The Ring Of Iron

The title of this post sounds scary, right? You have no idea. But only if you are Welsh.

I am fairly confident that growing up and going to school in England until the age of 11 that I studied some sort of English history. Not like detailed complicated stuff in Primary School but something I am sure. But before I started returning back to the country of my birth every two years-ish (no trip during 2020 because of COVID...) starting in 2014, I'm finding that I really didn't understand much about English history at all. And by English history, of course, I mean British history.

Let me take a quick stab at how I would sum up English / British history from the time I was 11 to let's say when I was 46ish.

A long time ago there were Picts and Gaels and Angles and Saxons living on what is now Britain. Eventually they got themselves organized and some how, some way, they decided that someone should be king. Then in 1066, William the Conqueror invaded from France, killed King Harold and took over the throne and thus the entire island of Britain. A couple of centuries later, there was a civil war started by some dude named Oliver Cromwell and that lasted a few years until the crown was restored. After that...the War of the Roses...exploration and colonization all over the world...Queen Victoria...and then we're at the 20th century.

That's it. That's my take on English / British history from when I was 11 and supplemented by absolutely zero learning for the subsequent 35 years or so.

Of course, it's way wrong. I mean, it's not exactly wrong. It's just missing some subtleties. 

Take what is now Wales, for example. And we'll start with William the Conqueror and 1066. 

Edward I, King of England 1272-1307.

When William the Conqueror took over what at that time was England, he established control over as much territory as possible by dividing his newly acquired land among lords that were loyal to him. That strategy allowed him to maintain control over a ton of land without having to secure the area with any sort of National or Crown-provided military force. But he didn't control the entire island of Britain right away. There were local warlords and landowners in charge of their own piece of turf who didn't turn over their lands to the Conqueror as soon as he was crowned. 

And spoiler alert: that situation lasted way beyond the rule of William the Conqueror. Over the centuries there was a ton of small scale, localized fighting and changing of hands of lands. Let's go forward in time about 150 years beyond 1066 and let's focus on Wales. Specifically the north of Wales. Which was decidedly not under the control of the English king at the beginning of the 13th century.

In the early part of the 13th century (so the early 1200s...), much of what is now the north part of Wales was controlled by a Prince named Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (or Llywelyn the Great). By all accounts, he was one of the greatest or maybe THE greatest Prince to have ever ruled the northwest part of Wales which somehow carried the title Prince of Wales. During his rule, Llywelyn managed to transform a territory ruled by lords engulfed in continual civil war into a territory which worked on all levels. He was even officially recognized as the Prince of Wales by the English crown.

But then in 1240, Llywelyn the Great died. And after a brief period where his son, Daffyd, was mostly kind of sort of in charge but then also died, all of Llywelyn the Great's lands and holdings passed to his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. And this is where the end of Welsh independence started. 

Conwy Castle, as seen from the opposite bank of the River Conwy.

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was no Llywelyn ab Iorwerth. He feuded with neighboring lords. He treated his people poorly. He started to call himself the Prince of Wales without endorsement from the King (who was then Edward I). And when Edward I called Llywelyn to Chester to pay homage, he declined the invitation. Now most of these things may seem like small stuff, but the direct snub to the King was pretty bold for the 1200s. And pretty bold to do it to Edward. We'll get to that last part.

Eventually of all Llywelyn's nonsense got to be too much for Edward and he mustered an army and marched on north Wales in 1277. Victory was swift and the resulting Treaty of Aberconwy left Llywelyn in place as a recognized Prince of Wales but with much reduced lands. That defeat and reduction in power really didn't sit well with either Llywelyn or his half brother Daffyd. 

Lots of Llywelyns and Daffyds in this story, I realize. Apologies. It will be over soon.

Five years later, Llywelyn was back at it, this time waging war on neighboring lords in the name of Welsh independence. And this time, Edward had had just about as much as he could take was determined to leave Wales with a different outcome. He marched on Wales again but this time killed Llywelyn (and Daffyd, who ended up with his head on a spike) and kept the land he captured, determined never to deal with Welsh rebellion or skirmishes again. 

To ensure control of the land (and complete subjugation of Wales), Edward decided not to rely on anyone Welsh to hold lands and keep things in order. Nor did he settle on some kind of agent of the Crown to do the same thing. Instead, he relocated a population of English men, women and children into Wales and granted them land and safety. And he constructed a series of ten castles from Howarden and Flint in the northeast down to Aberystwyth and Builth in the southwest. The castles collectively were known as the Ring of Iron and they were there for one purpose: to make sure Wales would never have any illusions about being independent ever again.

I am sure there is a ton of detail missing in my four paragraph description of two wars waged by Edward I on Wales. But I think a little history is important every now and then. Or like maybe all the time.

Caernarfon Castle, as seen from the parking lot.

So, we visited some castles in Wales. Let me say a few words about that because this is not something we would normally do. And this is going to make me sound spoiled.

