Latest news with #BannauBrycheiniog
Telegraph
4 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Villagers win battle against 200m ‘Great Wall' at Welsh beauty spot
Villagers have won a fight to tear down a giant fence that was blocking views of a national park. The 200m-long, 6ft-high steel fence was dubbed the 'Great Wall of Clydach' after it was built by a Labour-led council without notice at a cost of £40,000. But weeks later, officials have agreed to tear it down – and will spend £20,000 on its removal. The roadside structure blocks views of the mountains and valleys within Wales's Brecon Beacons National Park (now known as Bannau Brycheiniog) and close to the Unesco World Heritage site of Blaenavon. Locals described the fence, made of galvanised steel with sharp spikes on top, as 'disgusting' and criticised the council for a lack of consultation. Officials said it was erected along Pwll Du Road, which has been closed to traffic for five years, over fears it could collapse. Resident Clive Thomas said: 'It's just an eyesore. When the sun is on it and everything, it just looks out of place.' Simon Elliott added: 'There was no consultation with anyone. The fence has been put up with no understanding at all of what the area is. 'All it needed was a low-level fencing to stop any cattle or people going over the edge into the quarry.' Monmouthshire County Council has agreed to remove the fence and replace it with a shorter structure that will 'blend in' with the surroundings. Independent councillor Simon Howarth said he was pleased with the council's decision, but added: 'We shouldn't have got here' and claimed huge bills could have been avoided. He said: 'Overall, we are where we should have started, but around £50,000 to £70,000 worse off.' A council spokesman said: 'Following a positive meeting, the local community and the council agreed with the proposal to reduce the height of the back line of the palisade fencing, replacing it with stock proof fencing and painting the reveals and pillars with a suitable colour to blend in with the landscape.'
BBC News
30-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
'Disgusting' mountainside fence to be removed after backlash
A huge fence put up across a mountain and overlooking a beauty spot is to be removed after a public 2.1m (6ft) tall steel fence - dubbed the "Great Wall of Clydach" by villagers - was erected without notice last month, along the Monmouthshire village's Pwll Du Road, spanning 200m (652ft).It sits across the face of Gilwern mountain in the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park and close to the boundary of the UNESCO Blaenavon World Heritage claimed the galvanised steel structure with sharp spikes was "disgusting" and demanded its removal. Monmouthshire County Council, which said it had to take action to stop people accessing the road - which has been closed to traffic on safety grounds for the past five years - has now agreed to replace it, according to the Local Democracy Reporting council has said it will use stock fencing instead and the posts at either end of the road, supporting the fence, will be reduced in will also be painted to blend in with the surrounding countryside. Simon Howarth, independent councillor for Llanelly Hill, said he was pleased with the outcome, but was critical of the council's actions and costs involved, saying "we shouldn't have got here".He said, at a recent meeting held at Clydach Village Hall, the council said it would be going out to tender to remove the fence, but costs would be in the region of £20, a public meeting held in April, the council confirmed the bill for putting up the fence was £40, said: "Overall we are where we should have started, but around £50,000 to £70,000 worse off."The councillor said he was also pleased the council intended to allow access to the backside of the fence, between it and the mountainside, for cyclists and pedestrians, as well as holding talks with farmers and landowners over access for moving stock from the Keeper's Pond end of the mountain road. A council spokesman said: "Following a positive meeting, the local community and the council agreed with the proposal to reduce the height of the back line of the palisade fencing, replacing it with stock proof fencing and painting the reveals and pillars with a suitable colour to blend in with the landscape."The council had said its previous measures to keep vehicles off the road, including gates and boulders, had failed as they had been damaged or removed, while a rockfall in 2023 had prompted it to commission a further report which suggested the road should be closed to people, as well as report outlined alternatives including new footpaths over the top of the mountain and below the existing road, or rebuilding the road but moving the carriageway further back into the mountain, which the council had said would cost millions of Wayne Elliot, who was involved in court action that ruled the council was responsible for the road, previously said he had been battling with the authority since 2020 to get it moved back, claiming "the farmers would help do it, they'd get it done in a week".But a council spokesperson shut down this suggestion, saying it was "not going to happen".
