https://vo.rs/tags/wales/Recent content in Wales on vo.rsHugoenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/encore/bog-snorkelling-world-championships/Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/encore/bog-snorkelling-world-championships/<p>Every August Bank Holiday, grown adults in wetsuits and flippers lower themselves face-first into a trench of cold peat water in mid-Wales and thrash 120 yards through the dark. This is the World Bog Snorkelling Championship, and it is exactly as absurd, as cold, and as gloriously pointless as it sounds.</p> <p>The venue is Waen Rhydd, a boggy patch near Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys — a place that bills itself as the smallest town in Britain and behaves like the eccentric uncle of the whole country. The organisers cut a trench roughly 60 yards long straight through the peat, fill it with the sort of brown, tannin-stained water that gives Welsh bogs their smell, and invite anybody daft enough to swim two lengths of it against the clock. First championship: 1985. It has run in August almost every year since, pausing only when the whole world paused in 2020 and 2021.</p>