One of the side effects of traveling so much (I know...poor me...just bear with me here...) is that we end up seeing a lot of the same sorts of things in all sorts of different points on the globe and we start to get numb to the exposure of it all. I don't know how many churches, royal palaces and botanical gardens we have been to over the last 13 years or so but it's a lot. I mean like a ton. So many that we really start to question if we really need to go to another one. I mean how is it going to be any different than the last one or two of five or ten of whatever we happen to be thinking about visiting?

Castles are on this list, although let's face it, this is mostly an issue only in Europe. Since I turned 45, I've been to castles in Germany, Ireland, Scotland and maybe one or two other places and they are all pretty much the same. Big stone walls; no roofs; maybe a moat and a drawbridge; a dungeon sometimes; and maybe a keep or some lawns inside. If there's one place I associate castles with more than any other land, it's Britain. I grew up there in a town with a castle in it, for crying out loud. We can't visit every castle that is near where we are going when we travel. We just can't.

So when I drafted my first list of what we could possibly see in England and Wales, the list had a few castles on it. Seriously? After all that numb-ness, I wanted to visit another castle or two? The answer is yes. Because some of those castles in the Ring of Iron built by Edward I are quite possibly the best that have ever been designed and built on this planet ever. And yes, that sentence deserved two "ever"s. We had to visit some castles in Wales.

The outside walls of Conwy (top) and Caernarfon (bottom).

We picked two. And then added a third. 

When I wrote earlier that Edward I built a series of 10 castles to make up the Ring of Iron, that wasn't exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that he started building 10 castles but some were just never finished, including one of the three that we visited. Castles cost a lot of money, even for kings, and building 10 of these things in quick succession apparently was more than the Crown could afford. 

Four of Edward's 10 castles have been honored with a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. These four today (Harlech, Beaumaris, Caernarfon and Conwy) are largely intact and apparently exhibit outstanding military architecture design courtesy of Edward's castle architect, James of St. George. We selected two of these four to visit, Caernarfon and Conwy, and then added a third in Aberystwyth Castle, which just happened to be there in rainy Aberystwyth and totally free when we were in town. Other than the picture below, I'm skipping Aberystwyth. There's just not much to engage with there.

Some of what's left of Aberystwyth Castle, built after the first of Edward's Wales campaigns.

Both Conwy (1283-1287) and Caernarfon (1283-1330, but never completed) are castles that are attached to a larger city wall. Harlech and Beaumaris are not. We didn't know this before we got there. We just happened to pick two that we're a combined castle and attached town in one package. Both the castles and the walls were built by Edward: the castle to hold the royal quarters and those Crown officials needing those sorts of accommodations and the town to hold the English citizens that Edward imported to Wales as part of his plan to crush the spirit of the Welsh.

Generally speaking, the condition of both castles and their attached walls are pretty similar. The perimeter of each of the castles is generally intact, with impressive towers (like lots of towers) at various points around exterior walls. The town wall at Conwy is intact; you can actually walk around the whole of the perimeter as long the town is not performing work on parts of the wall when you are in town like they were in late May of 2026. Caernarfon's walls are a bit less continuous. There are clearly spots which are largely intact, particularly along the west side of the town.

Once you move inside of each castle, the condition of the interior is also pretty similar between the two. There's basically nothing there. Maybe a stone vault or arch here and there but they are way more runied on the inside than the outside. This makes a ton of sense. The interiors of medieval castles didn't need to be made out of stone. The shell was the thing that mattered and stone was expensive. Less durable interors made sense on a number of levels. 

A model showing Caernarfon Castle and the attached town. Very GOT-ish.

The presence of both castles when you are next to them is super impressive. The walls are thick and high and full of murder holes, tiny gaps through which things can be dropped on sieging forces with a very low risk of any retaliation. They are also both sited next to a significant body of water, restricting any sort of land attack. 

If you plan to visit and you want to be fairly comprehensive about your time in these castles, plan on about an hour for Conwy and about twice that for Caernarfon. And by walking the whole thing (or most of each one) you get a sense for how the circulation is or is not tied together. I don't know how many towers there are at Caernarfon but each one seems like it's one way up and one way down and there's nothing joining these things together above absolute ground level. That means a ton of climbing to get up each one. On the day we visited Caernarfon, my step counter on my phone topped out at over 12,000 steps and I'm convinced at least half of those were actual steps climbing and descending the very large and oversized steps in Caernarfon's towers. At the end of two hours, I was done climbing steps. I can't believe people ever could do this in armor.

Of the two castles, I'd go with Conwy as my favorite. I'm half convinced I'm developing some sort of ADD as I age and definitely taking in something that was smaller with fewer spaces to investigate was preferred over massive Caernarfon. I also think if someone asked a random person to draw a castle, there's a good chance that they would produce something close to what Conwy looks like. It's like a cartoon version of a castle but of course, cartoons generally come from the real thing. From across the water, it's just four massive towers with crenellated walls connecting the towers. I love it. 

I also love the approach sequence to Conwy along the town walls. I know this is a very modern approach (I mean it's not like residents of the town on Conwy back in the 1200s would go to the castle for a picnic on a Saturday afternoon or something) but the walk from the parking lot along the old walls getting you closer to this massive medieval fortress with each step definitely builds anticipation for your visit. Of course, you don't enter the castle the way they did back in the day. The original staircase (which is now mostly ruined) to the front door is super steep. The gentle paved ramp is much better for our 21st century physiques. 

