Source to Sea
by Guy Procter

Plick. Plink. Plop. Plip. Scientists have yet to agree on the exact sound a drop of water makes (although I know they are hard at it). I had romantically hoped this would be what we'd find -- nay, I had promised my editor -- at the head, the very source of the River Dovey. Hanging plumply off the end of a single blade of grass drooping from the edge of a carpet of wind-blown moorland, there it would be. "There!" I'd say, and no doubt follow up with "Come see, Ped. It's beautiful, man." Then I'd shove the neck of my waterbottle under the swelling bead to catch it and be able to say I had the River Dovey right there in my bottle.

Well, now we were here, several hours' drive from home, and the reality was turning out to be less clear cut than my very tiny serving of natural mineral water.

See, the River Dovey in mid Wales isn't born of a single atomic droplet, but, as a moment's thought would have told me, the less picturesque process of drizzling, seeping and oozing into and out of soggy Welsh hillsides. And as I recall from a geography lesson called, I think, the Hydrological Cycle, my droplet has probably passed through seven people, four different types of cloud and any number of sewage treatment works by the time I get to it.

Still, what our pilgrimage to the source of the River Dovey has done is brought us to a beautiful viewpoint. Although gravity is tugging at my hydrological bicycle, there's time to take in a wild upland landscape behind our shoulders, blending in one graceful plunge into the green baize pastures of civilisation in spreading patches down the valley. Hornby-perfect bushy oak trees dot the scene, while on either side screes sweep up in unpassable steepness - nesting country. Thirty miles away lies the sea.

The Dovey (Afon Dyfi) divides North and South Wales -- as important a boundary for natives as its English equivalent. They pronounce their vowels differently on each side. Or at least they do a little further down the valley. Up here in the biro-thin part of the river's lifeline it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. In fact you could straddle the entire river in one step.

We release the brakes and inherit a huge potential energy gift given to us by Aran Fawddwy, the 2,791ft hump from which the Dovey dribbles. In this upper reach, the Dovey goes by an infant name. Although its headwater is called Creiglyn Dyfi, the enthusiastic stream which leaps from rock to rock answers to the name of Llaethnant ('milk stream').

Hatches on the map mark this first couple of kilometres as extra-steep and the view is quickly a blur. But as we're gathering pace, the Dovey is gathering breadth too. Coming to a halt before a particularly tricky descending hairpin, we're surprised like neglectful parents to see the river appearing bigger and more assured than we remember it. It doesn't dodge round rocks like it did; it goes right over them.

At Llanymawddwy, four kilometres into our ride, the initial rush is over, both for us and the Dovey. Clear of the moorish tops, the water has settled to a stiller presence and we're faced with a surprise: an uphill climb. Here again it would seem I have let down my trusting editor gravely. Following the course of a river, you'd think, would essentially be a long, blissful downhill coast. Not so. While it's true that rivers rarely, if ever, flow uphill, Tarmac often does. Bummer. Twist, turn and -- more often than the locals would actually like -- flood as the Dovey does, the accompanying lane keeps a prudent distance. That means where the river follows the Pied Piper of gravity with graceful precision, the road Morris dances an elaborate series of sometimes amusing, sometimes frustrating kinks, curves, ups and downs.

Not for the first time, a drop preoccupies my thoughts, although this time it's on the end of my nose as I crunch down the gears in search of the perfect compromise of uphill progress and effort.

The magic ratio won't be found though. Soon we stop at the Gwesty'r Llew Coch pub for orange and lemonade and let the river go on without us for a bit. We're a few kilometres into the ride, with many more to go. Pleasingly, at the bar stands an award-winningly old Welshman in a long blue mack and wellies. I nod tentatively. After all, this is no tourist-pleasing tat outlet, but a real slate and brasses locals' watering hole. I may be in for a 'bloody English' brush off here. Instead, as the drinking arm (huge hands) goes down, a toothless grin bisects his face, and I'm relieved. I hesitate to describe what ensued as a conversation (he couldn't hear what I was saying, I couldn't understand his replies, although I definitely picked up 'bricklaying' at one point). I like to think we forged some kind of animal bond. Anyway, he held the heavy door open for me as I manoeuvered a tray of drinks back into the blinding 10am light and said "Gyah" in the way that ancient Welshmen with no teeth have.

