“What does it look like?” asked the blind man.
“It looks like…”
His sighted companion paused, looking for comparison.
“Uh…butt.”
“Then I’m surprised they didn’t call it the Devil’s Bike Rest,” the blind man quipped.
The blind man is comedian Chris McCausland, who became famous as a celebrity dancer after winning a TV dance competition.
Another person is television presenter Alexander Armstrong Perfect for a pub strollmiddle-aged men taking a summer walk somewhere in England, talking about their problems, before stopping for a drink in a pub garden.
Chris and Sander (as his friends seem to call him) are climbing a hill in South Wales called Skyrid, which we’re told has a mysterious crack that gives the peak its unique appearance. After the walk, they visited a pub called the Skirrid Inn, which is believed to be the oldest pub in Wales.
What I find a bit mysterious is that during the show we were never given footage of this strange feature, which is supposed to resemble a buttocks. This is a bit of a shame. Xander seems like a nice guy. He had the audacity to make a blind man the butt of his joke?
Anyway, I realized I had an easy way to solve this mystery. Skirid is only a short drive from our home in the Cotswolds, so one weekend earlier this year when Edita returned from Haiti we headed west determined to crack it.
Skirrid is an isolated mountain peak located 5 kilometers northeast of the town of Abergavenny. I noticed this a few years ago when we drove to Sugarloaf Peak. Sugarloaf is a more famous peak that towers over the town and was once thought to resemble a sugar cone.
My first assumption was that Skirid Mountain must have two rounded, crescent-shaped peaks, but from the outline on the map I could see that it was a 1km long north-south ridge. The map also shows the ruins of a church on the top of the mountain, which would make it a sacred mountain, but that’s not the hole we’re looking for. My next thought was that there must be a weird rock formation on top of the mountain, sort of like a pair gluteus maximus.
my travel guide, Pocket Mountain Guide to the Brecon Beacons seems to prove this. It describes a route that skirts the east side of the summit and then ascends from the north, in the opposite direction to the standard tourist route.
It can be said that its description of this passage contains the following sentence:
There are three explanations for the formation of the gap at the northern end of the mountain.
Notches, cracks, crevices, whatever you want to call it: we’re going to find an explanation on the north side, and if it’s not an explanation in terms of contours, then it probably involves rock.
(By the way, these explanations themselves don’t seem convincing, namely: an argument between giants and demons, lightning that occurred at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion, and an earthquake. None of them seems likely, although the last one is more plausible. More on that later.)
When we arrived at the National Trust car park on the south side of the summit, I was further convinced that I was looking for an unusual rock formation. A display sign at the base of the trail mentions several routes to the summit, one of which is a “crawl” from the north side.
“So I guess that’s the rock formation,” I said to Edita. “Maybe we’ll crawl up the crack between the two buttocks.”
The main road winds steeply through the forest on a dirt track. After passing through a gate in the wall we branched off from the main path and followed the route described in my guidebook around the east side of the summit. The weather was clear and we could see the vast expanse of Monmouth County farmland to the right. To our left the mountain rose steeply above us, nestled in a bracken-covered marsh. There aren’t any strange rock formations here, but there’s nothing weird about them. I can’t help but think that these slopes are as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
After circling around to the north side, we encountered a faint path that climbed up a dizzying grassy slope. Edita picked up the pace, but my progress was more laborious. The footprints are slippery. Twice I slipped and fell flat on my face, then found myself crawling to regain my footing. I feel a bit in the butt. However, these strategies are due to incompetence. This is a steep walk, not a climb.
A few meters from the top, I cross a wide path that circles the top. I stopped and turned around to photograph the black mountains rising on the northwest horizon. As I took my position, the clouds parted, revealing twin figures on the distant hillside. I looked at the camera screen, twice more. If I were standing on stage performing a pantomime, the audience would be shouting “Behind you!”
I turned slowly, but all I could see above me was sloping grass. There were no strange rock formations; there was no logical explanation for the hip-shaped shadow I saw across from Black Mountain. I looked back and saw that the clouds had dispersed and the shadows were gone.
When I reached the top, Edita had been waiting there for several minutes. There is an Ordnance Survey triangular pillar there, and many people stand next to it and take selfies. A broad ridge extends to the south, offering views for miles. This is how everyone got here, and no one was stupid enough to take our path.
“So where are these buttocks?” I said.
Edita didn’t answer. No butt, and if the devil were watching, he would be grinning crumpled.