The approach to Conwy along the city wall and the interior of the castle today.

There's something else that we got out of our visits to Conwy and Caernarfon: Edward I was one bad dude. And I'm not using bad in a good sense. Bad means bad here.

Maybe it was the time that he was alive. Maybe it was the fact that he was bigger and stronger than pretty much everyone around him (Edward was 6'-2"). Maybe it was the fact that he was personally involved in wars for much of his life (including one of the Crusades to the holy land). Maybe it was because he was the King of England. But Edward I (or Edward Longshanks as he was sometimes known) did not seem like a pretty nice guy.

The historical stories about Edward's fits of rage are a little unbelievable, including him ripping out some of his son's hair from his head and someone else dying in Edward's presence just because Edward was Edward. But there seems to be little debate about the fact that Edward had an unpredictable and fierce temper and was also vindictive. I mean he did put Daffyd ap Gruffudd's head on a spike, but that's not really all he did to that dude. He first had him dragged him alive through the streets of Shrewsbury, hanged him, revived him and then disemboweled him and burned his entrails while he was still alive. Of course, all kings might have behaved similarly back then. I'm not sure. 

He also seemed pretty vindictive towards the Welsh. Maybe they deserved it. But the kind of personal revenge he plotted and executed seemed petty. I mean moving in an entire population of loyal subjects just to make sure the locals (who I assume were automatically lower in social status) understood their place is a lot of effort to show someone who's boss. He also removed any sort of notion of there being a Prince of Wales who was actually Welsh. He crowned his own first-born son as the Prince of Wales, making his offspring the first non-native Prince of Wales in history, a tradition which continues to this day to still humiliate the Welsh. And that's outside of the whole mutilation of Daffyd ap Gruffudd's body while he was still alive. 

There is speculation that Edward used the story of the dream of Roman emperor Magnus Maximus as inspiration for the construction of Caernarfon castle. In the legend of Magnus Maximus, who had strong Welsh ties, the emperor dreamed that he met a beautiful princess and when he awoke, sent messengers out to find her while also building a castle to impress her. It is thought that the colored banding on the walls of Caernarfon is deliberately imitative of the walls of Constantinople and that the legend of Maximus' dream was a source of inspiration. World leaders using emperors from past and long dead empires as a source of real inspiration to guide decisions in an era far removed from those times? Sounds like crazy stuff to me. Or maybe it happens often. Who knows? 

The interior of Caernarfon and a view of the town wall from one of the Castle's towers.

These two impenetrable fortresses that Edward built that we visited by the way? Both captured by the Welsh.

OK, so it was really brief in one case. 

Caernarfon Castle was captured by Welsh rebel leader Madog ap Llwelyn in 1294 and held for a year. How awesome a name is Madog, by the way and I promise that's the last Llwelyn in this post. 

At Conwy in 1401, two Welshmen disguised themselves as carpenters convinced the guards to let them in while everyone who would usually be inside the Castle was at Good Friday services. The two "carpenters" then killed the guards and held the castle for 15 days before a surrender was negotiated. 

Were Conwy and Caenarfon worth keeping on our agenda despite our (probably snobbish) aversion to visiting castles? Probably. I'm glad we went, particularly to Conwy. Does that mean all castles are back on future agendas? Umm...no. There's still a high bar for an intentional castle visit for us, I think. But I definitely feel a little more connected to English / British history. Subtleties, I'm telling you. 

The original (now ruined) entrance to Conwy Castle.

Sheep

Until the age of 11, I grew up in England, which meant I grew up with sheep in my life. By that, I don't mean like we had a flock of sheep in our back garden or anything (we didn't!), but sheep were out there. Somewhere. Somewhere close. Not that far away. If we took a drive to see my grandparents or went for a walk somewhere or even went on a family holiday (all too often to Wales in my grandma and grandpa's caravan), we were bound to find some sheep somewhere. You can't grow up English and not have sheep in your life.

Then we moved to the United States. All of a sudden...no sheep. Like none. Nowhere. Like lamb to eat was not a thing. No fluffy white animals baa-ing in the fields. No lambs gamboling in spring. Cows? Sure? Lots and lots and lots of cows and their chewing and their methane. But sheep? Nowhere to be found. Not a one. 

That lack of sheep here in America sticks with me. So much so that when I go to Great Britain and leave a city, the first thing I do when I see sheep is turn to whomever I am traveling with (newsflash: it's my wife) and say "sheep!" (although admittedly, sometimes it's "sheeps" or "sheepies"...). It's a thing. Sheep = Britain = home. What can I say? And this year, on my first trip to Wales since I was a kid younger than 11 years old, when I saw my first sheep in Wales, I am sure I exclaimed "sheep!" or my wife said the same thing to me. 

Or it might have been "sheeps" or "sheepies". 

Sheep on Mount Snowdon.

