Insufficiently Welsh (14 page)

The sward is not smooth but uncomfortably bumpy. The slopes are huge, impenetrable walls of boulders. The entire surface seethes with water. Marching through rocky areas requires continuous negotiation with the route ahead. But stoop down and the detail becomes more astonishing still. Here in this huge landscape, the tiniest flowers thrive. Hywel pointed out the aconites and the sorrel. The little white petals were everywhere in the wet tussocks of grass between the shattered rock. I thought we might find the lily there. But Hywel said no, and we scrambled higher.

High on the wall above us was a large white shape. “Ice,” said Hywel. “The sun hardly shines down into this valley and so the snow lingers here.” And there was also a certain acidity to the limestone to be noted. “It is these combinations that create the special conditions for the lily,” he continued.

Hywel was now directing me like a child looking for an Easter egg. “Up, go on, up a bit.”

And then, magically, there it was. In a cleft in a rock, swaying slightly in the wind: a delicate flower on a couple of inches of stalk. The light was still low and the sun shone through the petals. It was the perfect time to find the Snowdon Lily. For most of the year it simply looks like a long strand of grass, easily missed, until it blooms in May and June.

“How many petals can you see?” Asked Hywel.

“Six,”

“And what do the leaves look like?”

They were spikey and quite dark. “They look like chives,” I said.

“Well that directly corresponds with the Welsh name, “the rush leaves of the mountain”.

Botanists have established the flower as an ice age relict. It wasn't that tourists had picked them all. In our post-ice age period they had always been rare. The first record of the Snowdon Lily in Great Britain was made by the Welsh botanist Edward Llwyd in 1682. There are varieties in Asia and the Alps but this one, in this valley, on the slopes of this mountain, is genetically unique and it is understood that there are fewer than 100 remaining. Some predict that, with global warming, the plant is threatened and will become extinct.

For the time being, however, the lily enjoys the cold, icy conditions of Cwm Idwal. The bright day and the sea shining like the Aegean almost mocked its existence. It was exquisite and defiantly alive, bobbing in solitary fragile prettiness on its broken rocky pinnacle. I felt privileged to see it: a survivor in a popular place, cold and inaccessible. A conundrum in itself.

–7–
ANGLESEY
WILDLIFE

–
ROUND THE ISLAND
–

Anglesey is easy to identify, if difficult to pin down. The island juts off the top of mainland Wales in a wide, broken blob of land. Turn around in the middle of its flat plain on a sunny day (and I was blessed with the weather of heaven on my visit) and you encounter the eternal blue rump of Snowdonia, the beginning of mainland Wales proper, rising up on the horizon behind you.

Is Anglesey particularly Welsh? The ports are connected with the Mersey. Its name is Viking in origin. It is mentioned in history because of the attentions of Italians (or Romans as they were known then). And to cap that, it is full of English people.

When had I been before? Back in 2004, I came to the sand dunes at the south end of the island to visit Newborough. This was home to the “Prichard Jones Institute”, built by a Welsh retailer who was the Jones half of “Dickins and Jones”. The store had an all-you-can eat buffet that impressed me at the age of eleven (when I wanted to eat all I could if I could). With the money made from bug-eyed consumers like me, Jones had in the early years of the twentieth century built a library and reading room for his home town that later needed saving by
Restoration
. It was a quiet town and an interesting place, but few wanted to vote for it.

Somewhere further down that southern coast I had also been to stay with an old friend called Peter. Peter is an agent these days. His white cottage was filled with seaside boat-bits and fishing lines, deckchairs and slip-on sandals. I realised that I had never really thought of him as Welsh. We shared a university, a career and friends, but when we went together to Bangor that afternoon, both to be awarded honorary degrees, he got up and thanked everybody in the Welsh language. Embarrassingly, I couldn't match him. But Peter understood. He had lived here. He may have sounded like a bogus Taff, as I do, but he knew how deeply Welsh Anglesey and the whole region really was.

At some point in my jumbled past, I also climbed the Parys Mountain. I did this to marvel at the pitted, moonface landscape of the place, and four thousand years of copper mining. The copper mine on Anglesey was once one of the largest in the world. The industry was only brought to an end in our own era. Tacitus recounts that copper was actually the reason the Romans came here to fight the Druids and their bare-breasted woman attendants.

I was back in Anglesey and Amlwch a few years later. Again, I got a different take on the same place. The deep harbour at Amlwch, once busy with ore transporters, once boasting its own copper currency, was a steep sided tidal hole where I boarded a pilot ship, climbing down a 30-foot ladder in the darkness before dawn, to go out and meet a container vessel on her way into Liverpool.

