All walks › Llandrindod & Radnorshire
Llandrindod & RadnorshireWater-break-its-neck
Twenty minutes up a wooded gorge in the Radnor Forest to a waterfall dropping into a dark, fern-hung amphitheatre. Superb after heavy rain and frankly a bit pointless in a dry August.
- Distance
- 1.5 mi / 2.4 km
- Time
- 45 min
- Ascent
- 60 m
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Shape
- There and back
Where it is
The circle shows the general area, not the exact start. Use the directions link below to get to the car park itself. Contours and paths shown are OpenTopoMap, drawn from OpenStreetMap data.
The route
Follow the forest track up the dingle with the stream on your left, then take the narrower path that continues into the gorge as the walls close in. The fall is at the head of it. Return the same way, or loop back on the higher forest road if it is running.
Worth knowing
- Go after two or three days of rain. In a dry spell it reduces to a trickle down a black wall.
- The rocks at the base stay greasy all year. Nobody looks graceful getting close to the water.
- There is no phone signal in the dingle and precious little in the car park.
What you’ll see
Mosses, liverworts and ferns in the spray zone, and a fall of around seventy feet into a cauldron of dark rock.
Background
The Radnor Forest was a royal hunting forest and never much wooded in the modern sense. The conifers arrived in the twentieth century; the name refers to the older, open ground.