We expected that we would see a lot of sheep in Wales. And we were correct. There were sheep seemingly everywhere. In the fields. On the mountains. Around corners. Close. In the distance. Sometimes on the side of the road. Sometimes in the middle of the road. We figured maybe it would be worth spending a little time in Wales getting a little bit up close to some sheep and some sheep history.

Sheep history? Bear with me a little bit.

Invariably when we travel, we dig a little bit or a lot bit into the local history of the place where we are exploring. Wales was no exception to that rule. When we started to piece together some sites to explore Welsh history, we kept running into the Industrial Revolution. 

Why the Industrial Revolution? Well, because there was a lot of industry in Wales that was at the epicenter of the transition away from an agrarian economy and into manufacturing, that's why. And with industry to remove those natural resources from the land, you also need an infrastructure to transport those materials to points of sale. 

One of the first things that got inked into our agenda was a visit to the Pontcysysllte Aqueduct near Llangollen. We booked our passage over Thomas Telford's masterpiece of civil engineering early and it paid off with an amazing day puttering along in a narrow boat through part of the United Kingdom's vast canal network. 

Then we explored visiting a coal mine but we kind of did that in 2014 when we paid a visit to an old coal mine in Yorkshire (and then sort of repeated it with a tin mine visit in Cornwall just two years ago). We looked at slate as a source of inspiration and found that the National Slate Museum was closed for renovation. Bummer! 

So we decided to double down on sheep. Or wool. And if you are thinking that wool does not have any part in the Industrial Revolution, you'd be way wrong. 

Now, there was a time when wool production in Great Britain looked a lot like the photograph above. Individual men and women with spinning wheels in their houses taking wool that had been cleaned and straightened by hand and then made into thread and spun onto bobbins all over the land. And yes, I did ask if it was OK for me to take a photograph but clearly the woman on the left is the only one who was interested enough to pose and smile. We'll come back to these ladies later.

I know what you are thinking...where on Earth did we find a group of women sitting around using spinning wheels? Well...the National Wool Museum, where else? 

We journeyed through a lot of back roads and even more back, back roads that were one to one and half cars wide in our week plus in Wales. It took a lot of those sorts of roads to get to the National Wool Museum in Dre-fach Felindre. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we. Apparently it's near Newcastle Emlyn Llandysul. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we and neither do we still. But Google Maps knows. And despite a lot of very tight roads, we made it just in time for opening time at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. 

It was packed. I'm not kidding. The parking lot was at least half full. In the morning in the middle of nowhere. I told you wool was a big deal.

The National Wool Museum is housed in a pair of old textile mill buildings that used to be the Cambrian Mills. Industrialization makes a lot more sense, now, right? Mills I can get behind as a concept. They must have been chock full of looms making blankets or some other kind of large scale textile products, right? 

And yes, that is what happened at the old Cambrian Mills, but it's not all that happened. 

We started our tour of the Wool Museum by chatting to the four ladies above, then we moved past a quick history of sheep and wool and then walked into the first floor of one of the mills and found the willower and the carding engine. What's a willower, you might ask? It's a machine that disentangles wool. Pretty simple, right? 

No. No, it is not. This machine is massive. I'd guess (and I'm going from memory a bit here), it is about five to six feet wide and maybe 15 feet long. It's absolutely enormous. It's as complicated as a bunch of rollers with teeth through which cleaned wool is fed into from a large hopper of sorts. This machine is gigantic. And all it does is disentangle wool that people used to have to do by hand.

So what's a carding engine then? It's a machine that combs the wool after it's been willowed and gets it ready for spinning. It effectively converts wool fibers into almost wool thread. How big is this machine? Slightly bigger than the willower. Put these two machines end to end and it's about 30 to 35 feet long. All these two things do is take cleaned wool and make it into thread. Almost. They occupied an entire length of a giant mill building.

Industrial Revolution? Wool? Yes. Very much so.

The carding engine (top) and the spinning mule (bottom).

The machinery didn't stop there.There is a spinning mule on the second floor of the mill, a machine that basically takes the thread out of the carding engine and puts it onto bobbins. This machine is the one that killed spinning as a cottage industry in England and Wales and other parts of the world where that sort of thing went on. If you had one of these things, you no longer needed to pay women and men to do this at home. It was cheaper and faster to have a machine do it. That's amazing that you can buy this giant machine which you have to maintain and operate and that it pays off over time. I'm sure that return on investment was quick. Don't mess with the power of machinery.

After the spinning mule? Some looms and some machines to dry and finish the final products woven on the looms. The scale and size of the machines in the Museum is staggering. I can't imagine how revolutionary these would have seemed to people back in the 18th century when some of these contraptions were rolled out. We think we are scared by Artificial Intelligence today? Try seeing one of these giants for the first time. It must have been astounding.

Some of these things are absolutely gorgeous, by the way. These are old school machines. Large mechanisms made up of giant pieces of iron that move and interlock and work together precisely to make what once seemed impossible into very real possibilities. I cannot imagine the noise and the heat coming off these machines. We were told they were originally coal-fueled and steam-powered, although there is an operational water wheel outside one of the two mill buildings. I am sure at some point water was used as some sort of power for the whole process.

