January jaunts.

[Bierzo Baggie]

Unlike everybody else my long run last Sunday was a walk. And a motley crew of walkers we were too. Bierzo Baggie, Miguel mushroom, Manolo, Mrs Scouser, her brother in law and Elwyn, (back to the fold after illness) completed the line-up. Funnily enough neither Mrs Scouser is a scouser nor Elwyn a Welshman.
Must be honest here. I enjoy a long walk much more than a long run and happily sacrifice “bread and butter” Sunday runs for a refreshing stroll on the hills in good company. I’ll pay for this later no doubt… The problem with long walks is that they take all day. So I’ve promised baby Lara that I’ll do no more than one a month.

El Bierzo is dotted with ruinous villages. Most of them were abandoned in the 60s or 70s. All of them are remote, invariably at the end of a dirt track or an overgrown path and usually over 1000 metres. Winter hardship and lack of basic facilities (such as electricity) forced the occupants to emigrate leaving the simple stone and slate buildings to be gradually consumed by moss and lichen. Our destination on Sunday morning was the abandoned village of Las Tejedas.

Lying at the head of a deep, wooded valley you continually ask yourself why anybody would consider building a village up here in the first place. Perhaps they were hiding from somebody. Only a couple of houses maintain some semblance of a roof. Some have entire trees growing inside. In one I glimpsed a twisted iron bedstead emerging through the rubble like a shipwreck. We scrambled up through brambles to a hillock where the old church overlooks the ghost town. A couple of precariously dangling beams are all that’s left of the roof and the original font was still inside along with the rotting remains of what looked like a confession box. Mrs Scouser fancied the font as a flower pot but it’d have taken a crane to shift the thing.
Total walking time; about 4 hours.