Story Pop: Pen Y Fan Horseshoe - 10 Peak Loop

The Pen y Fan Horseshoe isn’t just a loop — it’s a ridge layered with deep time, old kingdoms, strange folklore, and some of the most evocative place‑names in Wales. In this episode, we open the Horseshoe as a story stack: a Devonian desert turned mountain wall, the high edge of Brychan’s lost kingdom, the fairy‑door legends of Cwm Llwch, the chained afanc, the witches of Fan Frynych, the shapeshifting hares, the watching blackbirds — and the horse‑lore of Rhiannon and the Mari Lwyd woven quietly into the landscape.

We break down the Welsh names — Craig y Fan Ddu, Cribyn, Corn Du, Rhiw yr Ysgyfarnog — and explore why this ridge has become both a mythic boundary and a modern proving ground for SAS selection.

If you want to understand the Pen y Fan Horseshoe, don’t just walk it. Read it. Listen to it. Let it speak. This is the Beacons as stone, kingdom, myth, language, and trial — all in one big day

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

This it is Off You Pop, podcast for hikers and adventurers who want to be epic in just one day. Some mountains are climbed, some routes are ticked off, but the penny fan horseshoe is something else entirely. It's a ridge that remembers things. It remembers the rivers that built it, the ice that carved it, the kings who named it, the stories that whispered into it, and the soldiers who broke themselves across it. Today we're opening the Penny Fan horseshoe, not as a root, but as a story stack. Stone first, Kingdom Second, Myth Third, Language Fourth, and Trial Last. Now this is off you pop. Before Wales, before Bracan, before saints, soldiers, or stories, this place was a Devonian desert, a hot, semi-arid floodplain where braided rivers wandered across a vast basin. Every flood laid down sand, every drought baked it. Iron oxidized the grains into deep red. This built the old red sandstone, the backbone of the beacons. The bulk of the horseshoe is made of the brownstones formation. Channel sands, flood deposits, mud cracks, ripple marks, and crossbedding. If you crouch down on the ridge, you can still see the ripples of vanished currents, the cracks of lawn evaporated pores, and the tilt of ancient riverbeds. Then came the coarser, tougher plateau beds, laid down by violent flash floods, these cat penny fan and corn dew. They're the reason those summits stand higher. They're wearing the geological equivalent of a helmet. Then the Akkadian Origeni shoved the whole stack upwards and tilted itself. This tilt is the entire character of the horseshoe. In the north it's steep, dramatic, and glacially carved. In the south, it's long rolling and dipping away. During the Ice Age, glaciers sat in the north facing cums, cum loch, cum sere, cumwin. They carved bowls, cliffs, and hanging valleys. They sharpened the ridge into a fortress. This is the stone beneath your boots, a tilted desert rim sculpted by ice. This region is named after a king, Brecan Brekiniog. He's from the 5th century, the son of an Irish prince and a Welsh princess, a borderland warlord, a father of saints, a man with 48 children, almost all of whom became holy figures. His kingdom was Brekinog. The mountains were its crown. That's why the Welsh name for this range is Banu Brekinioc, the peaks of Brecan's kingdom. This ridge wasn't scenery, it was a border, a lookout, a grazing ground, a defensive skyline, and a spiritual roof. The beacons have their own mythic ecosystem, older, stranger, more rural, and more local than the Arthurian stuff up north. Below Pennyfan lies a lake with a story older than Christianity. The Fairy Lady of Cumluch. Once a year, a door appears beside the water. Inside is a world of music and feasting. Visitors are welcomed on one condition: take nothing back. One man stole a golden apple, and the door slammed shut. He returned to find decades had passed. The Afank of Kumluch. Before the fairy door, the lake had an older legend. A monstrous Afank lived in the water. Villagers chained it and dragged it up the mountain. Its thrashing carved the gullies around the Kum. The witches of Fan Frenich. North of the horseshoe, witches were said to gather on the ridge, dancing and summoning storms and guarding hidden springs. The hare, a shapeshifter. Hares in Welsh folklore are witches in disguise, messengers between worlds. So Ru Ir Isigagon, the ridge of the hare, is a supernatural marker. The blackbirds of twin muelkod. Blackbirds are guardians, omens, and guides. And then the horses. In Welsh tradition, white horses belong to Rihanna, the sovereignty goddess whose mount moves slowly but cannot be caught. They also belong to Anwin, the other world, appearing on ridges, in mists and near lakes. Grey mares belong to the mortal world, the everyday horses of the uplands and guides. And in Breckenshire law, when a white horse and a grey mare stand together on high ground, it means the land is shifting, or the weather is turning, or you're crossing from one kind of ground to another. Not a prophecy, not a message, just a quiet moment where the ridge shows you two of its oldest inhabitants in the place where they've always belonged. If you want to understand a Welsh mountain, don't look at the map. Look at the names. Welsh place names aren't labels, they're descriptions, warnings, and memories. So we climbed ten peaks on our journey through the Penny Fan horseshoe. And I'm going to tell the story through the names. The first peak was Craig Fan Duth, the dark ridge of the beacons at