Mills, with an abundance of natural materials from all the sheep in the country, proliferated in Wales. In the late 1800s there were 23 mills in the area around Dre-fach Felindre alone. If we thought this was in the middle of nowhere today, I can't imagine how it would have been 140 or so years ago. There must have been mills and nothing else. And it must have been noisy and dirty.

The absolutely gorgeous teasel gig (top) and the old water wheel (bottom).

Wool comes from sheep, right? 

Not a trick question. It does come from sheep.

Earlier in this post I wrote that we doubled down on sheep and then all I've done since that sentence is write about the National Wool Museum. But we did do something else sheep-related before we went to the Wool Museum. And it wasn't about history or learning or the Industrial Revolution. It was about chilling with some sheep for a bit.

What exactly does that mean? We took a sheep for a walk. That's what that means.

Say hi to Biscuit. She's a nine year old Ouessant sheep, which apparently is pretty old for a Ouessant. Ouessants are often called Breton dwarfs; they are the smallest naturally-occurring breed of sheep in the entire world and they originated (maybe not surprisingly given their alternate moniker) in Brittany, France. On an island name Ouessant, if you must know. They tend to top out at about 19 or 20 inches tall. That's a pretty small sheep.

We didn't meet Biscuit in Brittany. We met Biscuit in Wales in a town called Crai, which is somewhere in the vicinity of the Brecon Beacons National Park. And if you thought the National Wool Museum was in the middle of nowhere, Dre-fach Felindre has nothing on Crai. It took us the better part of 3-1/2 to 4 hours to get there from Llandudno. Not a quick trip. 

Biscuit lives on the Aberhyddnant Organic Farm in Crai along with a number of other sheep of various species. Pretty much all of those other sheep, including some April born lambs, are bigger than Biscuit. We were there to walk one of the sheep on the farm for about 45 minutes to an hour. 

And no, I'm not kidding. We went to the middle of nowhere to walk a sheep. So did six other people who we'd never met before. Sheep trekking is a thing in Wales, I guess.

Introduction to the flock (top) and those sheep not eligible for selection on the move (bottom).

First activity? Sheep selection. Socks. Fluffy. Patches. Jacob. Benji. And of course Biscuit. Maybe there was a Bo in there. Some others that I can't remember. I picked Biscuit because she was absolutely the smallest adult sheep I had ever seen in my life and I figured if there was any chance of a sheep bolting or getting out of control under my care, better that I have a 35 pound or so sheep to deal with than something larger. 

Rookie sheep walker. What can I say? 

Next up? Rules of the road. Keep the lead (that's leash in American) on the same side of the sheep's head as you are standing; if you lose control of your sheep, it will go find other sheep to be with and chasing it won't make things any better; and sheep have absolutely no spatial awareness so beware those horns because they don't register as being there to a sheep. 

Biscuit had no horns. I'm good with that last rule. Or so I thought. 

What comes next? Take your sheep by the lead and let's go! Walking time!

Let's go, Biscuit!

If this isn't one of the silliest and most self-indulgent things I have ever done in my life, I don't know what beats it. I mean, we drove almost 4 hours to get to a farm and paid someone to let me walk one of their sheep for an hour (to clarify...Sophia also had her own sheep). But when am I ever going to have the opportunity to do this again? And why NOT do this? There's no answer to that last question by the way because there is no acceptable answer. This was a can't miss experience. 

What's it like walking a sheep? It's pretty relaxing. There's absolutely no stress involved in leading a fluffy sheep around through fields both empty of other sheep and full of other sheep. It's actually kind of peaceful. If the sheep want to walk, let them walk. If the sheep want to eat, let them eat. If they just decide to stand still, you can generally get them going with a tug of the lead. They are very inclined to be led. They are, after all, sheep. 

Biscuit, by the way, is all sheep. And by that I mean a natural born follower. I was told at the beginning of our sheep trek that Biscuit is pretty docile and that she is happy just following a "big white bottom" (not my words). That description of Biscuit is spot on. Give her a couple of other sheep to follow and she's all in! She's motoring as fast as those little Breton legs can carry her. Third or fourth or even second in a pack and she's off! 

But get to the front of the pack and she stopped dead in her tracks. Not interested in being out front in any way. Not Biscuit. Not this tiny sheep.

Biscuit following other sheep.

She's also a talker and not much of an eater. All of the other sheep seemed to be stopping regularly to munch of some leaves. Biscuit? Not interested. She was all about the walk except for one spot where she did actually stop for a snack until like three or four other larger (because ALL sheep are larger than Biscuit) piled over and on top of her and pushed her aside to get to whatever she had found to eat. Poor Biscuit.

This is the point in the walk when sheep having no spatial awareness kicked in for me. In the process of knocking my sheep out of the way, one sheep also managed to get his or her horns into my waist area on the way to the greenery. "I have horns? Didn't notice. Needed a bite to eat. If my horns get in the way, who cares." Yes, that's my made up dialog from the sheep that horned me.

But when it came to voice and volume, Biscuit was the champ. She was making way more noise than any of the other sheep which also endeared her to me. We managed to get a video of her looking over to her left before she turned towards the camera, let out a giant "baaaa" and then turned back away, her cameo for the camera done for the day.

