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It's gone 3am. Why am I still awake? I think it's because I snoozed earlier on today when I should have fought the *eatentoomuchness-fatigue* 'But it's just so easy to go to bed after eating such a big Sunday Roast; I bet I'll be paying for it tomorrow/Today - w/e!
Mind you, I always get anxiety attacks when I make big changes in the clubs. I recently arranged to have tomorrows first lesson changed to grade lessons only. Each Monday a different kyu grade will occupy the lesson and have the whole lesson dedicated to only their grade. Telling them all was the easy part, getting them all to turn up is another thing!
The lessons will always change from time to time as no 2 students are the same. Some need more time than others so you have to accomodate each persons needs and make sure they get their value for money. Everyone benefits in the end!
Hubby is buying me a rowing machine tomorrow to work on my weight/leg issues. I'm really excited about that. I'm hoping to burn the bulge off in time for summer. It's so nice to be doing something again. As you know I also like walking, but the weather has been dreadful and I haven't been able to go out. Gutted. Never mind. Roll on warm hazy days.
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Something I didn't know about Neath / Swansea!
Take the coast road out of Swansea. Pass the Cenotaph on the embankment to the left and two sets of traffic lights, before arriving at a third. Carry straight on for about half a mile, until the road is joined by another from the right. Turn right here and enter the CAR PARK on the left.
Leave your car here and cross the main road. Go past the mini boating lake and stand on the concrete footbridge that crosses the small river. This was once the site of the famous Mumbles Railway, the earliest passenger-carrying rail-transport system in the world. Much of the ensuing walk is established upon the line of this tramway, which ran from Swansea to Mumbles Pier. It was closed in the sixties.
Look to the south-east and follow the shape of the land from the furthest headland towards Port Talbot, which is the first noticeable town on the coast, with its steelworks. The sudden increase in height of the land behind the immediate coastline is the result of resistant Coal Measure sandstones coming to the surface on the southern limb of the South Wales Coalfield syncline. The flatter land to the south of this hilly region is made up mostly of Triassic and Jurassic rocks overlying the eroded basement of folded Carboniferous rocks. You are, in effect, looking at an ancient coastline, because as the younger strata get thinner northward, they also develop into sediment types more characteristic of shallow water. Older Triassic rocks beneath lie directly upon basement and are the deposits of large, fan-.shaped screes formed by desert-erosion of high mountains, which are now only the rounded hills you see before you. Only one small patch and a few infilled fissures now remain to tell of a similar Triassic cover over Gower.
Above Swansea stands Kilvey Hill: a brownish-black, rounded hill like those over Port Talbot, and made of the same rocks. It has a television mast on its summit. The other hills on which Swansea's northern and western suburbs are built, also stand on northerly-dipping Carboniferous rocks, whose geology closely controls the topography of the town.
If, for example, you were to drive northwards from Swansea to joint the M4 at Llangyfelach, you would notice several distinct ridges that the road must traverse. These are the thick formations of sandstone - look out for quarries and cuttings on the way - and the valleys that lie between them are formed along the intervening shales and coals. These valleys and escarpments run east-west, and they are cut across, on the west side of Kilvey Hill, by the other major feature of the Swansea landscape, the Swansea Valley. The picture above is taken from one of these Pennant Sandstone ridges.
Anyone coming to Swansea on the train will, after having left Neath, have descended into the Swansea Valley from the high land which separates the two depressions and traversed the broad, level valley floor towards the Landore Viaduct. This wide, glaciated valley, a cradle of the Industrial Revolution and once the largest area of industrial- dereliction in Europe, is filled and flattened by the sediment deposited by the retreating glacier. This tongue of ice carved the valley along the line of one of Wales' major fault-lines the Swansea Valley Disturbance.
Much of the valley, and also much of Swansea Bay itself, is filled with this glacial debris. The exact course of the Swansea Valley Disturbance is not known for certain in the immediate vicinity of the city, but it probably meets the sea along the northern edge of the Gower peninsula, having veered westwards somewhere to the north.
Nevertheless, many other faults come to the coast in the bay itself. Not all are major features like the Swansea Valley Disturbance, though the Neath Disturbance (which controls the Neath Valley in similar fashion) is of comparable scale. At any rate, these numerous faults, all converging here, have resulted in the formation of this extremely wide and dramatic harbour.
(Note that the term 'disturbance' is meant to convey a zone of complex faulting rather than a single fracture-line. Most of the major faults of Britain are similarly complex, but only in South Wales, it seems, are they called 'disturbances'.)
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