If you know about Clyne Valley. you are probably a regular visitor who enjoys the many paths through varied woodland, the mountain bike routes for the restless, the streams, trees, birds, flowers, calmness and spiritual renewal that settles like dew on its visitors.
If you don’t know about Clyne Valley, there are precious few signs to alert you to its existence. You can drive past its unsignposted entrance from the coast road, hidden behind a car park for beach visitors. Kilay, Dunvant and Gowerton afford, but don’t advertise, access – and that’s the way I like it. If you like countryside, you’ll find it soon enough; and if you don’t much care for it, it’s not going to try and tempt you away from your preferred activities.
It’s Spring as I write this, so birds and flowers are beginning to show.
I have seen blue tits, great tits, a marsh tit, long-tailed tits, a spotted flycatcher, goldcrests, goldfinches, greenfinches, grey wagtails, an innocent tiger-who-came-to-tea buzzard sitting on a branch being mobbed by much smaller birds who hadn’t read the book, dippers, wrens, robins, mallards, song thrushes, chaffinches and many others belonging to species that move somewhat faster than the speed of binoculars. There are so many paths, be they more wooded or less-wooded or hilly or level or meandering or straight, running or not running alongside streams, each with its own wildlife palette, that all but the hard of appreciation are catered for.
And mountain bike riders are very well catered for, significant effort havin been put into creating trails. Wikipedia states: ‘In 2009 Swansea Council launched the Clyne Valley Management Plan [2] to develop the use of the valley for leisure activities. The plan is grant-funded through the Forestry Commission‘s ‘Better Woodlands for Wales’ scheme, and includes a substantial investment into Mountain Bike facilities in Clyne. Several kilometres of new purpose-built way-marked mountain bike trails are being constructed as part of the plan. The Clyne Riders [3] group has been specially constituted for this task.’. And the link below gives some indication of what was constructed.
Town Hillbilly 