What I remember about that adventure, however, was the dash across the countryside in the dead of night, through deep lanes and a maze-like network of narrow roadways, under thick hedges and past sleeping farms, to get to the little port. It seemed to take us forever.

A tangled, remote place? This was something new to me, and perhaps for many others, because, for the casual visitor, Anglesey is defined by the A55, which forms part of the European route E22, at more than 5000km one of the longest of European roads, starting in Russia and crossing Latvia, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. No wonder the island can feel like an adjunct to a ferry service: a mere last, flat, small thing to be hurried through before you hit the Irish ferry at Holyhead. Ever since Thomas Telford built his suspension bridge, which was, anyway, just part of a great scheme to reduce travel time from 36 hours to 27 and allow Irish MPs easy access to their representations in London, the island seems to have been treated as a staging post, but Anglesey is huge and wild and rural too.

–
FISH TRAP
–

I started in a trap. It looked like a house on a rock, but it was built to be a giant fishing net to gather the herring passing through the Menai Straits, which separate Anglesey from the rest of Wales.

Ynys Gored Goch, on its island in the middle of the rushing tide to the south of the Menai bridge, doesn't get as many herring these days. They have always been fickle, herring. They left the Welsh coast long ago. In the Middle Ages they would have blamed witchcraft. Today we rely on climate change. But I had been told that the fish trap still functioned. It was going to provide breakfast at the start of my journey.

“This place used to be owned by the Bishop of Bangor,” another Peter, the owner, told me as we walked out along a curving sea wall that projected into the strait. “It was largely built 400 years ago. His Grace came here to write his sermons.”

Bangor is about three miles to the north on the mainland side. I couldn't imagine the Bishop himself scooping up his breakfast, but he might have had encouraging thoughts on the last supper, or the feeding of the five thousand, or even the fishing of souls.

I deeply wanted to see the trap in action, but I had come at the wrong stage of the tide and too early in the season. Peter was patient. He explained that we could have opened the oak lock-gates that allowed the water to enter and shut the ones at the other end, thus marooning any fish that entered the trap. But it would have been useless. We might even have opened the wall-gates and released the water, in the hope of stranding our prey on the bare rocks. But we would have been disappointed. There simply were no fish.

In the early twentieth century, it was fashionable for visitors to cross to the island to enjoy whitebait teas. They would walk down to the shore by a footpath through the Coed Môr woods, ring a bell placed on the shore for the purpose, and a boat would pull out from the island to collect them. But recently the weather had been cold and wet. Thanks to the delayed winter, the fish just weren't ready to take part in our late medieval industrial hoovering system, even for televisual purposes. Peter regularly caught more than he could gather, but not today.

I did at least discover my challenge disguised as a message in a bottle bobbing about in the lagoon. And I took a little stroll around this isolated kingdom, poised as it was, halfway between the wooded banks of the mainland and Anglesey Island. The Menai is wholly tidal, with strange currents, and the sea surges in from both ends and makes swirling eddies and dangerous whirlpools on the black, glistening surface. The difficulty of the waters caused the HMS Conway to sink there in 1953 and at times of low tide, it's said, you can still see the remains.

Our tour took us round the neat paths and tiny lawns across the little island, and down to what I assumed, from the number of gates, sluices and locks, was an entirely different fish trap to the east. This one was a project in hand. Peter had bought this island in order to conserve and restore it. He escaped here at weekends from a property restoration business he ran in the Wirral. Inside, his main cottage had the proportions of a large boat. Outside there were borders of flowers and neat trees, which overhung whitewashed walls. In the early morning's blazing sunshine I could have been in Greece.

Despite the continuous presence of human beings since deepest history (we were close to the point where the Roman legionaries had forded the stream to grapple with the last of the rebellious Welsh) sea birds still behaved as if we had never arrived.

“Over there in the border,” Peter whispered “you can see the oystercatcher nest.”

I looked, and in a rough bundle of grass and straw amongst the perennials under the kitchen window sat a couple of coffee-coloured eggs.

“The mother and father are just over there waiting for us to go.” Peter pointed across at the rocks, where two oystercatchers were bobbing about, 20 feet from where we were standing. “If we go inside, they'll go back and she can resume sitting, but she won't do that if we stay here.”

So we went inside and had a cup of tea. Then we had toast. And some croissants. The oystercatchers returned to their nest and I met Peter's wife and his friends. And I forgot about the whitebait.

–
PUFFINS
–

My message in a bottle was to try to “spot a puffin”. I am not a twitcher, but I was prepared to make an exception for this bird. It rather excited me. To begin with, the puffin has an exotic, highly-coloured beak. Often the rarest and most inaccessible birds turn out to be drab, unexciting creatures. A puffin is almost a parrot by comparison. In fact one of its nicknames is the ‘parrot of the sea' or the ‘clown of the sea'.

