Blustery borders
Saturday, January 24th, 2009Time flown today: 2h 20m
Total time to date: 64h
Another weekend, time to get airborne again! Plan was to head out to Wales for a land-away, ideally Caenarvon - but having realised my booking at PFT was shorter than I’d thought, and there was dubious weather coming in from the north-west, we decided to shoot for Welshpool instead. The weather at Oxford was beautiful, so we took off and departed westward over the Cotswolds. We could see big cumulus on the far western horizon, and started to encounter clouds around Malvern, but the base was a good 2000ft higher than the hilltops, so we continued. Going towards the murkier weather, we could always just turn around and go home if things got trickier.
Shobdon Radio was pretty busy, as we ducked under cloud to turn in their overhead, watching like hawks for any traffic that might be joining overhead at the same time. Pressed on north to Welshpool, the clouds getting darker but still leaving a respectable height clear above the hills. It was getting pretty turbulent under the clouds, too. Took a look at the time, considered when we had to have the plane back on the ground at Oxford, and decided we didn’t have time to land at Welshpool. But we’d taken off with full tanks, so put a quick call to Welshpool from about ten miles away that we wouldn’t be landing, and turned around.
We had time on our hands. Where to now? Well, I fancied seeing one of my favourite parts of the country from the air: the Black Mountains. Quick look at the map, quick look at the DI, quick look at the lay of the land… I think it’s *that* way, pointing south over the lines of hills lit by bright sunlight behind the low dark clouds. It looked pretty epic.
Had to dodge around one particularly black cloud underbelly that appeared to be dropping prodigious quantities of hail! Got a few splatters of rain on the windscreen, gave it a bit of carb heat for good measure and kept plenty of sky between us and the ground…
And soon enough, we’d reached Hay-on-Wye.
It’s stunning countryside around here: south-west along the escarpment of the Black Mountains, one of the most spectacular pieces of upland scenery in the southern UK IMO:
And north-west over the Wye Valley, towards the rugged hills of mid-Wales:
A favourite spot of mine on the eastern-most ridge of the Black Mountains, which also happens to be the line of Offa’s Dyke marking the border between England and Wales - we’d been walking and picnicing at this very spot a few weeks earlier:
We flew over the eastern-most ridge, crossing back into England, and skirted around the Pontrilas danger area before a quick detour to the little village of Much Dewchurch, to see my mother’s house from the air:
And with time pressing on, time to hotfoot it back to Oxford! With the wind on our tail, we were making over 120kts groundspeed, back over Gloucester and the Cotswolds.
