Number six

In which I revisit Wales' second highest road

You might remember the arbitrary challenge I set myself a few weeks ago, to ride up all of Simon Warren’s ‘Ten Toughest Climbs’ before the year is out.

I spent last weekend visiting my family in Mid Wales, and hoped I would find time to venture north, to tick off Bwlch-y-Groes - the sixth on my list. I’ve been up this one quite a few times already – when I lived in Wales it was a good landmark to build an all-day ride around, especially if you wanted to get a lot of climbing in, which usually I did.

I grew up a few miles outside Llanidloes, and although I didn’t particularly enjoy living there as a teenager, when I moved back in my thirties I immediately realised that this was an excellent place to live as a cyclist. If you look at the town on an Ordnance Survey map, almost every single road leading out of it has a chevron,¹ and once you get away from the busy A470 (Wales’ main trunk road) there’s a dense network of small, quiet lanes that are perfect for cycling – as long as you’re prepared to go up and down a lot. They’re also, for some reason, often very well paved. One of my favourite roads, through Newchapel and Llidiartywaun, has such perfect, mirror-smooth tarmac that every time I pass I speculate about where it could have come from. Did someone make a mistake in the 1980s, and despatch a load of tarmac to Montgomeryshire District Council that was meant for that year’s Tour de France route?

Bwlch-y-Groes is up near Bala in North Wales, and the most direct way to get there from Llanidloes is to take the Machynlleth mountain road², which I’m always trying to convince people is one of our nation’s greatest cycling routes. After climbing steeply up out of Llanidloes, it skirts Llyn Clywedog, a massive reservoir that was controversially dammed in the 1960s, to supply water to Birmingham – when I was growing up, there were still people around who had lived in the valley before it was flooded.

I once had to issue a warning to a cyclist who thought that a gentle pootle round the edge of Clywedog might be a relaxing way to spend a Sunday morning. It will be nothing of the sort, I told her. True, it’s only a 23km loop, but the steep hillsides that enfold the reservoir mean that almost no part of that is level – instead it’s a virtual torture chamber of unrelentingly steep climbs, false flats and vertiginous descents, including one that looks like it’s going to launch you straight into the water, only swerving away at the very last moment. In 23km, you’ll gain over 500m of elevation.

So yes, it’s hard, but I love riding out this way.

---