the far north end. Next, Craig Quali, the quarrying crag. Then Fanny Big, the beak-shaped peak. Next, Clibbin, the little ridge, the comb. Then Penny Fan at the head of the beacon. Next, Korndu, the black horn. After that was Craig Quintas, the crag above the moor of Taft. Then Ru Arusub Arnog, the Ridge of the Hare, then Kevin Keel, the narrow back, and finally Twin Buelkod, the hill of the Blackbirds. It's not a list, it's a linguistic map of the ridge's identity that combines both the geographical forms and the mythology behind it. In more modern times, Penny Fan has become a proving ground for the SAEDs. Same stone, same kums, same weather, new story. The beacons have become a proving ground for SAS selection. Not because they're the hardest mountains, but because they're the fairest. The terrain is open, honest, relentless, and deceptively simple. The fan dance, the long drag, the march that breaks people down to their essentials. The ridge doesn't care who you are, it just asks, will you keep moving? When you step onto the Pennyfan horseshoe, you're not walking a loop, you're walking a Devonian desert tilted and carved by ice, the high edge of Brachan's kingdom, the mythic theatre of portals, witches, giants, and lake spirits. A linguistic poem written in Welsh, a modern probing ground of endurance, and a ridge or a mythology of this place, white horses belong to the other world, and grey mares belong to the land, and the boundary between them is the ridge itself. Now let's get on the pop. So I drove down to the Brecon Beacons from North Wales from Snowdonia. Now on the fifth day of my tour of some of British of some of Britain's greatest peak hikes. I stayed in the town of Crical at the Manor Hotel, which sits majestically above the valley, giving you a resplendent view of the Brecon Beacons. I arrived kind of late. I got there after nine, and the hotel kitchen was was shut, but I hadn't had dinner yet. But the kindly staff directed me to the local India restaurant which was just down in the valley, a few minutes' ride. And so I spent the evening eating curry, sipping up Indian pale ale before retiring to bed. The next morning I took my car and I drove into the Breckham Beacons for the start point of this hike, which was the Neward Reservoir. My intent for the day was to do the famous Penny Fan Horseshoe. Now, Pennyfan is the highest point in the Southern British Isles and the perfect cap to the UK Six Peaks. The Southern British Isles are defined by anything below Snowdonia, which was the last peak we did in the UK Six Peaks in Snowdon. And Pennyfan stands head and shoulders above everything else in the Southern British Isles and made the perfect finishing point for this journey. So I arrived at New Ed at about eight o'clock in the morning, and it was a beautiful morning. The sun was out, and there was a gentle calling breeze. And when I got to the parking lot, there were already a fair number of cars there and folks getting ready for their hike. It appeared that a lot of these folks were just going to hike straight up into the valley and up to Penny Fan. But I had bigger ambitions. I wanted to check off the ten pigs that make up the total Penny Fan horseshoe. And so I got ready and I started up the road that leads up towards the Brecon Penny Fan horseshoe. And as you start walking up the road, there becomes a branch in the trail. And at that branch is a stone road that starts climbing heavily up to the ridgeline. And so I took that road, I took that route, and I see the other hikers continuing on down the road, and I was soon alone. And as you get up and start rising above the valley floor, you come to a turn in the road, and from there you can see the glory of the Penny Fan horseshoe. Just this wondrous great rolling ridge line, as far as you can see, terminating in Corn Dew and the Penny Fan Peak. My intent today was to get on the ridge as soon as possible and double back on myself to hit the first peak, Craig Fan Dew. And so as I continued along the rock road, I came to a canyon with a creek rushing down it. And this is where I was going to stray from the traditional horseshoe route. There was a single track that went up the canyon and hit the ridgeline a little earlier. Now it appeared that that trail did not connect with the main ridge, but it was only a short gap, and I couldn't see any major impediment like a lake or a sharp ridge that would stop me connecting to the ridge, so I decided to risk it. So I began climbing up by this rushing creek, and the ground was kind of boggy, not too bad, but wet enough to wet your shoes. I mean that I had to cautiously navigate through some muddy patches. And the trail wasn't too steep and it wasn't too severe, but it gently climbed slowly up onto the ridgeline. And as you reached the ridgeline you started to enter the moors. But the trail was still clear, and soon you connected with the main ridge trail. At this point there was a cairn. It was a cairn that didn't mean anything. It was a can without a name. Here I traversed along the ridgeline out to Craig Fandu, and it was a fair distance to get out of the main horseshoe loo. But soon you're s at Craig Fandu, looking out southward towards this beautiful Welsh rolling countryside that goes on and on and on. It was a beautiful sight to behold. And I turned tail and came back the way I came until I reconnected to the cairn with no name. So I stood to look across the moorland from the cairn. I noticed there was a white horse grazing just across