A walk with my camera

[linda_joyce]

I took Losyn for a walk last friday around Pen-y-fan pond a walk we have done a hundred times but this time it turned out differently.  When we were half way round(the pond is about a mile in circumference) our way was blocked by 'men at work' laying a new layer of tarmac on the path.  At that point they were leaning on their shovels watching a diesel roller flatten it out.  We were stuck , all we could do was turn round and go back the way we came. But there were these steps leading down the dry side of the dam so I decided we should go look where they went.

Naturally I didn't have my camera with me Friday so Losyn and I did that walk again this morning with my camera.

We came down in to a piece of ver wild woodland with a narrow path, one person wide, of beaten dirt running through it.

Which very soon led me to a normal tarmac road  which I realised met the path round the pond to my left.  Following it slowly, Losyn spent about 5 minutes ever 20feet sniffing all the new to him sniffs and I don't walk on with out him, he's a typical dog and will roll if the smell is enticing enough.  The last thing you want is a dog smelling of fox droppings in youyr car.  I watch him very carefully.

We passed this

I have only a vague idea of what it is from context.  Back in the late 18th Century when horse drawn canal barges were the cutting edge of transport for bulk goods a canal was built trough the the Ebbw valley from Newport to Crumlin' a distance of about 15 miles, which is the town directly down the mountain from the pond,.  Water is not a problem in my part of the world there are streams and springs every mile or so on the way up the valley but for the initial filling of those 15 miles would need more water than they could supply.  That is where Pen-y-fan pond comes in.  The pond was initially just that, a small spring fed pond in a marshy hollow that had never been known to fail no matter how dry the summer.  A huge, for the time, dirt embankment was built and lined with stone, with a tunnel and a sluice gate on the inner stone side.   A bigger dip was excavated and puddled with clay and the builders stood back and waited for it to fill while they ran a gully down to the end of the canal at Crumlin and finished building the canal itsself .  By the time the canal was ready the pond would have looked some thing like this
This was taken in March this year.

The sluice gate would have been opened and this


would have been filled with rushing water while the pond emptied itself into the canal.  This photo is taken on my slowest shutter speed and fiddled with a lot on computer and I still cant see the end of the tunnel..  These, of course, are not the only photos I've taken.  There's lots of flowers to come and a couple of arty shots of the pond but they will be saved for another day.

Comments

[stegzy]

What lovely pictures :-)

[linda_joyce]

Thank you.