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
‘The giant penis took shape easily, as I passed through a village called Three Cocks': meet the artist athletes drawing with GPS
In 2013, I was in the worst shape of my life. Though I functioned well day to day, I was a heavy binge drinker and smoker. Unfit, obese and unhappy, on impulse I signed up to a white-collar boxing fight. I trained six days a week for three months, shifting three stone by fight night. Winning that fight was great, though turning my life around had been my main goal. After that, I started challenging myself regularly while raising money for mental health charities. My first 24-hour challenge involved ascending Pen y Fan – the highest peak in south Wales – 10 times in a row during the dead of winter. It was horrific, but it raised lots of money, so next time I wanted something even bigger. Having seen examples of Strava art online, I thought that might be a good way to get people's attention. I decided on a big run in the Bannau Brycheiniog (formerly the Brecon Beacons), an hour from my home, and chose November to coincide with Men's Health Awareness Month. A giant penis seemed the obvious way to represent this, plus it was undeniably eye‑catching. I researched previous examples made using GPS mapping, all created on foot in a single, continuous effort. Plenty of them were three or four miles long, but I was aiming for something on a much grander scale. Using the Strava planner, I found a route resembling a shaft between England and Wales, right up Offa's Dyke. I thought, 'Brilliant. Can I tack on a little bell-end at the top, near Hay-on-Wye?' Yes, there it was. 'Now, can I squeeze some balls on at the bottom?' The whole thing took shape very easily, taking in Crickhowell and Llangenny, and passing serendipitously through a village called Three Cocks. Only then did I realise the route was just over 72 miles (116km) long, with almost 10,000ft of elevation. But now I'd plotted the picture, I had to do it. I started and ended in Abergavenny, where I set off at 5pm on 1 November 2024, running for 12 hours in darkness. Friends were stationed en route to run alongside me for a while and keep my spirits up; likewise my brother was waiting for me right on the tip. Without their encouragement, I don't know if I'd have made it. The first 20 miles were uphill, and after 50 I just wanted to die, yet still had the best part of a whole marathon to go. Bone-tired and wrapped in a Welsh flag, I crossed the finish line at 4.30pm the following afternoon, half an hour shy of the 24-hour mark. A local craftsman presented me with a 3D-printed cock and balls trophy. The giant manhood has also been recreated in cake form by my mother, to celebrate my 40th birthday, and I've even been a question on Have I Got News for You. Some have suggested my real aim was to make my name the top result whenever anyone Googles 'world's biggest penis'. Alas, it turns out the search terms have to be a bit more specific. Samppa Tölli put on ice skates to etch a 16km image of a great white shark on to a frozen lake in Finland Hiidenvesi is the second-largest lake in Finland's Uusimaa region, north-west of Helsinki. My parents have lived near the lake since I was a kid, so I've known it all my life. In summer, I'd ride around the surrounding bike trails or go out in my kayak. I still live nearby. During the winter the lake freezes over, and in 2023 I spent a lot of time skating on it. After a couple of months, doing the same circuits started to feel a little repetitive. The idea of creating a GPS picture on ice was an attempt to shake things up a bit. I decided to try an animal that lives in water and, though not a creature you'd naturally find in the lake, a shark seemed to fit. I adapted a simple colouring picture I'd found online that used one continuous line, then I placed it on to the map, making sure the fin and tail fitted neatly into coves around the shoreline. When I'm on my bike, I strap my GPS watch to the handlebars so I can always keep an eye on it. It's trickier to see where I am on the map while skating, because I have to move my arm in front of my face. So when I skated the shark, I was moving more slowly than I usually would, a situation made worse by the fact the ice wasn't particularly smooth that day. There was also fog that affected visibility – when I started, I couldn't see more than a couple of hundred metres ahead. This meant I wasn't able to rely on any landmarks to keep me oriented. Although making GPS art in a big open space offers a lot of freedom, it was difficult to work out exactly when to turn, and how much by. For example, I turned too soon when coming out of the shark's mouth and had to skate back and fix it. I also had to make some compromises, such as the gills, which I chose to skate in a zigzag, rather than pausing and unpausing the recording so I could make a series of parallel lines. Overall, I was happy with how the 16km-long (10 mile) shark turned out. After Strava posted it on their Instagram page, I got a few new followers and some complimentary messages, which encouraged me to try more GPS art. The following