the moorland, looking at me, taking its time. As I looked to stare, behind it was a grey mare. And I could not help but think about the mythology of this place and its connection to the other world, and what the mythology of this may have meant to the ancient Welsh folks that were wandering this land. I took in the moment and then continued along the trail, along the crest to my next destination, Craigwalley. And along the way you see the bedrock showing through the trail, that old red sandstone poking up and actually making it pretty easy going. And before you know you're you're at Craig Kowali, it's insignificant, there's no major cairn. But before you lay is the traditional starting point of the horseshoe, and you see before you Fanny Big. The trail dips a little, not too much, before climbing up to Fanny Big. Now the interesting thing about the way the Brecken Beacons are laid out on the Penny Fan horseshoe is that the major peaks sort of stick out like the rays of a sun as you were going around the horseshoe. So in order to hit the peaks, you kind of follow the horseshoe ridge, and you have to do sort of a little out and back to get to the peak. And Fanny Big was the first time that you had to achieve this. So there was a little climb up to Fanny Big, and when I got there, there was a bunch of people enjoying the sun and the glorious day. And there's a precipice rock there that juts out over and above the steep drop that leads into the Welsh valleys below. So I took the opportunity to stand on the precipice rock and admire the view below me. And it was a great feeling to enjoy that moment. Although the precipice rock wasn't quite as big in itself as I was anticipating, the drop below it really was. And so quickly I turned tail and began a steep descent away from Fanny Big. And Fanny Big from the side that I had taken it was not a very big climb. But the drop-off on the other side of Fanny Big into the valley below was very steep and quite long. And the issue was that this led into the climb to Kribbin. Now Kribbin from Fanny Big is a substantial climb. And it was certainly a workout. Getting off of Fanny Big was okay. There was certainly a well-defined trail. But the climb up to Kribbin was short and punchy and steep, and it was a leg burner. You've you can either follow the trail or follow footprints that have been made in the grass, but either way you're going what feels like straight up, uh short and punchy, but certainly to the point. Eventually it eases off, and you make your way out to that sun ray out to Kribbin. And you get to Kribbin, and once again, another glorious view. But the next peak, the next challenge is the big one, it's Penny Fan. And you can see Penny Fan from Kribbin, and it looks enormous in comparison. It's clearly the largest peak, and the huge outcrops that you're facing look dramatic, and the trail looks like a grind. And I can assure you it is. So you come off of Kribbin, another steep descent before the long ascent up into Penny Fan. At the bottom is a small small pool, a small pond, sort of covering the trail. Now you can walk through it or you can walk around it. On this morning I chose to walk around it before I began the grind up to Penny Fan. And so there were a fair number of hikers coming down or going up the ascent from this side. And so we began the grind just up and up and up. I took a few breaks on the way up, but you could feel that this one was real and this one was going to keep you honest. Eventually you get just below the ridge of Penny Fan. There's a little bit of a larger stone outcropping that you need to navigate before you pop up onto Penny Fan. And suddenly you're engulfed in hikers and tourists who've taken the more traditional route up to Pennyfan. The long hike up from the freeway up into Pennyfan. They're going out and back, quite simple. They haven't come from the quiet Neuid Reservoir side. And you immediately get kind of overwhelmed by just the number of people that are there. But make your way over to the small cairn, which is actually the burial place, the Bronze Age burial cairn. And it has been archaeologically excavated, and they've they found a crown and some other artifacts below that cairn, but now that just sits uh a National Trust sign, noting that this is Penny Fan with the altitude. I had to cue for a few minutes to get my photo and get my video in, but it was worth it. There weren't too many people around. I decided this was the halfway point peak number five, so I'd take a moment to eat some lunch. So I sat off to the side of Penny Fan, looking down on this beautiful lake. And this lake was Hum Loch. That lake of legend where the fairy lady lived, where the Afang was found, the doorway or the portal into the fairy underworld. At the time it was just a glorious view looking down on this high altitude lake while I was enjoying some lunch. So I finished, I made the short trip over to Corndoo. And interestingly, I don't think the Welsh intended this, but it kind of looks like a corncob when you are looking at it from afar. But is the sixth peak on the horseshoe and requires a little bit of a downhill and a little bit of an uphill to get there, nothing particularly strenuous. And when you get up into corndoo, there's another one of these Bronze Age uh burial cans. Actually, people have put lots of little cans on top of it. And when I got there, there was a woman who was putting the toy of a like a stuffed red dragon on top of the cairn. She was doing that because she had