Yes, I got attached to a sheep in Wales. I'm telling you...I got the best one.

Larger sheep moving Biscuit (center) out of the way.

It is amazing to think that at one time, sheep like Biscuit were part of a giant economic engine that drove trade between countries and caused men to invent huge contraptions to maximize the return on the power of their precious natural resources that just happened to have four feet. Before sheep were domesticated and wool was sourced and converted to thread, mankind relied on plants and skins for clothing, I guess. Imagine having a predictable product that could be reliable made into intentional garments when you had no such option before. It must have been revolutionary.

I did have one question about this whole thing though: what did sheep do with all this wool before humans were around? Did it just grow and grow and grow because there were no men and women with shears around to cut it off? 

The answer from the farm? Apparently sheep were bred over time to produce the maximum amount of wool, which of course required frequent shearings from humans. 

What does the Wool Museum think about that? Pretty accurate, I guess. The Wool Museum did acknowledge that breeding is a factor in how modern sheep produce wool. But it also mentioned that before sheep were domesticated (that would be more than 5,000 years ago in Wales), sheep would shed their wool in the summer. Makes sense. I mean we sort of saw the same thing happening to wild bighorn sheep in Rocky Mountain National Park six years ago.

Sheep? Industrial Revolution? Yes, it's a thing.

Two last wool thoughts. 

First, if it wasn't obvious already, I loved the National Wool Museum. The place completely fascinated me and it started before I even set foot inside the old Cambrian Mills. Outside the Museum, there's a natural dye garden. Who knew that the roots of the madder plant were used to dye wool red? Certainly not me, who had never even heard of a madder plant.

Second and lastly, the woman on the left spinning and smiling at us and who was so gracious to walk us through a lot of the mechanics of using a spinning wheel? She was spinning thread from the very same farm where Biscuit lives. Connections. I'm telling you. The things we connect to each other when we travel.

You know the next time I'm in England or Wales and I see sheep, I'm saying "sheeps!". It just has way more meaning now.

Canal Boat Diaries

One thing that becomes completely obvious when you travel a lot or even a little is that all travel days are not created equal. Some days you just look forward to way more than others. Sometimes those days pan out really well and sometimes (and regrettably) they disappoint. This post is about one of those most anticipated days. And it did not disappoint.

The photograph above is a ground-level view of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct crossing the River Dee in the town of Trevor in Wales. It is the longest aqueduct in Great Britain and the tallest canal aqueduct in the world. It was designed in the late 18th century by Thomas Telford and was completed and opened in 1805. It is still in use today. Telford, one of several world famous civil engineers active in the 1800s along with fellow Britons Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, knew what he was doing.

The aqueduct was designed to be navigable by narrowboats, a type of barge particular to the island of Great Britain which are generally less than 7 feet wide and less than 75 feet long, although in some cases they are significantly shorter than the 75 feet maximum. The use of narrowboats and canals in Britain began in earnest at around the time of the Industrial Revolution to transport goods to and from mills and factories and mines. That network of canals constructed in Britain to move all those goods around, into and out of the country is still there today and is still very, very active, even if its original purpose is (mostly) long gone.

Over the time that I've been writing this blog, we've visited other significant works of civil engineering in Britain, including the Tower Bridge and the Thames Barrier in London and the Firth of Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland. The Pontsysyllte Aqueduct is located less than an hour and 15 minutes from our hotel in Llandudno where we were spending our first three nights in Wales. We could not pass up the opportunity to visit this icon of British engineering.

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in the Welsh landscape. 

You don't need to do much in the way of anything special outside of having a car to get to the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. You can drive right up to this marvel of stone and cast iron. You can even walk across it on the walkway that is adjacent the waterway which makes up the oh-so-impressive full 12 feet width of this structure. It's a piece of cake to get a super detailed, up close experience here.

We didn't do that. 

Yes, we wanted to see the Aqueduct from both below and above but we didn't want to just drive up to it and walk across. We wanted to cross the full span in a narrow boat high above the Dee River. I mean, after all, this is what the Aqueduct was really and originally built to support. Let's be legit about this experience and go over it in a boat. And there are companies in the area around the town of Trevor which offer round trip boat rides over the Aqueduct and it only takes a couple of hours.

We didn't do that either. 

What's better than booking a spot on a narrow boat to cross the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct? How about having a 32 foot long boat all for your party and nobody else? Private boat for the day so we could take the trip at our own leisure and schedule with nobody else to worry about? Sounded ideal. THAT is what we wanted to do as soon as we found out about it. Boat for the day? Rented!

Then we went one better over that situation. These boats hold a maximum of ten people. We had the whole boat. Why not bring some other folks along. So we got my cousin and her husband to come down from Manchester and my uncle and aunt to come over from Yorkshire and we made a day of it. It is rare that I get to spend time actually doing something with my relatives from over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean so this day was poised to be amazing. Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in a boat? That was our original plan. Doing it as a private excursion with family? How does it get any better?

By the way, I have no idea how to pronounce Pontcysyllte. No clue. Forgot to ask.

