A 7,000-mile round trip for a ramble in Wales

A monthly round-up from Bridgend Ramblers, with Steve Townsley

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BRIDGEND Ramblers arranges five or six walks each week. It's usually six in the summer and five in the winter.

That's around 280 each year. So, with an average distance of about seven miles, we cover over 2,000 miles of annual rambling.

Two thousand miles takes a lot of organising. And most of it falls to a group of volunteer walk leaders who find the routes, check they are safe, arrange the start and finish points, and then kind of look after everyone on the day.

A sunny Sunday in May found me joining this valiant group and leading my first walk of the year in the woodlands and hills around the upper and lower Lliw reservoirs, just north of Swansea.

The reservoirs have a fascinating history. They were built in the 1800s to supply water to Swansea. The lower one opened in 1863 and the upper one in 1894.

There's a sinister legend that the body of a workman who died during construction is buried in the upper dam wall. I've no idea if the legend is true, but after some repair work in the late 1970s, both reservoirs are still in use today, which stands as a strong testament to the skills of the workers who built them.

I'd walked the route a week earlier to check it was safe and suitable for a group. I'd measured (okay, guessed) its length as about nine miles, and assessed it to be moderately difficult, with one long gradual climb, several short steep ones and a bit of rough ground. And I'd judged it to be okay for dogs, provided they were kept on leads near livestock.

I hadn't spotted any significant risks and had found a convenient car park - with a cafe and toilets (wow!) - for the start and finish.