Prestatyn to Rhyl (Y Rhyl)

On 16th July 2006, a very hot day, Richard and I, with our daughter Helen, walked down through Prestatyn at the end of our walk along the Offa's Dyke Path.  The weather today was rather different, with rain forecast sometime later in the morning and Storm Amy expected to reach us by the end of the day. However, we decided that, by making an early start, we stood a reasonable chance of covering the few miles from Prestatyn to Rhyl, where we had started our adventure on the North Wales Coast yesterday. We caught the 8.21 from Conwy to Prestatyn. Prestatyn Station and the walk down through the town were disappointingly unfamiliar, but just before we reached the sea, we reached an signpost giving the distance to Chepstow as 177 miles, in the same place as there had been a signpost when we were here 19 years ago (though the length of the path according to the signpost has reduced from 182 to 177 miles!) and the stone marker that matches the marker at the Chepstow end of Offa's Dyke Path is still there too.

However, another sculpture was installed, apparently in 2009, so just three years after we completed Offa's Dyke Path (but it still looks new and shiny), to mark the beginning/end of the trail.  It's name "Dechrau a diwedd" actually means "Beginning and end" and the sculpture is meant to be a stylised representation of the Sun, and depending which way you're looking at it, you can either see the Sun rising in the east (representing a new beginning) or the Sun setting in the west (representing an end).  I don't think the sculpture looks much like the Sun (apparently  is known locally as the "polo mint", which is rather easier to see!) but the concept is highly appropriate for us, given that we completed the Offa's Dyke Path here and intend to walk the Wales Coast Path in an anti-clockwise direction from this point. We'll just get as far as we get! After photographing the sculpture with the coast behind, the talk of looking at it in different directions made me look at the sculpture with the hills behind Prestatyn as my backdrop - and I was amazed to notice that the (real) sun had come out, making photography in that direction difficult. 

It was very high tide when we were here at the end of the Offa's Dyke Path, meaning that our paddle at the end of the trail happened from the concrete steps immediately beneath the promenade. It was quite high tide today, but at least I was able to get onto the beach before "tipping my toe in the water" (just! - I didn't want to get soaked by a rogue wave). The tide receded slightly as we walked along to Rhyl, but there were still occasional puddles and damp sand on the prom., whether from the sea or rainfall I don't know.  It felt as though we soon left Prestatyn behind, but when I took a side path a short distance into the dunes behind the prom., I could see that the houses were still running parallel with us, with the hills of the Clwydian Range (which we'd crossed at the end of the Offa's Dyke Path) beyond.

The promenade in this section has a flat section at the bottom and a flat section at the top, with a slope between the two, which would have been uncomfortable to walk along. We were walking along the top section, which had been made quite a lot narrower by sand which had either been blown or washed here from the beach, or down from the dunes. Moving out of the way to allow a bike to pass necessitated us walking though the sand covering, but at least this was a grateful and polite cyclist. There were occasional dog walkers on the beach.

When we were here in 2006, we'd walked from the centre of Prestatyn to a B&B near a golf course beneath the hills, and my memory was that we'd walked along the coast to reach it. However, this didn't make sense as we walked along today, and when we reached a golf course between Prestatyn and Rhyl, I realised that my memory was wrong; we were near the sea but the hills were a long way away. It turns out that we were now walking past Rhyl Golf Course; Prestatyn Golf Course is to the east of Prestatyn, again near the coast, while in 2006 we'd been staying near the St Melyd Golf Course, above Prestatyn. They obviously like golf round here!

It started to spit with rain as we reached the outskirts of Rhyl, but it really was just the occasional raindrop in the wind, so we kept going without waterproofs. We stopped in a shelter near the lifeboat station to don waterproof jackets and to put the cover on the rucksack, then continued the short distance along the sea front to the point at which we'd joined it yesterday.  We took a slightly different route back to the station so as to photograph the  clocktower, built in 1948 by local bricklayer John Morris and described as "the only surviving promenade landmark from the town's Golden Era".  Rhyl developed as a holiday resort in the Victorian era, with the first pier in Wales built here in 1867, but my memory from my one previous visit, which must have been in the early 1970s, en route home from a guide camp, was of what I could only describe as a dump. The seafront area has now been redeveloped, with modern seaside attractions. These aren't really our thing, but it felt rather more pleasant than on that previous visit.