At 5.10am the alarm clocked jarred its way into my consciousness and reminded me that today was one of those rare days that I had to turn my back on the rural idyll of Bradgate Park and join the (less than) happy band of commuters standing on the platform at Leicester station prior to travelling up to The Big Smoke for the day.

It is difficult to find a much greater sense of dislocation that the one I started my day with: at 6am I was driving through a silent and deserted medieval deer park and at 8am I was crammed onto an Underground train that bore more than a passing resemblance to a cattle truck. Thankfully only two stops on the Northern Line before walking up and down the City Road (it should only have been down but the culture shock seemed to throw my usually good sense of direction out of kilter) on my way to my destination in EC2A.

I always joke that I like to commute to London once or twice each year as it makes me appreciate how good my life here is. Once again I have made the point to myself and I am safely back at home feeling suitably appreciative of my rural existence. On the trip home I tried to calculate just how much an employer would have to offer me to induce me to put myself through the commuting experience twice a day, every day. Suffice to say, the sum involve is sufficiently large that the chances of my ever being lured away to the bright lights and gold-paved streets are, to all intents and purposes, non-existent.

In the words of Ricky Scaggs: “I’m just a country boy at heart.”

I have been walking in the Brecon Beacons since the early 1990s and, now that we no longer live halfway up a mountain, a trip to see friends in the area is not complete without at least one decent length walk involving a significant hill.

Despite the erosion, the crowds and the sheer familiarity of the area around Pen y Fan, the highest peak in southern Britain, still exerts a magnetic pull. I have climbed ‘The Fan’ in sun, rain, snow and gale force winds, in uniform and in civilian clothes, carrying big weights and no weight, on a tight schedule and with all the time in the world to stand and stare. I have friends for whom Snowdon or Kinder Scout are their spiritual hilltop homes: for me it’s Pen y Fan.

On this occasion I had the chance to be dropped off anywhere along the A470 as Nicola was off to Cardiff for the day, which saved me the perennial hillwalker’s dilemma over where to leave the car and gave me the rare opportunity to take a route up into the Central Beacons that I had not walked before. After that it would be over the top and down the other side by any number of possible routes, depending on the weather and how many miles were left in the legs, to get back to the caravan site at Brynich.

The first mile or so from the roadside to the hill gate was a steady uphill plod through an unremarkable conifer plantation but with the familiar sense of anticipation as the road fell away below and the big skies beckoned.

At the hill gate looking up

So many of the routes in the Central Beacons are either badly eroded scars or have been repaired so as to be paved highways so the prospect of picking a route up the shoulder of Cefn Crew without an obvious path to follow was a refreshing one.

The Beacons, in common with most of the upland areas of Britain, have been so heavily grazed by sheep for so many years that until 2001 little vegetation survived other than close-cropped grass and the ubiquitous and inedible bracken pursuing its relentless march across hillsides where the natural process of succession to scrub and woodland that would shade out the fern were held in check by the heavily subsidised ‘woolly maggots’.

What changed in 2001 was the outbreak of Foot & Mouth Disease. As the infection spread across the country, aided and abetted by the practice of transporting livestock for hundreds of miles by road often as a result of the closure of local markets and abattoirs, ironically caused by the imposition of new food safety standards. As a result, the night skies in these parts of rural Wales were lit up by the flames from enormous funeral pyres as the carcasses of tens of thousands of sheep and cattle, killed not by the disease but by the cull that was imposed by the government in an attempt to halt its spread, were burned .

Tormentil and bilberry -signs of reduced grazing pressure

Although the government compensated farmers for their losses, some were so traumatised by the experience of the pyres that they retired from farming altogether. Others took the opportunity of the enforced conversion of their livestock into cash to restructure their farm businesses and diversify. Either way, the numbers of sheep grazing the hills were decimated and did not recover to their pre-2001 levels. In ecological terms, this is the best thing to happen to these mountains in many a long year, although as a result of the predominance of farmers among the membership of National Park Authorities and the pressure on National Park staff to never or say or do anything that might be construed as being critical of the farming lobby, this is a truth that no-one dare speak.

