Our last full day at Mawddach! We swam in the blue cold, sky rippling, water lapping, out to Jeff, the yellow buoy in the bay. The soles of my feet ached with the cold and the sky was big and, as we struck out, a heron flew overhead, close, neck stretched, circling.
Later I went back to the woods. Up the hill behind the houses, under bent backed trees and out, onto the top, to look out at everywhere we’ve been. Past Fairbourne, the sky glittered as if with sea spray caught in sun, but it was too far for me to see. The gorse around me was flowering, yellow bright spots against the green, and a wintering rose was swamped in bushy-beard lichen. I went down the other side, past brown bracken flattened by wind and grey trees twisted from growing away from the gale. I turned onto the Mawddach trail and returned to the bog. The brown gold beech leaves we’d looked at a week ago were crispy now, close to falling into the sucking dark gloop of the bog. I heard a strange sound, the wind, a human, a bird? A low long moan, almost inaudible. I recorded it but when I got home the recording played nothing but ruffling wind, no sign of the low mournful note. A dunnock chirped its repetitive song from a branch overhead and a sheep wandered onto the path, looked at me, and wandered away. I got back to our bay, sat and watched the tides slow descent, the grey sucking sand revealed bit by bit.
After lunch, I tried to get upstream to the estuary edged marsh but the tree tunnel path was flooded, the pools as deep as bog. It was as if there had never been a path at all. Instead, I returned to the house, took a pot of tea to the table outside and watched the water.
Then, together, we went toward Barmouth in the dusk. The sky’s pinkish tinge had already dropped into blue, and the light was thick, almost touchable. We walked onto the bridge, looked over at the sand flats across the railway line, at the hunks of rock lying there like beached whales or the submerged vertebrae of a sea monster. We walked back, sat in the spot where we saw our first Mawddach sunset, and it got dark around us.
Bonnie Radcliffe 