After Christmas we spent 3 nights in south Wales, staying in a cottage on a farm near Abergavenny. We were very close to Raglan so we visited Raglan castle. Luke enjoyed running around finding all the different rooms, and petting the very obliging castle cat.
We were staying not far from the English border and the Forest of Dean, so we drove down and visited Tintern Abbey. We timed it perfectly so that the sun was streaming in the 'windows' of the nave.
Again I think Luke mostly enjoyed clambering over things.
The next day our friend Alison joined us and we went for a walk in the Black Mountains - up a hill called Skirrid Fawr. It was very very cold, but we wrapped up in our winter woollies.
The view was spectacular, even on a rather grey and misty day. Luke made it most of the way on his own legs, which was a pretty good effort!
In the afternoon we visited the Big Pit mine at Blaenafon. This was a working coal mine until the late 1970s and then was turned into a museum shortly afterwards. You get taken 100m underground by a real miner (ie ex-miner) and certainly our guide was brilliant - funny, down-to-earth (no pun intended) and very knowledgeable. Last time we went underground with Luke, in a slate mine in Wales a couple of years ago, he was terrified and had to be carried through the whole thing and couldn't get out fast enough. This time, though, he loved having his own helmet with its light, and was very proud of the fact that unlike the rest of us, he didn't have to duck to walk through the mine shafts!
