The great bowl holds a wide pool of gentle water and shingle beach. Moss and fern grow in profusion in this misty microclimate and many say this is the most beautiful waterfall in Wales. I arrived at midday and the sun was high enough to light up the sunken woodbine and ragwort-draped glade. A slender chute of water was falling from a high ledge beneath slopes of oak and beech. Tiptoeing into the pebble shallows, I dived into the deeper parts of the plunge pool and swam underwater in the peaty darkness, hearing the drone of the water hum between my ears and the movement of the falls vibrate across my skin. Breaking the surface close to the far wall I clambered out onto a ledge of wet rock that leads around behind the falls.
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Lady Falls is variable: sometimes it can be a roaring cascade, at other times a trickle. If you’re well equipped and have time you may be able to bushwhack your way up a further kilometre through the forest above Lady Falls to find the falls of Einion Gam, named after Gwladys’ lover. This is twice as tall, and its pool is cut into a sheer-sided ravine. Back at the footbridge and junction pool a rather precipitous path leads on to the Horseshoe Falls and two perfectly elliptic pools, like emerald lidos, lying deep in the forest.
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In the parallel valley of the Melte, leading up to Ystradfellte, there are yet more waterfalls. At one of the most famous, Scwd yr Eira, an ancient drovers’ road passes behind the flow. In another the entire river disappears into the caverns of Porth yr Ogof, one of the largest cave systems in Europe.
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This extraordinary landscape was laid down in layers of time. The oldest limestone was formed from the shells of sea creatures that inhabited the early tropical seas and these soft layers have been eroded into the plunge pools. The harder red sandstones and gritstones above were compressed out of the desert sands that covered the earth just before the dinosaurs and these form the hard lip at the top of the falls. Finally there are the carboniferous, or coalbearing, seams, the remains of the first forests that colonised earth once the seas and deserts receded. Warped, compressed and contorted, all these aeons of time are visible in the waterfalls. 142
Wales and Midlands