Foraging in Porthkerry

We had a lie in, followed by our Saturday pancake breakfast this morning, then we drove to under a blue sky to visit Porthkerry Country Park for a walk along the coast path. We've walked there from Cold Knap in Barry several times, but I'm not sure if we've driven there before. A wooded valley with a broad grassy meadow runs down to pebbled beach through a saline marshy area, with different vegetation, albeit dried out at this time of year. A nice new boardwalk has been constructed running from the cafe to the beach, about three hundred metres, excellent for wheelchair users. I don't think it was there when we last visited three years ago. 

The entire domain is very well managed and litter free. The cafe is run Italian style with a wide range of usual snacks, but also offering a range of canoli worthy of a Montalbano story. The car park has Pay and Display machines, a pound for two hours. These incorporate contact-less pay devices linked to the mobile phone network I think. It worked fine, although the payment signal sent to the banking network took about a minute for verification to be transmitted. I stood peering at the rather dim black and white screen waiting for my ticket to be produced, and a kind lady stopped and asked if I needed help. I wondered if she'd often seen older people peering at the device trying to figure out how it works.

The coast path heads up from the beach, a stiff climb of about 70 metres. As the tide was at its lowest, we could have walked along the beach, but big pebbles make for a slow ankle twisting trudge, so the climb was the lesser of two evils. I say this as two years of park walking on the flat have reduced my climbing fitness, so my legs feel very stiff and take ages to loosen up. Clare went up faster than me, as she uses her exercise cycle several times a week. I wish we lived nearer some really steep hills for daily walking.

The Coast Path route takes you through Porthkerry Leisure Park, with over a hundred chalets owned if not rented on the clifftop and in a quarry cut into the cliff facing the sea. We walked to a headland on the far side of the Park and ate out picnic lunch there. Considering how close the coast is here to the flight path from Rhoose it was fairly quiet. I noted only two planes taking off, one Vueling and one KLM. It would be much busier in a normal summer season. I saw three different butterflies,white brown and blue. There were swallows and swifts in the air. A big black furry bumble bee was browsing the undergrowth at my feet and then I watched it take off. One of several passing swifts snatched it before my eyes. Something I've never seen before.

We didn't go much further on the coast path as we'd already walked for an hour, but we stopped to pick blackberries, from the abundance of bushes along the way, a pound and a quarter. On the way back to the car we stopped for coffee and canoli. There was a ten minute queue to be served, but it was worthwhile. I had to go and sit down and leave Clare in the queue as my feet were hurting more than usual, perhaps the wrong choice of walking shoes? Anyway, it didn't stop us from calling at Lidl's for groceries and wine on the way home.

We had a wonderful salmon soup for supper, from the bones of the filleted fish which arrived yesterday. The blackberries plus some apples we bought went on to cook, and then left overnight in the filtering bag used to make fruit jelly. Wonderful seasonal stuff! Then we watched a recording of Elin Fflur on S4C performing superbly before an audience in Bangor. Her show featured Eden, a trio of clog dancers, with an original way of dialoguing with the rock band, like a second drummer. The sound is different from the Irish folk style, in which musicians are more of a backing group for the dancers, an element of Welsh pop which isn't an echo of other genres of pop music.