As I continued up towards Blaen Crew and the first of several false summits, the air was full of the song of skylarks and the occasional screech of a buzzard or red kite soaring overhead. The red kite has been one of the great success stories of recent reintroductions of previously native species that had been driven to extinction in the UK by the hand of man, in this case by gamekeepers on sporting estate seeking to stop these raptors taking game bird chicks. When I first lived in Wales, red kites were still so rare that the Army mounted a round-the-clock guard of known nesting sites in Mid Wales. Twenty years later we can see these wonderful birds in the skies over Leicestershire.

View from the summit of Pen y Fan with Cribyn in the foreground

Cresting the ridge, I followed the well-worn path around to Bwlch Du Wynt – ‘Pass of the Dark Wind’ – where the wind really does hit you on a winter’s day, but on this occasion the sun was shining and the air was still. From here, the path joins the tourist motorway coming up from Pont ar Daf car park – the shortest, easiest and dullest route up Pen y Fan. I skirted around Corn Du and, after the short final pull up to the top, I was once again standing on the summit of South Wales’ highest mountain, standing a few tantalising feet short of the magical 3,000 foot mark. Avoiding the excited family group posing with a Union Jack on the summit cairn, I took a moment to recall some of the previous times I had stood in this place – with old and bold paratroopers recounting tales of the ‘Fan Dance’, part of SAS Selection and the time I had a soldier collapse with exhaustion and hypothermia and the quickest way to get him off the hill was to kick him over the top and down the other side to the shelter of Cwm Gwdi Training Camp, now long since demolished and the site returned to nature. I have trudged up that hill with 40lbs on my back dripping with sweat despite the freezing fog and have run up it on a summer’s day in T-shirt and fell shoes. This time, thinking about everything that has happened since I last climbed The Fan the over-riding feeling was “I’m back and I’m still alive”.

Windy Gap, on this occasion without the wind

The problem with climbing mountains is that sooner or later you have to go back down again. The words of Alfred Wainwright “you may not pass this way again” are always in my mind whenever I turn my back on the view from any summit and start the downward, homeward trek. Picking my way over the scree, my knees and thigh muscles wasted no time in informing me that they were not getting any younger and that, after seven years living back in the lowlands of the East Midlands, Cribyn on this occasion would be a hill too far. I heeded their advice and bypassed the next peak to arrive at the pass where the old Gap Road crosses between Cribyn and Fan y Big. I always think of Windy Gap as a place to shelter briefly from a gale or driving rain and take on some high-calorie sustenance before once again braving the elements to tackle the next summit. I have never before had to seek shade from the relentless sunshine and strongly suspect  this to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will never be repeated.

Off the hill and back below the tree line

All that now remained was to negotiate the loose, stony surface of the Gap Road- painful on tired legs – and to trudge the final few hot tarmac miles back down to the real world.

Our little tin box on wheels

At the end of July we took the caravan to Brecon for a week to revisit some old haunts and catch up with old friends. Now I have to admit to having changed my opinion of caravans over the past couple of years. Whereas my views previously verged on the Clarksonesque, I do have to admit that our little tin box on wheels offers many advantages over our previous portable holiday accommodation of choice, the trailer tent. For a start the bed is a lot more comfortable, especially on this trip as, following an unfortunate incident where one of the cats got locked in the caravan a few days before we left home, the tin box’s sofa/bed cushions were unusable so we took the mattress off our bed instead. The other great improvement is that, instead of spending the best part of an hour wrestling with poles and canvas, usually in a howling gale or driving rain, arriving on site involves driving in, unhitching the caravan from the car, winding down the four legs and putting the kettle on. Caravanning is not sexy, it’s not cool and it’s not glamorous but then neither am I and, what is more, I have got to an age where comfort is becoming an increasingly appealing alternative to all the above.

