Published in Snow News, September 2002

The Welsh Three Valleys

Bet you didn't know there were once ski lifts in South Wales? William Ham Bevan looks back at the exploits of his local ski club in the mighty Brecon Beacons

WHEN I tell people I learnt to ski in Britain, they sensibly assume I mean Scotland – or, at a pinch, some dry slope in the provinces (although my two unmangled thumbs give the lie to that). South Wales rarely features on their list of skiing destinations.

So when I add that it was in the Brecon Beacons that I made my first descent – on real snow, and with the use of a ski lift, mind you – there is more than a little surprise and incredulity.It was all thanks to the South Wales Ski Club. Long before skiing became a popular pursuit in the UK, a group of enthusiasts in Swansea were planning trips abroad, getting together several times a year for socials, and when the weather allowed, organising days of skiing near Pen y Fan in Brecon.

My father, who for a while was chairman of the club, was custodian of our very own lift: a petrol-driven cable tow that would be installed in the field at the start of each day’s skiing.I remember that mine was an inauspicious start. With the admonition of “Don’t fall in the stream”, my father had pushed me off on my first-ever run on skis – an ancient, wooden pair with the old “wire noose” Kandahar bindings.

Still shivering at the damp Welsh cold, despite a hand-me-down C&A anorak and oversized salopettes, I pitched wildly from left to right, before miraculously finding my balance. I could ski! The elation lasted about two-and-a-half seconds, whereupon I ran out of hill and fell nose-first into the stream.

The effects of that trauma soon wore off, and each year I would look forward to the winter ritual of the South Wales Ski Club. When the weather became noticeably colder, there would be a flurry of telephone calls, speculating about the possibility of snow. Then, if a snowflake was spotted, one of the members would drive up to the Beacons to do a recce.

On the rare occasions when there was enough snow cover (Brecon’s record in this respect falling slightly short of Val d’Isere’s) the green light would be given, and it would be all systems go.A convoy of cars and caravanettes would wind their way to a spot opposite the Storey Arms on the A4059, where a small resort would spring up in the lay-by. Fortified by hot soup from a thermos, and later on, gluhwein, members would each get a metal handle that could be clipped to the wire tow to make an ascent.

If the choice of piste was limited – basically, left or right at the top – enthusiasm never was. Whole weekends would be spent there, until the snow gave way to rough grass and frozen sheep turd.

And in one record year in the early Eighties, when there was a huge dump of snow, two other Welsh ski clubs even joined forces with the SWSC. They added their own rope tows above ours, in what still must be the only linked ski-lift network ever to be seen in South Wales. People in passing cars would stop and gawp – after all, this was quite unexpected to find in an anonymous field in the middle of nowhere.

Somehow, word got around, and skiers from as far away as Newport and Pembroke began to turn up, paying their joining fees on the spot for the loan of a metal handle.That year, people joked that this was Wales’s answer to the Trois Vallées, and that we should have been issuing lift passes.

Wishful thinking, maybe, but the analogy was spot on in one respect: by mid-afternoon on the Sunday, the lift queues were massive.