How many times can you climb a mountain before you lose count of the number of times you’ve climbed it? Some people (guides, usually) can number it into the 100s. For me, I start to struggle before I’ve run out of fingers. Luckily, I have photos which enabled me to work out that I’ve now climbed Pen y Fan, the highest mountain in South Wales, six (yes, a mere six) times over a period of 24 years (in 2002, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2025, and 2026).
Rising to just 886m in height, Pen y Fan has the distinction of being the highest mountain in the Brecon Beacons, now known as Bannau Brycheiniog, and also the highest peak in the southern United Kingdom. Unlike most mountains, which can look completely different depending on which side you’re looking from, Pen y Fan has a more unusual, seemingly magical, quality of looking exactly the same no matter what angle you see it from. Its twin summits of Pen y Fan and Corn Du (which is 13m lower) rise above the landscape like a ship sailing across the ocean. Of course, there must be a line you can stand on somewhere in Wales where one summit will be hidden behind the other, but I can’t ever remember standing on it (well, OK, here’s a photo I took from just above the Storey Arms when I could only see Corn Du, but you get my drift).
Having climbed it twice from the south side and twice from the north side, it wasn’t until last year that I finally got round to making it up the standard tourist route from the west side, an ascent I raced up in just 44 minutes from the main car park.
These ascents led me to think about completing the set by climbing the mountain from the east side. This, however, is not as easy as it sounds. While it’s possible to approach Pen y Fan from the east by starting north or south and ascending one of the subsidiary tops of Fan y Big or Cribyn first, a true east side approach involves starting a very long way away, right down at 200m on the shores of the Talybont Reservoir, 9km from the summit. The ascent involves traversing virtually the whole massif, up and down over Twyn Du, Waun Rydd, Craig Cwareli, Fan y Big and Cribyn, then turning around and going back again. This is a trek that my Ordnance Survey app reckoned would take nigh on nine hours, with over 1,300m of ascent and descent.
Nevertheless, I decided to give it a go in the second weekend of September, when there was still plenty of daylight.
The Talybont Reservoir is watered by various streams coming down off the south-east side of the Pen y Fan massif, most notably Caerfanell and Nant Cynafon. It was dammed in the 1930s to provide water for the city of Newport (coincidentally, many people say they are damned to go to Newport). It’s now a popular tourist spot, with a network of trails across the dam and through surrounding forest.
I also discovered it could be quite muggy along its shoreline on a hot September day. I was attacked by midges as I got out of my car at 9am. A woman in new-age costume gave me a big grin as I pulled into the car park because she thought she could hear flamenco music coming from inside my car (disclaimer: I wasn’t listening to flamenco music).
I followed a path across fields to join up with the main route up Waun Rydd from the east. A power walker clad in lycra and wielding two walking poles barrelled past me as I joined the trail. We seemed to be about the same pace, which was awkward, because it meant I would end up stalking her unless one of us slowed down. Thankfully, she stopped to adjust her poles, allowing me time to get ahead.
A good trail climbed steeply through stands of bracken. The hillside profile was like the curve of a normal distribution (meaning, in case you’re not into stats, that the gradient started steep but became gradually more gentle as I reached the rounded top of the hillside). After a few minutes of heavy breathing, I crested a rise and had my first view of the Bannau Brycheiniog mountaintops.
I was walking along the rim of a combe. Across the combe to my left was another rounded hillside, Allt Lwyd, that I would be crossing on my return journey. At the far end of the combe, the tablelike peak of Waun Rydd rose up. I could see a steep path at the end of my ridge, rising to its top, where there appeared to be a large cairn. I could see tiny figures on their way towards the slope.
The bracken had given way to carpets of purple heather. I followed my broad ridge over the minor top of Twyn Du (533m). It was pleasant and comfortable walking, with wide views. Behind me I could see the broad skyline of the Black Mountains, where I’d been two weeks earlier.
I caught up with the other figures as the path steepened to climb the flanks of Waun Rydd. A few minutes later, I was surprised to see the power walker I’d overtaken earlier roar past me. I thought I’d left her far behind; whatever magic she’d worked with her walking poles I would like to try for myself.
The steep ascent ended abruptly at a disproportionately large cairn marked on the map as Carn Pica (which, judging by its name, should have been no more than one sixth of an inch, but was closer in size to a garden shed). It didn’t even sit on top of the plateau but just beneath its rim.