February, I spent two hours skating a more detailed picture of an eagle, as a celebration of the sea eagles you see around that part of the lake during wintertime. As a child I dreamed of seeing one but never did – nowadays they're rare in Finland. My most recent piece, completed at the start of this year, was a response to someone who suggested I try a single-line drawing of a woman. The line was more than 7km long. I was unable to skate that one, though – there was too much snow on the ice on the day I'd chosen, so instead I did it on my cyclocross bike using spiked tyres. I don't yet have a specific picture planned for next winter, but I'm open to suggestions. Frank Chan ran almost 75km to draw a portrait of singer Chappell Roan in San Francisco Running is something I didn't really embrace until I was approaching middle age – I ran the San Francisco Marathon in 2018 and just got hooked. There's something about the meditative aspect of longer runs that appeals to me. They require a lot of training, of course, and you need to do most of your running at an easy pace. What better way to slow yourself down than to look at a map? That's how I got into doing Strava art, which has the added advantage of encouraging me to mix up my routes. I've done all sorts, from pop culture characters like Ariel from The Little Mermaid to more personal ones like a picture of my mom tying my laces that I did for Mother's Day. I've collaborated with another Strava artist called Lenny Maughan on images like Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, where he ran God's hand on the east side of the city and I ran Adam's hand in the west, and I've created more meaningful pieces, such as spelling out the name of Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered in a racially motivated hate crime while running in 2020. Music is a big thing for me, so that's the subject I return to most often. Until recently, I've tended to stick to music I grew up with, such as punk and Britpop. The aim with my album-cover drawings is to ensure that people who know that particular sleeve art will recognise it instantly. When I did Actually by the Pet Shop Boys, people generally got that, though there were some who said, 'Is that two ice‑cream cones?' Whitney Houston's Instagram page re-posted my Strava art version of the photo from her second album – an absolute honour. I don't think I'm necessarily the target audience for Chappell Roan, but she'd become such a phenomenon that she came to my attention. She performs with a certain punk spirit that appeals to me – she's unapologetic and clearly has a sense of humour. I decided to recreate the sleeve of her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, on the first anniversary of its release. The layout of San Francisco is pretty much a grid pattern. I can see how some older, pre-automobile cities might offer opportunities for more interesting routes, where you're not so constrained by blocks, but there are moments where I can optimise things on the ground – for example, cutting across a parking lot might improve a diagonal. What I most want to avoid is missing a turn and offsetting part of the picture by a block – with Chappell, for example, I didn't want to end up with one eye bigger than the other. Like Whitney, Chappell was a three-day effort, covering almost 75km (50 miles). I tend to stop as it's getting dark, or when I'm fading, then resume from the same spot the next day. Having decided on the scale of the runs, I work out how much detail I want to include, and which flourishes I'm happy to omit in order to avoid another couple of days' running. There's a certain degree of uncertainty with Strava mapping when running near tall buildings, as they can cause the satellite signal to glitch, and I took a wrong turn on the Pet Shop Boys piece, which means Neil Tennant looks as though he's sticking his tongue out rather than yawning. I'm pleased with Chappell, though – I think she turned out great. Frédéric de Lanouvelle and his daughter Mathilde used a tandem to cycle a 2,162km heart in France I have always been close to my four daughters and decided some years ago that it would be fulfilling to share a special adventure with each of them when they reached the age of 16. For example, my eldest daughter, Cécile, and I travelled to southern Morocco to run the 250km, seven-day Marathon des Sables in the Sahara desert. It was wonderful to experience this with her, but my second daughter, Mathilde, made it clear that she didn't want to do the same thing for her 16th birthday. We struggled to come up with an original idea that felt equally special, until a colleague showed me a newspaper article about a group of French cyclists who had created the world's biggest GPS drawing made by bicycle: a 1,025km dinosaur. Mathilde likes cycling, so I suggested we attempt something similar on a tandem. Five or six years earlier, we'd ridden a tandem for 600km round Île-de-France starting near our home in Paris. We had good memories of this adventure and decided that for our new one we should try to raise money for a charity. We chose Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque, an