Back in the saddle I wish I could remember the names of the houses and hamlets we"re passing but it's a lost cause and they're gone by the time the notebook comes out. All the Welsh words look like shortened versions of longer, and possibly more memorable, actual words, with more vowels in. As we reach Dinas Mawddwy, the first of the Dovey's big public appearances, the river has quintupled in breadth and regained some of the white-topped wavelets of its mountain youth.

Our lane has broadened too, and there's a brief stretch of 'WHoooaghmygod that was close' A-road riding before we pull off onto the backroad again. On the other side of the river lies the hamlet of Mallwyd, whose church bears the rib of a mammoth dug up in 1641. We're in danger of becoming of archaeological interest ourselves if we take any longer over our migration to the coast, so we pass it by. Got to be single-minded if you want to reach the briny before the ice-cream vans depart.

In and out of trees and high-banked hedges we spot the Dovey in gaps and lowpoints, flowing like glossy film reel over the pastures on the left. At Aberangmell it's ready for its first taste of authority, as it marks the boundary between Gwynedd and Powys. But it's the fish the Dovey has plumped that create the only rivalry round here. In the 1920s friction between local 'poachers' and fishing rights owners flared into a riot. We opt to take lunch at a bend in the river where the flow is stretched and broken by a rocky step, the Dovey yawning to expose milky-white fangs like the MGM lion, with a roar of white noise. At the foot of the mini waterfall the water stops dead in a trough, fizzing and percolating like a never-ready pint of Guinness.

A few more miles of back lanes and we complete the transition from the Dovey's upper reaches where mountains are the dominant presence to a more open scene, the perfectly flat grazing an echo of the ultimate flatness that lies beyond. Our road is now navigable by bigger craft too. Time to get into an approximation of a Tour de France peloton, select a tall gear and make for Machynlleth, the next major waypoint.

It was in Machynlleth that the nationalist Owen Glendower opened the first Welsh assembly in 1404, after conclusively biffing the resident English. Today its influence has waned somewhat and it's just a pretty market town with a healthy balance of local services and tourist material. As for the Dovey, here it is now as wide as the Mississippi, flowing with diplomatic stateliness below the town. You get the feeling that this is the last time the river will be really and wholly itself, not some bland forerunner of the estuary it will soon become.

Back across the bridge the road too is losing its character, alternately clogged by barge-like coaches and strafed by local heroes in their souped-up Fiestas.

A loop of lane at the bypassed village of Pennal lets us pull off the A-road briefly. This is a half-track lane, with bushy banks reaching toward each other like unconsummated Velcro. Ferns and blackberry thorns grip our arms with their weedy arms as we pass. In the village, the local newsagent's luminous snorkels and swimming masks confirm that the Dovey has ceased to be the dominant aquatic presence.

It's just a few miles to the end now; a terminal point as indistinct as the start in a way. Is it Gogarth, where the river bank turns to sand, or Aberdovey, the seaside resort with the river's name? As the Dovey carves its way down through the silt plains, the road gains in relative height, looking down on the estuary with true coast-road precipitousness. Down there the Dovey has become a bona fide estuary, the fields giving way to a fringe of hardy grasses, a slaty wall marching determinedly and pointlessly into the water, a man fishing next to some inexplicable hulk of rusting machinery.

As anonymous as it looks in this wet desert, the Dovey is still at work here. In 1995, after a winter of easterly gales, the estuary's channel switched from the south side to the north. Nobody knows why it happened, but I'd like to think that the Dovey maintains an allegiance to its mountainous forebears upstream, in the north.

At last we reach Aberdovey, where the river is salty and governed by the tide, rather than gravity. At the end of a tree tunnel, across our boughs, the Irish sea suddenly appears.

It's a bittersweet end, gaining the coast and that longed-for 99 but losing a constant companion. Here, in its own lifeline, it simply doesn't exist any more. Still, as we manoeuvre our ice-creams to avoid a flake up the nose, at least having ridden it we know that back up the valley the Dovey is still simultaneously a titchy, tumbling stream, a gouging, peat-stained river and a mellow, cow-quenching flood. Silly thought, really. But nicer than the Hydrological Cycle.

© Guy Procter
On Your Bike