Pen y Fan
— — red sandstone above a long green valley.
Not only on a wall.
“The highest peak in southern Britain, 886 metres of Old Red Sandstone above the heads of the Taf and Usk valleys. The classic ascent climbs from Pont ar Daf in under two hours, along a paved path the National Trust keeps rebuilt against the boots. Cloud comes in fast and goes out faster. Sheep watch the whole thing. — from the studio
Pen y Fan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pen y Fan is the highest peak in southern Britain at 886 metres, the summit of the central massif of Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, formerly known in English as the Brecon Beacons. The mountain sits in Powys, in mid-south Wales, with the town of Brecon to the north and Merthyr Tydfil to the south. The whole ridge is built of Old Red Sandstone laid down in the Devonian period, and the flat summit caps a steep northern escarpment that drops nearly four hundred metres to Llyn Cwm Llwch in a single sweep.
The peak is a textbook of Devonian geology. The Old Red Sandstone of the Brecon Beacons Formation gives the summit its rust colour and its blocky weathered shape. The flat top is a remnant of a much older land surface, lifted and tilted before the last glaciation cut the cwms into the north face. Llyn Cwm Llwch, the small glacial lake under the north scarp, sits in one of those cwms. Two Bronze Age cairns crown the summit ridge of Pen y Fan and its neighbour Corn Du, both surveyed and stabilised by the National Trust.
The most popular route is the Pont ar Daf path, a paved track that climbs about 530 metres over three kilometres from a car park on the A470. Most walkers reach the summit in around ninety minutes. The horseshoe route from the Storey Arms over Corn Du and back via Cribyn is the classic longer day. The path is rebuilt continually by the National Trust against tens of thousands of pairs of boots a year. Weather changes quickly here, and the SAS selection course over the same ground has cost lives in heat and cold.