VIRAL STUNT: Swansea influencer took a bath up Pen y Fan — twice

The bath went up Pen y Fan on 17 July, on the shoulder of a man in flip flops, because it would look extraordinary on camera.

Tom Christopher, the controversial Swansea influencer, had bought a tub and decided to carry it to the top of the highest mountain in southern Britain during the hot spell — a climb of some 460 metres up from the A470. At the summit he hoisted it over his head for the camera.

An empty bath was no use to him, so he built a relay. At the stream near the bottom of the path he planted hand-lettered cardboard signs reading “Help take water up”, “Fill here” and “River water”, left buckets and a jerry can beside them, and started walking.

Then he waited to find out whether anyone in Wales would carry a bucket of river water up a mountain for a stranger.

They would. His footage shows walkers handing buckets up the track and grinning into the lens, the tub filling load by load as the light went.

Two friends doing the Welsh Three Peaks got in with him at the top. Christopher has said the video stopped being about him having a bath and turned into something about the number of people who joined in.

He got in and watched the sun go down over the Beacons.

He was calling it the world’s highest bath. It was not close. Yangpachen in Tibet has open-air thermal pools at around 4,300 metres, nearly five times the height of Pen y Fan, and people have been getting into them for years.

Christopher later told followers he had a Guinness World Record anyway. Guinness World Records lists no such title.

Then he went home and left it there.

He has said he meant to come back inside 48 hours to fit wheels and ride it down, and that hundreds of messages had asked him to leave it up so walkers could photograph it.

For the next day the bath belonged to the internet. People coming over the ridge found a pristine white tub standing alone against the drop, photographed it, posted it, and the comment sections filled with theories — a misdelivered parcel, a Wetherspoons opening in the car park with the urinals to follow.

What came over the ridge instead was Cardiff Rugby. Junior and senior academy players were on the mountain with National Trust rangers, repairing footpath damage and erosion left by heavy visitor numbers, at the end of their first block of pre-season.

The day was organised by academy manager Gruff Rees and Cardiff RFC winger Tom Williams, who works as a National Trust ranger looking after 72km of footpaths in the Central Beacons. Williams said the work was designed to “protect the mountain from the heavy footfall of visitors”.

The players took one look, decided the bath had been dumped, and carried it the entire length of the descent before handing it to rangers.

Here is the part the joke skated over. The summit Christopher chose is not a bare heap of stones.

It is a reconstructed Bronze Age burial cairn with a stone cist at its centre, ringed by concentric kerbs to stop the mound slipping. The cist is a box of upright slabs that would once have held a cremation and grave goods, and the National Trust sign now stands in it.

Corn Du, the peak visible behind the tub in the photographs, carries a near-identical monument. That is roughly four thousand years of burial ground, on top of a mountain the National Trust owns outright, on land designated a site of special scientific interest.

It is also one of the most walked mountains in Britain, with hundreds of thousands of people going up every year. That is why the trust runs a continuous programme of path repair, and why a rugby academy spent a morning shifting stone on it.

A spokesperson for National Trust Cymru said rangers helped bring the bath down because of the risk it posed to visitors and to the site of special scientific interest, with the potential for contamination — the water in it having come out of a river, bucket by bucket.

Bannau Brycheiniog National Park said clearing waste left by visitors drains staff resource away from protecting the landscape, and that littering and fly-tipping are a significant problem across the park, hitting wildlife, livestock and local communities.

Christopher says the park has told him the incident was reported as fly-tipping, and that he does not know whether a fine is coming. He has said he is in his overdraft and would rather work a penalty off through volunteering than pay it.

Penalties around here are not nominal. A Morriston man was ordered to pay more than £1,400 this month after waste was strewn along two miles of a Dulais Valley road. Neath Port Talbot has crushed vehicles seized in enforcement. A waste boss lost his licence after a conviction last summer.

He apologised. “I know that night I should’ve taken it down and I am sorry,” he said, calling it an honest mistake made after the response online ran in his favour.

Baths, by this point, were the act. Christopher says he entered one in the RNLI Raft Race, fitted out with oars, a shower head and a shower cap. The Mumbles seafront fundraiser marked its 40th year this month.

Then he went back to Pen y Fan with a new one.

This one he bolted to a timber frame mounted on two fat off-road wheels, with a camera clamped to the rim. He climbed in wearing swimming trunks and a red motocross helmet and set off down the open grass.

He did not stay in it. The bath tipped, and kept tipping, and finished on its side with panels and timber shed across the hillside.

The footage then shows him wheeling the wreck down the path, broken panels and lengths of timber stacked inside the tub. Whether every last piece came off the hillside is not something a video can show.

His own account was cheerful enough. “Bath kept tipping, no world record this time, but I’ll be back,” he wrote afterwards.

The record was never real, and it was never the point. What the two trips reliably produced was footage — a man in a tub against a sunset, strangers passing buckets up a mountain, a bath coming apart down a hillside. All of it performs.

The second time he came back for the wreckage. The first time he did not, and Cardiff Rugby’s academy carried it for him, on a morning they had given up to repairing the path. Both baths came apart on a mountain the National Trust pays staff to maintain, above a grave that has been there since before the Romans reached Wales.

For Christopher, the views were excellent. Both from the top of the mountain. And on his socials.