Our chariot for the day, the Dydd Un, which means Day One.

So the boat comes with a driver, right? 

Nope. You can hire a driver for the day but you don't have to. They allow you to drive it yourself. So even though I'd never driven a narrow boat before, I figured if they allow you to do it, it must be perfectly safe, right? I mean they can't really let people drive a boat down a canal if there are repeated issues with first time drivers causing havoc every day, right? Right? Made perfect sense to me.

We got a lesson with our day boat hire from Steve. 

Boat operation instruction? Pretty simple. This is not a complicated machine. You need a key to turn on the boat. Motor starts with the push of a button. Engine goes forward and in reverse. It's an opposite steer craft meaning if you want to go right, push the tiller to the left and do the opposite to go left. There's a lock key included in the boat and if you need to stop for lunch, there are large metal pins that you can drive into the ground with a hammer and ropes to tie the boat to the pins.

Canal navigation instructions? A bit more complicated but not super difficult. Right after we start our journey, there's a one way part to the canal lasting about 500 meters; one person needs to get out of the boat and confirm there's no other boat coming the other way. After that there's a farmer's bridge that will most assuredly be up; but if it's not, you'll need to use the lock key to crank it up. After that, there's another very narrow section of the canal but nowhere near as long as the first section. The Aqueduct is one way and there's a wide spot to turn around after that.

And in case you were wondering...no locks. In fact, the rental agreement prohibits entering locks. Also, no legging required, as confirmed by my Uncle Malcolm.

Steve giving us the pre-departure rundown of the rules of the water.

First task? Turn the boat around. Steve would help us with that. 

Canals are narrow. Narrower than the 75 foot maximum length of a narrow boat (that length is limited by the typical length of a lock; no point having a narrow boat that won't pass through locks) and even narrower than the 32 foot length of our boat (the Dydd Un) carrying us around for the day. So to turn the boat around, we'd need to find a spot where the canal is a bit wider. Fortunately, there are such spots and there was one just a bit further from the Aqueduct than where we boarded our boat for the day.

Turning around? Piece of cake. We came back to the place where we boarded, Steve got off and we were on our own for the rest of the day. Our task for the day would be to motor the boat down to and over the Aqueduct, turn it around, find some lunch and get back before 5 pm. We'd have about seven hours to do all that. Seemed like plenty of time.

And the day couldn't have been better. We always keep a close eye on the weather for rain whenever we are in the United Kingdom and we'd been tracking the possibility of rain in the days leading up to our trip on the water. Sometimes the forecast looked like rain and sometimes it didn't. When we got the actual day, it was gorgeous sunshine the whole day. 

Scenes from the trip to the Aqueduct. This is pretty much idyllic English landscape stuff, no?

You know what? Driving a narrow boat down a straight narrow canal isn't really that difficult. There's no turning required so steering is minimal at best. You don't have to worry about the ducks and ducklings because they will get themselves out of the way. And there's not really that much other traffic on the canal. On this last point, we were probably helped out a bit to a lot by a breach in the canal system to the west a few months earlier that effectively cut off our portion of the canal from the rest of the nation. So no boats coming for the weekend.

There was no boat coming the other way on the 500 meter very narrow section of the canal (yes, we had somebody get out and walk to check), the farmer's bridge was indeed up and we found a similar lack of other way traffic on the second narrow section of the canal. Also, hitting the side of the canal seems to be acceptable; we did it with Steve in the boat and he seemed to think that was normal. And our rate of travel is slower than walking speed.

Got that? Slower than walking speed. When I got out of the boat to check the one way canal section on the way back, I could easily outpace the speed of the Dydd Un.

If there was an initial trickiness about the beginning part of our journey, it was navigating around one or two of the 8,500 narrow boats in the country registered as permanent homes. It is very, very important not to disturb these boats. I can't imagine being asleep in one of these things and having some first-time day driver slam into your boat / house accidentally. NOT how I'd want to wake up. Or wake someone up.

The solution? Slow down to minimize any sort of wake and be careful. As narrow as these canals are, there is easily enough space in an average section of canal to move past another seven foot wide narrow boat with ease.

At the helm (top) and scattering ducklings along the way (bottom).

A couple hours after departure, we got to the Aqueduct. This is what we came to see and it had to be without a doubt the best part of the ride. It was, by the way. Crossing the Aqueduct was incredible.

So first of all, this structure is crazy. And heads up, I'm going to use that word over and over in this section of the post. It is just a touch more than 1,000 feet long and almost 12 feet wide (actually 11'-10" and yes I rounded up earlier in this post to 12 feet). It is basically a cast iron trough with those dimensions supported about 125 feet above the Dee River valley by a series of iron arches spanning between 20 hollow stone masonry piers. From the ground it is simple and elegant.

The crazy part about the whole crossing experience is when you are driving a narrow boat across it and it's all about that 11'-10" dimension and the drop. I don't know how exactly the dimensions of the Aqueduct work out precisely but a narrow boat is about seven feet wide and a walk where folks need to pass each other and have a railing also installed (you know...safety) is going to take a good let's say 3-1/2 feet. Considering the walls of the trough which carries the water are probably 3 inches thick (I'm guessing...I didn't measure but I got awfully close to what I would have wanted to measure), that's not a lot of space on either side of the boat. 

