South Georgia on my mind

Far in the south, a great island of rock and ice, its inhabitants hardy and temporary. It was once an island busy with ships, in season, with little industrial villages dotted along the bays of the north coast welcoming the ships home and rendering the mightiest beasts of the sea into meat, oil and whalebone.

South Georgia is a romantic place, more so now that it is almost deserted. It has had its dramas. In 1982 the Falklands War started here, but before then, in the age of the whalers, it was a profitable frontier land.

In 1916, five men in a small boat crossed an ocean churned by Antarctic storms to South Georgia to seek rescue for their colleagues. On reaching the island in a hurricane, they were unable to relaunch to sail around the island to where the whaling stations stood: instead they looked to the mountains separating them from the habitations of the whalers, and three men set of into that unexplored land of ice, over the island across mountains, glaciers, snowfields, each with hidden hazards, until they reached help.

Soldiers have followed in latter years to honour Shackleton. It must be the toughest established walking route there is.

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The Usk Valley to Brecon

Who could not like a route which follows one of the prettiest of river valleys through a cleft in the mountains to such a town as Brecon?

The Usk Valley Walk is a charming walk along a charming river, and whuile I have complained of routes that depend too much on canal towpaths, as this one does to an incontinent degree in my opinion, it is still a pleasant fifty mile stroll; a gentle way to reach into the heart of the Brecon Beacons.

The route begins in what might be Monmouthshire’s oldest town, Caerwent, which signs will not cease to remind you was the Roman Uenta Silurum, north of Newport, and wanders up the meandering river, seeing where it slices through the mountains until it reaches Brecon, a town as well known to hillwalkers and to soldiers.

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