With the Sugarloaf Mountains to the west and the rest of the Black Mountains to the north, including Chwarel y Fan ridge, the highest point in Monmouthshire, the views are spectacular. We explored it a few years ago.
As we walked down the summit ridge we could see Abergavenny on the plains below, and the flat summit of the Coty Hills hiding the valleys of South Wales beyond. We walked the entire Skirid River, checking every possible crack and rock outcrop to see if there was anything that resembled a waist. The answer is no.
We returned to the National Trust car park around 11.30. We had some time to kill before the opening of Skirid Inn, located a few miles north in the village of Llanvihangel Krukoni (yes, I know, the people who name these places have too much free time). We drove slowly along the west side of the mountain, looking for the hip, but there was nothing.
On the plus side, Skirid Inn is a wonderful old stone fortress. We sat at the oak table by the fire and read about its history. The history of this pub dates back to the 11th century. One of the rooms upstairs was once the courthouse. Sentence executed On the spotAbout 180 people were said to have been hung from the bar’s beams. Not surprisingly, some of the rooms are now said to be haunted.
Meanwhile, I’m still obsessed with Alexander Armstrong and his hips. i from National Trust website The name Skirrid is derived from Ysgyryd, which means “to shake or tremble” in Welsh. Ordnance Survey maps even label the peak as Ysgyryd Fawr.
The website goes on to say, “It’s easy to see where the name comes from, as a massive landslide occurred on the north end of the mountain.”
Yeah? I had just reached the northern end of the Bleed and all I could say was “What a massive landslide?”. I haven’t seen massive landslides, just like I haven’t seen buttocks.
The article goes on to say that the landslide was formed during a bet with the devil by local giant Jack O’Kent, who is believed to be responsible for many geographical features in the Herefordshire and Monmouthshire areas.
Jack O’Kent’s relationship with Satan can be likened to Roadrunner’s relationship with Wile E. Coyote. The two struck a series of deals, and Jack O. Kent got out of trouble through a series of tricks. He made a bet with the devil that Sugarloaf would be higher than nearby Malvern Mountain (don’t we all make that bet). When the Devil realized he had been tricked, he tried to move some soil from Sugar Loaf Mountain to Malvern Mountain to make it higher in altitude. But he was clumsy and threw the dirt next to Skirid, leaving a mound at its northern end for posterity.
Obviously the article on the National Trust website cannot be trusted, but just in case there is some truth to it, on the way home we decided to follow the path on the west side of Skirid. From the entrance to the farm we found a wooded knoll at the northwest corner of the mountain, jutting upward like the bones of the lower spine. It forms a tiny notch in the descending slope about 100m below the summit.
If this is the rift we’ve been looking for, then to say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. The incision was nothing more than an abscess in the buttocks. If Xander Armstrong looks like this, then frankly, he needs to see a doctor.
My visit felt incomplete, so a few weeks after Edita returned to Haiti, I returned to Skyrid. This time I decided to circle the west side of the mountain to get a closer look at the mound. This was a more pleasant walk than the one we took around the east side and through peaceful woodland covered in bluebells.
I emerged from the woodland about 500m south of the fissure. As I got closer I could see a mound on the left about 20m above the crack, topped with pine trees, a stark contrast to the mixed woodland I was walking through. The slit was like nothing I had ever seen in my rectum. It’s wide enough for a boat to sail through (although it obviously requires water).
To my right I could see the summit of Skirid Peak, guarded by steep cliffs, contrasting with the grassy slopes to the east. These cliffs are easily explained by the boulders stacked underneath. There have apparently been many landslides here over the years, some very recently. Only the event that formed the tree-lined mound may have occurred long before the crucifixion of the Lord.
I followed a path through boulder fields to the northwest ridge of Skirid. I looked back across the mound to Sugarloaf Mountain and the Black Mountains in the distance. It was a more interesting route than the one we took two months ago, but frankly they gave the mountain a little too much of its split look. Mounds and cracks are not obvious. It took me two trips and a lot of exploring to find them, and again I was the only one on the trail from the back. All the people walking along the main road didn’t even notice it was there. These myths and legends are just a lot of old tailbones, I thought to myself.
I reached the top of the mountain under clear skies. An old couple was having a picnic among the bracken, and a group of young people gathered around the triangular pole. I tried taking a mountaintop selfie without their faces.
It was a pleasant walk; I’m glad I’ve been here twice and I’m sure I’ll be back again. But a pair of butts, my butts.
You can check it out for yourself by visiting my website Skyrid Flickr Album.