Llangollen, day two

The mighty River Dee, and lovely stone bridge, so reminiscent of our own bridge in Bakewell.

The Llangollen canal, held firmly in the icy grip of winter.

Amazingly, there were footprints all over the place. We could see the canal wasn't frozen in some places, particularly the edges, so thought this 'ice walking' a pretty stupid pastime!

Icicles hanging above the river. Nothing for perspective, but they were about 8 - 10 feet long.

Looking upstream to the Chain Bridge pub, and the bridge it gets its name from.

The 'famous' chain bridge - a bit of a let-down, really. In quite bad repair, in need of a coat of paint, and roped off to prevent access.

They were repairing the canal in places, and we had a most interesting chat with the head bod on the job. The canal was leaking quite badly, and a hue percentage of water was being lost, so they were 'plugging it.

We made our way back to town, and later on went out to try and get a nice night picture of the bridge.

The next morning, we decided to see if we could drive over the horseshoe pass. With the 4WD Honda, we were in good hands, and anyway, we could turn back if it looked bad. To our surprise, the roads were clear, and we had a lovely trip to the top of the pass. This is the Valle Crucis abbey a little way up the pass. Read about it here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valle_Crucis_Abbey

The Eglwyseg rocks. Offas Dyke passes below this impressive limestone escarpment. As you can see, they've had a fair sprinkling of snow, and looked wonderful.

Almost like Arctic tundra - the hills around the top of the Horseshoe pass. This is when the knee injury really was hard to bear, we'd LOVE to get out and up there.

Looking back down the Horseshoe pass.

The view to the Llangollen valley, or 'cym'.

This was the best we could do - at the edge of the car park of the 'Ponderosa' cafe/pub.

After that, we got back in the car and made our way to Froncycyllte, and the famous pontcysyllte viaduct.

This is the basin where they 'park' the hire boats.

A world-changing man - no doubt.

WHAT a thing to build, WHAT a man of vision. The pontcysyllte viaduct.

Again, the canal is in deep freeze.

Chirk castle limestone company, and a very nice monolith depicting the various types of picks they used.

That's yer lot for this time - next set of pics will show impressive icicles hanging underneath the viaduct, plus our journey back to Bakewell, from where we'd been getting texts saying; 'DON'T COME HOME YET - TWO FEET OF SNOW HERE'!! But we had the Honda - we'd be ok.......wouldn't we........???