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| Forests drowned in ancient memory | Forests drowned in ancient memory |
| (5 months later) | |
| Small waves hissed into the pebbled shore, clacked stone against stone as I made my way to the drowned forest. One of many around the coasts of Wales (a particularly fine example lies just beyond the east end of Rhyl’s promenade), that at Borth has become more prominent since storms in 2014 scoured away covering sand, which in time will conceal it again. | Small waves hissed into the pebbled shore, clacked stone against stone as I made my way to the drowned forest. One of many around the coasts of Wales (a particularly fine example lies just beyond the east end of Rhyl’s promenade), that at Borth has become more prominent since storms in 2014 scoured away covering sand, which in time will conceal it again. |
| At low spring tides, thousands of tree-stumps stretch out into Cardigan Bay, relics of mixed pine, alder, oak and birch woodland that colonised these coastal flats five or six thousand years ago. They gave rise to the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod – a Welsh Atlantis ceded to the sea by human negligence – that was first recorded in the 13th-century Black Book of Carmarthen (though some scholars posit earlier origin in folk-memory of a land-bridge between Wales and Ireland; a belief that also finds expression in the second branch of the Mabinogion). | At low spring tides, thousands of tree-stumps stretch out into Cardigan Bay, relics of mixed pine, alder, oak and birch woodland that colonised these coastal flats five or six thousand years ago. They gave rise to the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod – a Welsh Atlantis ceded to the sea by human negligence – that was first recorded in the 13th-century Black Book of Carmarthen (though some scholars posit earlier origin in folk-memory of a land-bridge between Wales and Ireland; a belief that also finds expression in the second branch of the Mabinogion). |
| These imaginative interpretations are more colourful than the landscape itself. The stumps rise from clots of dark peat lying on boulder-clay and held together by a lattice of blanched roots. Both peat and the extensive shallow root-networks – the extent of their lateral growth a sure sign of growth in waterlogged ground – point to this having been part of the same natural feature as adjoining Cors Fochno – the largest lowland raised bog in Britain, where quaking mats of heather, moss, sedge, bog-rosemary, asphodel and myrtle at the centre tremble over six metres of water. It remains undrained, preserved. In summer, hen harriers, merlin, dragonflies and the large heath butterfly can be seen here. | These imaginative interpretations are more colourful than the landscape itself. The stumps rise from clots of dark peat lying on boulder-clay and held together by a lattice of blanched roots. Both peat and the extensive shallow root-networks – the extent of their lateral growth a sure sign of growth in waterlogged ground – point to this having been part of the same natural feature as adjoining Cors Fochno – the largest lowland raised bog in Britain, where quaking mats of heather, moss, sedge, bog-rosemary, asphodel and myrtle at the centre tremble over six metres of water. It remains undrained, preserved. In summer, hen harriers, merlin, dragonflies and the large heath butterfly can be seen here. |
| As for its marginal and now submarine antecedent, apart from a solitary silvermew that observed my activity from a crumbling boss of peat bound by bleached roots and thrown up against the sea-wall, nothing moved but the waves. A watery sun cast a shimmer across these, to set a suggestion of motion to bowsprit headlands stretching southerly, which seemed to strain against the hawsers of geology, eager once more to be under way. | As for its marginal and now submarine antecedent, apart from a solitary silvermew that observed my activity from a crumbling boss of peat bound by bleached roots and thrown up against the sea-wall, nothing moved but the waves. A watery sun cast a shimmer across these, to set a suggestion of motion to bowsprit headlands stretching southerly, which seemed to strain against the hawsers of geology, eager once more to be under way. |
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