ABERGAVENNY MARKET Janice and Brian went off to work and kindly lent us their car for the day. Every Tuesday there is a sheep and cattle market at the town of Abergavenny, about 10 miles from Pontypool so we drove out and had a look at that. There wasn’t a very big yarding but as well as some pretty scraggy-looking ewes there were some good sized lambs on sale. I couldn’t figure out the method that the auction used to sell the sheep (it was half in welsh and half in English and the buyers were a very guarded lot) but some of the prices were:
15kg lambs – ￡27-50
– ￡32-00
15 1/2kg lambs – ￡27-50
– ￡30-00
16 1/2kg lambs – ￡31-50
18 1/2kg lambs – ￡33-20
Full-wool hoggets 19kg – ￡30-00
“ 20kg – ￡30-50
“ 18kg – ￡31-80
After the sale we went to the town of Usk for a ploughman’s lunch then drove to the town of Caerleon where there are some Roman ruins then on to a village called Christchurch on a hill overlooking the Severn Valley where we had a magnificent view of a steel mill and a coal-fired power station just visible through a haze of pollution.
In the evening we went on another pub crawl!
CurseOfTheTraveller 