And that's true. Our narrow boat was basically hitting the sides of the trough carrying the water with a 125 foot or so drop on the other side of it. So the boat that we are driving is basically banging into a very thin piece of cast iron over and over again and if it breaks because we keep hitting it then that's not good news. Now, deep down inside, I knew it wasn't going to break. People have been knocking their boats against this piece of cast iron for 200 plus years. Still...it makes you wonder.

This fear is escalated a bit by the view down when you are on the right side of the boat going out and the left side of the boat coming back. Whereas on the footpath side of the Aqueduct, there's a nice comfortably high railing for pedestrians, on the canal side of the structure, there's nothing. It's a thinnish piece of cast iron which is about as high as it needs to be to hold the water (the top of the cast iron is actually below the floor of the rear deck of the boat) and nothing else. No rail, no guard, no nothing. Lean over the side of the boat and look over the edge (which is way possible because you are traveling basically on the very edge of the structure) and it's straight down. It's pretty thrilling. And it's also crazy. This was a once in a lifetime journey. When else am I ever going to do something like this?

I'm posting three pictures of the transit over the Aqueduct below. Check out how close to the edge of the structure our boat is. And it's not like we had much opportunity to be further away. The second picture is a view taken by me extending my arm over the side of the boat and snapping a pic with my phone. Crazy view! But also a great picture of the bolts on the cast iron arches.

So then we had to get back for 5 pm. Which was not really a problem other than mooring the boat twice to spend time at two pubs for lunch (the first wouldn't serve us lunch), the speed that these boats travel at and the canoeists. Of all the dangers we faced on our day on the canal system of Great Britain, people in canoes turned out to be the biggest danger of all. This could have been bad. It wasn't but we (meaning I) sure had some luck on my side a bit.

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is a one way passage. Perhaps that was obvious by my description of the canal being barely wider than the boat above. The way traffic works is that if someone is coming across the Aqueduct, traffic has to wait for all boats, whether narrow boats or other types of craft (like canoes), to cross completely before traffic can go the other direction. And the rule is basically if you get to the Aqueduct and you see someone ahead of you going across, follow them, no matter how far ahead they are. This could make for quite a wait under the wrong circumstances.

We got lucky on both our journey across and back. We followed boats both ways and didn't have to wait. On the way back, we followed a canoe. And like us being first time narrow boat drivers, this dude and his (I'm guessing here...) six year old daughter were clearly first time canoeists. Slow doesn't begin to describe the speed of the crossing here and the swiftness of his passage was made worse by the fact that he kept stopping so his wife (on foot) could take pictures of him.

We finally get across and find a whole line of others waiting to go back the other way and we figure we could pass this dude at a slightly higher speed and keep going on our journey. But he could not maneuver his canoe out of way. He kept being almost clear before zigging back into the way. Eventually, we (again, meaning I) ran out of room and hit the wall of the canal head on. He wasn't ultimately in my way at that specific point in time but those clear directions about steering and reversing at the beginning of the day...not working so well in a panic situation where you are trying to avoid crushing a canoe with a child and her father inside. I'm sure it was not as close as I felt it was. He did, ultimately, let us pass after my cousin's husband asked him to let us pass. 

Was the height of the Aqueduct scary? Not to me it wasn't. But canoeists? Yes. Very scary. As my uncle Malcolm put it (and I'm paraphrasing) "that guy thinking everyone else on the water knows exactly what they are doing is probably a poor assumption."

Canoeists...following on over the Aqueduct and passing others packed to the side of the canal.

We did make it back on time. Barely. But two minutes or so before 5 pm is still on time. I think the speed threw us off a bit. 

Before we boarded the Dydd Un in Llangollen Wharf for our day boat ride, we found a few episodes of a British show called Canal Boat Diaries on YouTube. It's a show hosted by dedicated narrow boat owner and dweller Robbie Cumming who takes his narrow boat all over the United Kingdom in search of local sights. My mother thinks the show is boring and while some of it is definitely on the banal side, I am fascinated by this show. I mean, here's Robbie living the dream of being one with his narrow boat which can take him pretty much anywhere he wants to go in the entire country. Everything he needs is on this 7 foot by 75 foot craft. I love it.

I can confidently say that after spending a day on a narrow boat (admittedly just 32 feet long) that I am not cut out for living for any stretch of time on this type of watercraft. I love the day we spent on the Dydd Un crossing a 200 year old aqueduct with family that I rarely get to spend time with but my personal canal boat diaries probably stop in the end of May 2026. And I'm sure my wife is happy to know that. 

I can also confidently say that this day would have been nowhere near as much fun as it was if we were to have done this as a couple. It would have honestly been all work, all day. Having a crew including an able helmsman (thanks, Louis!) to take charge of the steering for most of the day was a huge relief. 

One day on a canal is probably enough. We made it about as amazing as it could be with the location and the company. Pontcysyllte? Sorted!

The crew of the Dydd Un. At least for one day in late May 2026 anyway.