Further study revealed that it has a mysterious side too. It lives in burrows; often burrows vacated by rabbits. But it only stays on the land for a short time, around four months, and then only in order to breed. The rest of the year the noble, if tiny, puffin heads off to sea and despite its puny dimensions and slightly fragile, nay delicate, nay ornamental, appearance lives on the wing out in the stormy North Atlantic. No wonder island dwellers thought it was really a form of flying fish and regularly ate it, especially at Lent and on Fridays to avoid meat-prohibition by the Catholic Church.

Having missed out on whitebait, I suppose I could have eaten a puffin myself. But Welsh puffins are quite properly protected from the most vigorous appetite. Puffins themselves eat fish (I wonder if they are to blame for the lack of herring). They usually catch around 10 fish per trip, though the record in Britain is a whopping 60 fish at once.

Peter helped me to board a local tourist rib from one of his three or four available slipways or jetties and we shot away. The mountains of Eryri gleamed in the sun. The boat charged up the strait, blasting under the Telford Suspension Bridge, one of the great engineering feats of its time, condemned as ugly by some, but rightly hailed by Southey, the great Romantic poet, as the symbol of the spirit of the age.

It took 150 men using a pulley system to raise the 23.5-ton chains to the top of the tower in 1826. They had to repeat this 15 times to get the remaining chains in place. Not surprisingly, a large crowd gathered to watch the first being got up and they cheered wildly as the connection was made.

The bridge is also mentioned in a Lewis Carroll poem in
Through The Looking Glass
– the White Knight says to Alice:

I heard him then, for I had just completed my design

To keep the Menai Bridge from rust

By boiling it in wine.

It wasn't boiled in wine, however, but linseed oil.

The western bank flashed past. It was lined with large suburban villas lurking in the trees. More rich incomers, I supposed. Bangor swooped by on the south. We bounced on, quickly overhauling a solid-looking, industrial fishing boat.

“Mussels,” Charlie, my skipper, shouted at me. The Menai Strait's unique topography is perfect for mussel-farming and Anglesey is home to the country's biggest mussel farm, providing around three quarters of our farmed mussels. The estuary opened out to either side, the Anglesey shore now sporting low, greenish hills; the landward side stepping back from the coast to higher, blue parapets. To our right, the mound of what appeared to be a tall, domineering island swung into view. It was in fact the peninsula headland of the Great Orme, joined to the mainland by an invisible low spit. I was due to explore that on another occasion.

Now we hugged the Anglesey coast. Beyond Beaumaris, we shot past a few weathered old industrial buildings and powered on towards the 69 acres of Puffin Island, ninth largest off the coast of Wales, and a long high-backed lozenge, pointing north. This seemed like the obvious place to fulfill my quest.

On the eastern side we slowed and crept in towards a layered ragged cliff of carboniferous limestone, with the engines gurgling like washing machines. Above us a great rookery of birds swept restlessly back and forth. Charlie shouted out their identities. “Guillemots! Cormorants! Razorbill! Kittiwake!!”

“Puffins?”

“No.”

Things might have been easier 200 years ago when (it has been estimated) 50,000 puffins lived on this island. Gradually the numbers reduced. It was not simply that locals found them a delicacy. The truth was that the island was swarming with rats. By the twenty-first century around only twenty breeding pairs remained. Perhaps to avoid having to rename the place “Rat Island”, the Countryside Council of Wales intervened and set about poisoning the rodents. Whether this encouraged the twenty pairs to continue breeding I do not know.

“Razorbill! Guillemot! Flamingo!” I was randomly shouting out the names of the other birds, but still I couldn't spot a “Fratercula”. The puffin's Latin name means “little brother”, because it clasps its feet together as if in prayer when it takes to the air. The island had been a haven for real monks, big brothers, since the sixth century, but both now seemed to have left.

It wasn't a wasted trip. It was a fabulous trip. At the north end we passed close to an exposed ledge, where fat, furry seals lay uncomfortably on the rocks and strained upwards, in inverted ungainly bows, turning their dog-like faces to check us out, like nudists surprised by interlopers.

Tommy, who had joined us for the journey, voiced his approbation. “I have never seen this,” he said. “I've worked on Anglesey for five years now, but I never knew any of this was here.”

We rounded the northern tip and chugged back, through deeper water, even spotting rare human beings on the eastern cliff top. “You can go as part of a guided tour,' said Charles, but you're not supposed to land without permission.”