Blaenavon

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” 
Jacob Riis 
A shorter walk today, beginning to improve after feeling decidedly off-colour yesterday after my Covid booster jab on Tuesday. Yesterday I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for a walk. The Blaenavon Walks Pack from the World Heritage Centre came to my rescue with useful ideas, and so I followed some of the Blaenavon Town Walk, from the Centre, once St Peter’s School, in 1816 the first purpose built by an industrialist for the workers children. From there I made my way through the streets and past the river of my childhood, the Afon Llwyd, which I read in the leaflet was once called the Torfaen (from torri maen – ‘Rock breaker’). I was heading for King Street, once called Heol-ust-tewi (Hush, Be Silent Strreet) – a street with a name like that just has to be visited.
Job done, I headed back (it was getting dark) to settle down to some Radio 4 entertainment, a dramatisation of Mabinogi, The White Hill, in which King Bran's prophecy was fulfilled, just the thing for a dark autumn evening.