A run to the Elan Valley dams
201 km4h 18m on the road
No big plan, just a proper day out: out the front door at Pontesbury and point the little Honda CRF300L at mid-Wales. The destination is the Elan Valley — Birmingham's water, if you want the potted history, a chain of Victorian dams and reservoirs strung through the Cambrian Mountains — and the shape of the day was simple: the long road down, a loop around the lakes, and the long road home.
No GPS on the camera that day, so the map below is inferred (the yellow line). The clock and the distance are honest; the exact wiggle in between is my best memory of it.
2023-04-15
Pontesbury → Rhayader → the Elan dams → home
South and west out of Pontesbury, through Montgomery, Newtown and Llanidloes, the border country slowly giving way to proper Welsh hills. Then Rhayader, and the gates of the Elan. If you've never been: picture a Welsh valley flooded on purpose a hundred-odd years ago, the dams built like cathedrals, the water sitting black and still under the Cambrian sky.
A 300 single is no superbike, and out here that's exactly the point — light, honest, and happy to potter the dam roads and the byways at the pace the day deserves. Around the reservoirs — Caban-coch, up to Craig Goch at the very top — then back the long way through mid-Wales for home. About 200 km all in, give or take, and barely a soul the whole way.
A word for the geeks: the X3's on a tall pole behind me, so there's a rider-shaped shadow keeping me company on every sunlit road — and that's me in the little round window, the new selfie bubble fading in and out across the cuts. The leveling's done the new way now: classical computer vision reads the road and the horizon to a fraction of a degree instead of me squinting at a number, and it even caught the camera mount getting knocked halfway round and quietly put it right.
Photos
Shorts
Every clip
The raw mini-montages — one for roughly every ten minutes of the ride.