There was now a flat, boggy plateau in front of me. I followed a good path across it and stopped for a selfie on the 762m summit. It was the second time I’ve been to that particular point thinking that it marked the true summit of Waun Rydd, but it was only when I got home that I noticed there is a point some way off the path that is 7m higher.
I could now see the familiar summits of Corn Du and Pen y Fan rising beyond the far end of the plateau. They still looked a long way off (and damn well were). I started to see more people as I dropped down to join the main escarpment. I reached the edge and gazed across the U-shaped basin of Cwm Oergwym to the peaks that lay before me. Fan y Big and Cribyn formed two shelves standing across my path. The former was fairly flat and sloped only slightly while the latter was much steeper. Behind them Corn Du and Pen y Fan crowned the skyline.
I was now on familiar ground, having come this way in the past. Fan y Big and Cribyn may have looked like shelves from where I stood, but I knew that to get from one to the other, I would need to descend a deep trench and then climb back up the other side – and then I would have to do the same thing again to get from Cribyn to Pen y Fan. Up and down like a yo-yo – bloody hill walking.
A wind whipped up and grey clouds still hung overhead, adding a chill to the air. To my left, the interior of the plateau was rough and inaccessible, shrouded in thick banks of heather and peat hags. But there was a firm, if rocky, path all the way around the edge; and I could gaze down into bare Cwm Oergwym to my right, and the swathe of forest at the bottom end of the valley.
By the time I started the gentle ascent to the top of Fan y Big, there were now so many people that I stopped greeting them, or I would have risked stony glances, as though I were some kind of weirdo.
In 2018, Fan y Big hit the news when it was downgraded from a mountain to a hill, or – to be a bit more nerdy – it dropped off the Hewitt’s list (named after the tennis players Bob and Lleyton) of peaks over 2000 feet in height and with a prominence of at least 30m. It was calculated that Fan y Big’s prominence is only 28.5m. It remains a Nuttall, but most hill walkers neither know nor care about this. All most people care about is that it remains one of a handful of peaks in Britain with extremely rude names.
I reached the 717m summit (which used to be 719m) at 11.30, and found myself standing at the top of a broad, grassy ridge dividing two more or less identical U-shaped combes (Cwm Cynwyn and Cwm Oergwyn if you’re interested – but good luck pronouncing them). There was a flat stone on top sticking out over the edge. A group of young men were taking pictures of each other on it and getting nervous about the exposure (Wilfred Thesiger would have described them as pansies).
I took a swig of water and continued, taking grassy slopes down to the col of Bwlch ar y Fan (which needs to be said with a roar). I took the grassy slopes because there were about a million people on the rough, stony footpath and I wanted to run down so that I could pick up momentum to get myself back up the other side. The momentum worked for a short time, but I slowed to a plod as I made my way up the higher reaches of the slope.
By the time I reached the 795m summit of Cribyn at midday, I had been walking non-stop for nearly three hours. As I had known beforehand, Cribyn was much steeper than Fan y Big. Previously, this had seemed an easy 200m ascent, but this time I had found it tiring.
It wasn’t yet time for a break, except for another gulp of water. I dropped down to the next col and joined the crowds up the final 200m haul to the summit of Pen y Fan, up a neatly cobbled staircase like a Roman road.
I reached the top at 12.30. There were lots of people milling around, but this time only about ten of them were queuing for photos beside the summit cairn. Queuing for summit photos has become a thing recently, mirroring the collapse in civilisation we are seeing elsewhere. This time, however, most people must have found the idea of forming a line to take a photo on top of a big plateau as insane as I do. This restored some of my faith in humanity at this critical time in our history.
I circled the summit cairn, taking photos of my own with all the queuers behind me. I sent the photo to Edita, who was just waking up at her apartment in Haiti. Then I sat down to eat my lunch at the top of the trail I had just ascended, with a view back along the jagged, undulating escarpment I had traversed. Far beyond, I had a distant glimpse of the Black Mountains, where I had been walking two weeks earlier. It was windy still, but the sun was getting stronger. I thought I had picked a quiet spot, but lots of people stopped to have conversations behind me, apparently unconcerned that I could hear every word they were saying. Luckily, I didn’t know the milkman in question.