The main aim of this trip was to catch up with old friends and that started with our choice of base for the week. In 2004, when I first started work at the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, I lived for two months in a cottage at Brynich Caravan Park .I had been getting increasingly desperate in my search for somewhere to live between starting work and buying our own place once the family moved down to join me and enquired about pitching  tent on the site for two or three months over the summer. Fortunately, they had a vacant staff cottage, which the owner, Colin Jones, kindly offered to me at the same rent per month as I would have had to pay for a week at holiday cottage prices. I shall always be grateful to Colin for this act of generosity and the month that we spent with six of us crammed into the tiny three-bedroom house remains a cherished family memory. Colin and family have since sold the caravan site to the Caravan Club and, as a week at Members’ rates plus the membership was cheaper than staying at non-Members’ prices, we signed on the dotted line.

Evening sunshine over Brecon

We have stayed on a Caravan Club site in the past so knew what to expect: high standards of cleanliness and presentation, a list of rules as long as your arm and an atmosphere of suburbia transplanted to the Welsh countryside, right down to net curtains, chintzy ornaments and people not speaking to their neighbours. Never mind; we had picked the site for its convenient access to Brecon, which is pleasant mile or so’s stroll down the towpath of the Brecon & Monmouth Canal, rather than for its ambience. However,we did find it a bit strange when we were sitting out on evening enjoying a late supper and a glass of wine and suddenly felt strangely alone. Despite it being a balmy July evening in a beautiful spot, it seemed that everyone else had scuttled back inside their tin boxes, drawn the curtains and were busy catching up with Coronation Street. I half expected the Camp Commandant or one of his lackeys to appear and take us to task for deviant behaviour but thankfully we got away with it.

On the Monday evening we caught up with some friends and former colleagues from the National Park Authority for a drink after work at the extensively refurbished Castle of Brecon Hotel. I have many fond memories of Brecon, having lived and worked there for  total of over five years in two instalments, but tropically warm evenings are not one of them. Sitting outside in the evening sunshine, it was good to catch up and share stories but rather depressing to hear of the constant cuts to services and the struggle for funding in the world of National Parks. National Park Authorities in the UK have two statutory purposes under the 1996 Environment Act: to conserve and enhance the special qualities of the Park and to promote opportunities for people to understand and enjoy those special qualities. Unfortunately, they are constituted as miniature local authorities and spend a huge proportion of their modest budgets on running Planning Departments to enforce the conservation of what are perceived to be the special qualities only without the staffing and resources to do this efficiently and without the Members of the National Park Authority having the democratic mandate to do it in a way that is accountable to local residents. As government cutbacks lead to even fewer resources being made available to National Park Authorities, they cling to these planning powers and commit an ever-greater percentage of the available funding to shoring up an unsustainable situation. There is no reason at all to my mind why, having written the Development Plan and the National Park Management Plan, the business of operating the Development Control system that is at heart a mechanistic process of comparing any planning application to the Plan and then making a decision on whether or not to grant planning permission, could not be put in the hands of the County and District councils within whose areas the National Park is located. This would mean that planning applications are processed by a larger Planning Department that has the resources and economies of scale to do so more efficiently than a tiny National Park Authority Planning Department where one member of staff going off sick is enough to cause disruption and backlogs and decided upon by a Planning Committee made up of councillors elected by the inhabitants of the local area rather than one that consists of nominees and appointees without that accountability.

Brecon Castle at dusk

Bearing in mind this obsession within National Park Authorities about planning and the fact that designation as a National Park is the highest form of legal protection that can be afforded to an area of landscape in the UK, it is more than somewhat ironic that decisions concerning major infrastructure projects, the things that can cause the greatest damage to these precious areas and which National Park status ought to protect them against, are taken away from the remit of National Park Authorities and placed within the gift of central government. Hence the decision in 2006 to route a gas pipeline through the Brecon Beacons National Park in the face of local opposition and the recent announcement by the Government that fracking for shale gas could potentially be permitted in National Parks to add to the presence of a nuclear power station in Snowdonia and a cement works in the Peak District.