intended to do this hike with her father who couldn't make it. And so it was a nice sight to see that sort of memorial to a family member. And as I'm standing there at the cairn, there are lots of these little flies hanging around and biting you, so I didn't stay very long and made the descent of corn dew. And when you make the descent of corn dew, it's a little bit more blocky and a little bit harder, harder of a challenge. And I could see some people coming up, struggling with how to navigate it. Now I found the way off relatively easy and dropped off to the side and went down the grass. And as you come back down off of corn dew, this is where the sort of the tourist trail connects with. And most of the people are avoiding corn dew altogether and then going back down to the to the road to the main trailhead. And this is where the quieter side of the horseshoe begins. If you don't go down that tourist and carry tourist trail and you carry on around the horseshoe, it gets a lot quieter than and there are a lot less people. So that's what I was doing. I popped off over to the other side of the of the horseshoe. And this is the lower side of the horseshoe as well. And it's relatively flat and relatively easy to navigate, but pretty quickly you are coming on to the next peak, which is Craig Guan Taff. There's a small can there. It really is the Craig above the moor of the Taft. So it's really a locationally named Craig. Nothing too significant and relatively easy to reach. Much further away is the next peak, number eight, which is Ru Isigifarnog. And this is the ridge of the hare. And if the myth is to believe, be believed, it's the place where the witches hang out, the shape-shifting witches who like to be uh transformed into hares. And when you get there again, there's uh another little can there, but you're continuing along the the edge of the horseshoe. Very well-defined trail, very quick to navigate. You can make a lot of quick time along here. The next one along is Kef and Core, the narrow back. Now, if you you could miss this quite easy. You do have to go a little bit off the trail to reach the little can. On top of the can is a very square block in the middle of a green field, but you do have to kind of navigate to it to tag it, but it's not a significantly steep incline. The real work of this horseshoe is done getting up to the ridgeline, and then probably cribin and penny fan are where is where most of the work is done. Now, on this backside, it's relatively flat and relatively simple. And after Kevin Cole, it's a fairly long trail out to the final peak, which is the Twin Mual Quad, the Hill of the Blackbirds. Now, the Hill of the Blackbirds connects to the main trail that descends back to the Newark Reservoir. And you have to kind of go off trail and across a bit of a field, a bit of a ridge. You can't see it from trail itself, but you go across some grass and you end up at this trig point, which is actually now doubling as a war memorial. But there is a defined trig point at this at this peak. And one of the one of the war memorials, one of the plates that's been put there, had this wonderful saying on it: winners never quit and quitters never win. I thought that was a really apropos way to end my whole adventure, not just the horseshoe, but the whole five-day adventure across the British Isles. And so I returned back to the trail and began the descent back into the valley. And as you get back into the valley and off the ridge, it gets warmer and warmer. And you descend back into the valley and across a bridge, and you come to this fantastic gothic dam that had obviously been built a long time ago to create the Neward Reservoir. It's got this wonderful architecture and what feels like these ancient industrial spillways, which you are hiking through before you connect back to the road. And before you know it, you're back on the road and you're making your way back to the parking lot, the Neward Reservoir parking lot. When I got back to the parking lot, I took my pack off, I took a break, and soon another another guy came along carrying a tent and some other equipment, and he was parked next to me, and we had a little chat chat about hiking, and he was training for a hike to the Dolomites and had shared with me some of his hiking adventures. But that was it. This was really the bittersweet end of the day. It was the end of my hiking tour of the British Isles, and what a glorious way to finish. Just the Breckham Beacons and the Penny Fan horseshoe is something you've got to see. It's just a spectacular sight. It's not a particularly challenging hike. It's a long hike along an exposed ridgeline. So if the weather's bad, you're gonna be in for a miserable day no matter what. You have to be careful about navigating if you end up in the mist in the rain. But on this day, sunshine all day, just a soft breeze, a real beautiful end, soft end to a beautiful hike around the British Isles, highly recommended. And when I got home that evening, I realized I'd actually got in sunburn. So that was a stark contrast from the whipping rain and mist of earlier in the week. But yeah, absolutely one of the places you must go, the tallest peak in the southern British Isles by far. And by the southern British Isles, that really means anything south of Snowdonia, which is a significant chunk of the British Isles. And so it really belongs on that list of the highest peaks that you can climb across the nation. So that was it. The Penny Fan Horseshoe. Now, off you pop.