Nobody tells you about the silence. After eighteen months of planning, we finally stopped the van on a ridge above the Usk Valley and turned the engine off.
We had been driving for eleven hours. Not because the Brecon Beacons are far from London — they are not — but because we took every wrong turn available to us and stopped at a petrol station in Abergavenny for forty-five minutes because Diane could not decide between a pasty and a sausage roll. She got both. The van smelled like a bakery until Pen y Fan.
Finding the Spot
Wild camping in England is legally fraught. Wales is different. Outside of designated areas, the tradition of open access to the uplands is widely respected, and the national park authority has always taken a sensible approach. We had done our research. We had the Ordnance Survey app loaded with offline maps. We had a “leave no trace” checklist. We were, by our own assessment, completely prepared.
What we had not prepared for was the road. The track up to the ridge that the app confidently labelled as a road was, in reality, a suggestion of a road — a geological proposal, a lane that had once briefly entertained the idea of tarmac before deciding it preferred to remain a moorland stream. We made it. The van’s undercarriage did not enjoy it, but we made it.
The Night
The Beacons at night in November are not comfortable. The temperature dropped to two degrees by ten o’clock. Our Alpkit sleeping bags handled it without complaint; we were less stoic. But the sky — once the cloud cleared around midnight — was genuinely extraordinary. We are, permanently, light-polluted Londoners. We had forgotten that the Milky Way is a physical thing you can see with your eyes, not a metaphor.
“We had forgotten that the Milky Way is a physical thing you can see with your eyes, not a metaphor.”
We woke to a frost. The van windows had sheeted white overnight. The portable kettle we had been so smug about purchasing took fourteen minutes to boil because the water inside was close to freezing. The coffee, when it finally came, was the best thing either of us had ever tasted.
Practical Notes
If you are planning your first wild camp in the Brecon Beacons: arrive late, leave early, take everything with you. The national park is only as beautiful as people choose to leave it. The Storey Arms area north of Merthyr Tydfil is accessible and stunning. The lanes near Llangynidr reservoir are quieter and often empty on weekday nights. Check the weather obsessively — the ridge can drop eight degrees below the valley floor.