Well hello and welcome. Well today I'm back in Wales.
I'm actually in Porthcawl at the moment but I'm going to take you on a walk.
A walk to the Brecon Beacons which is going to be a bit different.
Well in today's walk I'm going to be exploring the western side of the Brecon Beacons
Starting near Dany Yr Ogof show caves and the the reason I'm doing this walk is I'm going to see
if I can find the remains of an old world war II bomber which crashed in November 1944
on a training exercise. The reason I'm doing it today I have some Canadian relatives over
and we're gonna see if we can find this crash site and memorial because the crew of this Wellington
Bomber were Canadian. It's an interesting story although a very sad story and I'll tell you
more about that when I get there by the way the Canadian relatives probably won't be appearing
on camera, it'll be just me so anyway I'll see you when we start the walk on the Brecon Beacons
So we've parked just down from Dan Yr Ogof caves and basically that's where we're heading
you can park in a small lay-by by the church there about 500 yards down from Dany Yr Ogof caves
so from the church, we head down back towards Dan Yr Ogof show caves
and there's a footpath on your right so that's where we're heading now
Well it's very different today on a sunny summer's afternoon
to what it must have been like on the 20th of November 1944
a training flight of a Vickers Wellington MF 509 was doing a cross-country exercise
it was crewed by six Canadians from the 22nd operational training unit. They suffered a problem
with a starboard engine. It's believed it could have been a problem with icing anyway they
couldn't maintain height and they hit the side of Carreg Goch mountain and that's where we're heading
well sadly the six crew of the Wellington Bomber were all killed and they were buried
with military honours in a military graveyard near Chester but the plane itself
the Wellington Bomber was just left on the side of the mountain and now
it's a memorial for the six crew and we should find some poppies, some Canadian flags and
this leads me on to another interesting story about the place and how they found
the surviving families of the six crewmen
Obviously, the families were informed of the deaths but they didn't know the details after all it was
wartime but shortly after the accident a local person found a photograph of one of the crew
or they didn't know exactly who it was, lying in the area of the crash and that was posted on a
blog six years later. I think around 2005 and that blog is still live, I'll put a link to it below
it's quite interesting to follow the post on that blog because they managed to find the families
not long ago a few of the family members actually came up to the crash site to pay tribute
It was an interesting story have a look, again, link below. So we're getting pretty close now
I think we're on the other side, the eastern side of the mountain.
Like I said, the day is pretty nice but in the winter it's a pretty bleak place
Just look at this terrain, it was a hard walk to get here imagine this at night, low
cloud. Maybe you can just make out the Canadian flag
before anyone says anything we're not walking over the wreck itself
we're filming from outside the crash site
Well, I hope you found this story and this walk interesting. A sad story but one of many from
this period in time. Anyway I'll see you in another video coming up shortly, bye.