Back To Mach.

It was a bright but chilly morning. In Mach, sheltered as it is from the sea winds it was positively warm. The afternoon back in Borth was much cloudier and greyer.

In Mach we almost had the library to ourselves though the town itself was busy. As we went through last week's homework I discovered a number of mistakes in the homework I'd already sent to our tutor. Oops. We practised our prepositions using the card game that I'd made which now has a home-made dice (I know it should be die but who says that?) with he/she/ they etc to get us used to the different forms of the prepositions. Then we carried on translating a book of short stories but there were so many unexplained idioms that we couldn't work out we've decided not to carry on with that book.

Afterwards I had my usual trawl around the charity shops. One thing I've been looking for was a bum-bag for when I'm riding on holiday to at least put car keys in and today I found one. Not your average nylon one but a soft leather one. Only £2.50.

Back home I got on with a few small jobs- another dab of paint on the knots, bringing down our cases from the loft as we're going up to see Romas and Laura, putting new batteries in some of the garden lights and washing some of the stuff from the back of the car. Friday's milk spill had leaked out of the bag which I hadn't noticed until I opened the boot yesterday and got a whiff of sour milk. Hopefully it's all dealt with now.

Now for the rest of the Sunday walk - Llanafan and round Trawscoed Mansion.

 

From Black Covert Woods we crossed the road and went past the old vicarage. Pete F. remembers being given a lift as far as here by the vicar back in the 70s. It's up for sale, details here. I reckon the roof needs to be repaired. You could see it bowing and there looks to be damp in the upstairs rooms. But the garden is gorgeous.

We stopped and chatted with the owners for quite some time and he told us about the strange mound in a field further up the footpath. We'd speculated about it the last time we walked this way and my guess that it was a bunker was correct. 

We carried on through semi-abandoned farm buildings,

and then reached the point where we could see the mound in the field. The chap had told us that it had been a bunker for the ministry staff, a nuclear fall-out shelter? He said his children used to climb in there and also said the hatch was sometimes locked and sometimes wasn't.

In 1947 the mansion house became the headquarters of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in Wales, and the home farm is still occupied by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and managed by the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER).

Naturally we diverted from the footpath to go and have a look. Sure enough there were no locks so I lifted up the metal hatch. A metal ladder went down about 10ft and although some people wanted to climb down we could see it was wet and dark at the bottom so decided not to. I didn't take any photos as I was holding the hatch up and we had disturbed an ants' nest.

Carrying on it wasn't far to the village of Llanafan where we had our lunch at the picnic tables by the football pitch.

From the edge of the village we could see Trawscoed Mansion in the distance, quite a long way from the bunker.

We had a gentle stroll through the once landscaped countryside swinging back round to the mansion from where it was a quick cut through the wood and the car park.