organisation that provides heart surgeries for children in countries with limited access to such care. That's why our route was planned in the shape of an enormous cartoon heart – starting and finishing in Lyon, the journey would measure 2,162km in total, almost 1,350 miles. We did only three days' tandem training before the August 2023 trip, cycling more than 100km each time, but aimed to cover about 150km a day while making our attempt. On days where the landscape was mostly flat, we started at 7am and checked in at our destination – usually a pre-booked hostel or Airbnb – at 4-5pm. But on days with more uphill stretches, we sometimes didn't finish until 8-9pm. Still, one of the benefits of riding a tandem was that if either of us ever felt particularly weak, the other could usually pedal a little harder to make up for it. We faced more serious issues than tiredness, though. Five days in, I had to mend one of the spokes on the back wheel and made a somewhat clumsy job of it. Less than an hour into our ride the following day, the spoke came loose again and got caught in the bike's chain, breaking both that and the derailleur gears. Even the frame of the bike cracked. Less than a week into our adventure, it seemed we might have to abandon it entirely. Instead, local people rallied to help. A mechanic was found and everything was fixed in a few hours. There were no further major setbacks, but day 13 proved a particular challenge. We were in France's Massif Central highland region and, although our surroundings were beautiful, the cycling was very tough. In the end, we completed the heart on the 16th day. Guinness World Records recognised our achievement, though it was unofficially beaten a few months later by another French cycling duo who recreated the Olympic rings. Still, the adventure was never about the world record; that was just the cherry on the cake. The main reason was to share extraordinary moments and build memories with my daughter. We also raised enough for two children to have the operations they needed. We've met one of them, which gave us a great sense of satisfaction. Now my third daughter and I have just over a year to decide what we're going to do for her 16th birthday. All we know so far is that it will probably involve horses. Chiara Franzosi ran 60km around Edinburgh to draw her cocker spaniel, Miles When I moved to Scotland from Italy about 10 years ago I was already hooked on running, but it was in Edinburgh that I really fell in love with the whole scene. I'd explore the city as part of my daily run and met many friends that way – and my partner, too. Gradually, I got into long-distance races and running on mountain trails. When Covid-19 hit and races started getting cancelled, I had to rethink my routine and find new ways to motivate myself, such as running up and down the Royal Mile 26 times. Not long after I'd completed my Royal Mile marathon, we bought a cocker spaniel puppy – I called him Miles. When I committed myself to running seven marathons over seven consecutive days in May 2021, Miles became the motivation for another of my training challenges. I'd been using GPS to create routes for my long runs, and had also seen some particularly impressive Strava art online. I thought, 'Maybe I could do something like that, drawing one of the things I love the most?' I found a route above the Water of Leith that looked like it could be a spaniel's ear, and working from there I started to see if I could achieve the whole dog. It became quite difficult to draw the back legs and tail, because the part of the city where they fell is quite industrial and made up of straight lines and sharp corners, which wasn't ideal for the 'freehand' effect I was after. But, after a bit of trial and error, I managed to draw something that resembled a 60km (37 miles) version of Miles leaping over the Pentland Hills. I've since bought a fancy GPS sports watch that allows you to check on your progress as you make your way round the route, but at the time of the run, in February 2021, I had a cheaper version without that feature. For the training runs, I'd refer to my Strava drawing and run different sections of it on different days. I remember getting a bit confused on the tail and having to back up – it was quite hard to remember everything by heart, but it did help take my mind off the distance. The day of the run was beautiful, but it had snowed quite heavily a night or two before, and some of the footpaths had been covered in drifts from passing snowploughs. I ended up doing a lot of hopping from side to side between roads and paths, and there was a quite treacherous stretch beside the Grand Union canal, where the snow had become icy. But starting at 7.30am I completed the run in just over six hours – not a bad pace given the conditions. I think 'Cocker Spaniel Leaping Over the Pentlands' captures something of Miles's character, even if it does look more like something scribbled by a toddler than some of the artistic Strava pieces I've seen other runners achieve around Edinburgh. I haven't attempted any more Strava art since, but Miles is now my loyal running companion.