I left the summit at 1pm and descended rapidly. I took the bypass route around the base of Cribyn to avoid having to climb it all over again. This bypass was relatively flat and there were few people on it.
When I returned to Bwlch ar y Fan (rraaaarrrrgggh), I was surprised to see a marked mountain rescue vehicle parked up and decked out like an ambulance. My first thought was that there must have been an accident. My second was, how the fuck had it got there? Then I saw one of the volunteers handing a bottle of water to one of the many hikers coming over the pass and continuing down the track on the other side. Unlike the path up the escarpment edge on the northern side, the track south from the col was gentle and just broad enough for a vehicle. It seemed there was some sort of event going on, but the runners were going so slowly that I would only have known they were running had I received advanced notice of an event for snails.
I bypassed Fan y Big as well. This time the bypass trail slanted steeply up the side of the peak. I got stuck behind a school group as I intersected the main path, but they soon headed off in another direction.
It was much quieter beyond Fan y Big and the sun was shining brightly as I reversed my route around the escarpment edge. At the west side of Waun Rydd, I took a different trail. Rather than returning across its boggy plateau, I turned south-east to skirt the top of a combe in the direction of a broken crag.
A cairn beneath the crag marked the spot where an aircraft had crashed in the Second World War. This was becoming a theme of my walking lately. Back in March, Edita and I climbed Arenig Fawr in Snowdonia, where an American warplane had crashed in 1943, killing all eight crewmen on board. Here on Waun Rydd, five Canadian servicemen had been on nighttime training exercises in South Wales just after midnight on 6 July 1942 when their plane entered thick mist and slammed onto the top of the mountain’s plateau. The plane came to rest just over the edge, where some debris from the wreckage still remain for all to see. There were no survivors.
Drawn by the cairn I had come below the crag, but I could see from the map that my trail lay across its top. I had to scramble up it to gain the edge, but it was reasonably straightforward, with plenty of grassy ledges to walk up.
I was now on another magnificent escarpment in a quiet corner of the range, looking across forests to the south. The only downside was the wind, which blew powerfully over the edge, slowing my progress and making an otherwise flawless moment in time a little more uncomfortable.
I could see another giant cairn ahead of me on the southernmost corner of the Waun Rydd plateau.
‘What on earth is that?’ I thought to myself when I first spied it.
From afar it reminded me of a bear standing on its hind legs, but when I got there I could see that it looked nothing like a bear. Why these huge cairns to no one in particular have been erected at the furthest corners of Waun Rydd, when the summit had only a small pile of stones, is a mystery, but thankfully it’s a mystery I can happily live without knowing the answer to.
There was a nice flat rock next to the cairn that in hindsight would have made a good place for my second lunch. But I was saving the food for my final summit that I could see just a short distance away. The south-eastern end of the plateau divided into two forks like the tail of a kite. I now had to walk from one fork to the other, where I could see a projecting ridge descend then climb to the rounded top of Allt Lwyd, the destination I had determined for my final sandwich.
I chased two sheep on the dog leg around the escarpment edge, not because I had any amorous designs on them, but because they were too stupid to move off the path and let me past. Instead they ran in front of me for half a mile like a woolly escort.
It was exhilarating walking, but my legs were tired now, having stopped only once for half an hour in over six hours of walking.
The summit of Allt Llwd (654m) was a featureless peat bog. Had I sat down for lunch on its top then I would have soaked my rump more quickly than if I’d wet myself. I stayed on a landscaped path across its top; there was nowhere to stop and sit down until I was some way down the other side, where I found a grassy bank overlooking the Talybont Reservoir and across the combe where I had started the hike. I was back on the east side of the range with the Black Mountains now within reach. I could even make out a distant Sugar Loaf from where I sat (that’s a mountain, not the remains of someone else’s lunch).
The final 400m of descent to the car turned out to be easier on my tired legs than I’d feared. I ran down the steeper slopes beneath Allt Lwyd to spare my knees. A gentler path then traversed beneath woodland before dropping to the road. The midges found me again as I approached the car park. The sun was hot now, and I had to jump inside the car and put the air-con on as I got my breath back.
It was 4.30. I had been up and down 1,400m of ascent and descent, and across 25km of horizontal distance in 7½ hours.
This was Pen y Fan the hard way.
Route map
Pen y Fan from Talybont Reservoir
Total distance: 25.01km. Total ascent/descent: 1,403m.
View route map and download GPX
