gower walks. The most recent was at Rhosilli where the Worm’s Head spits out into the sea.
It was a very enjoyable walk on a beautiful day. Walking out from Rhosilli to the tip of the peninsula and the Worm’s Head, we had spectacular views from the cliffs over Rhosilli Bay. People and dogs on the beach looked smaller than ants!
We didn’t venture onto the Worm’s Head, though the tide times on that day would have allowed it. The tide times are shown on a large notice at the start of the path to the Head but despite this many people get caught out and end up stranded on the island. Many of these, so I am told, are from China and don’t speak English, yet it has not occurred to the Coast Guard that has top go and fetch them by boat, to put up a similar notice in Chinese (and other languages).
Over the next couple of weeks I am going to be posting a selection of images that didn’t make it into some recent StillWalks videos.
I have recently been working on a series of StillWalks videos around Lower Lliw Reservoir near Swansea, South Wales. During a production day I will take between 300 and 800 photographs. On average, only 10% of these will actually make it into the finished videos, around 50 – 60 images.
I use Adobe Lightroom to review and filter out the images I want to keep or reject and this can sometimes be a difficult process. Post processing individual images is not done until the penultimate stage of selection when the decisions become harder to make.
Overall the images need to tell the story of the walk. Along with the field recording, they need to show progression. The image below was left out of the Summer evening video because the photo was taken facing backwards on the walk and the fence is therefore on the wrong side and not in keeping with the rest of the sequence.
Last week I was up on top of Mynydd y Graig in the Mawr ward of Swansea. It is up above the Lliw reservoirs into which the River Lliw flows. It was very windy up there but the views are great and the sound of the Skylarks lifts the heart every time.
Wind and Skylarks on Mynydd Y Graig
Swansea Walking Forum meet once a month and although this has often been a matter of sitting around a table and sharing the news of different walking groups in the area, this week we met at Garnswllt Activity Centre and went for a walk first. What an excellent idea! Climbing up the Garnswllt end of Graig Fawr, we took nearly 2 hours to complete a circuit that provided beautiful hazy views across the hills and over Ammanford. Following the walk we were able to sit down with a cup of tea and biscuits in the Activity Centre which has been excellently converted from the old village school.
It was a beautiful day and the larks were singing their hearts out up above us. I had taken my recording kit and held back a little in order to record the sounds of without the chatter of the group in the background. Listen to the sounds below – either click the play button or the mp3 file name.
This week’s featured StillWalks video is set a few weeks ahead of the current date in terms of the time of year but the flowers and activity of the birds celebrate the beautiful sunny weather of Spring with gusto and are a welcome change to the wild, wet and windy weather we had through Winter.
The video above is in 480p quality. You can use the Donate button below to pay however much you want and receive a high quality (720HD) download of this week’s featured StillWalks video – “Garden Park Walk – Spring” which features Clyne Gardens in Swansea, South Wales. Click the image above to watch the video. DVD Collections are also available to order in the StillWalks Shop.
The centre is in Penllergaer, near Swansea and my first discovery of this woodland was through the StillWalks project “Sights and Sounds of the Countryside” – that was about 18 months ago.
Since then the woodland and the footpaths through it, have been developed further and there is more to see and hear there all the time. The first image below is of a team of volunteers planting hundreds of new trees – oak, ash, alder, hawthorn and many others.
The bespoke StillWalks video “Marching Feet, Crackling Leaves”, produced as part of the “Sights and Sounds of the Countryside” project, was made with StillWalks by the children of Pontlliw Primary School and features a (miraculously) dry day in Autumn.
Sounds from my walk there last week will be posted tomorrow.
