Traeth Lafan’s wide expanse of sand is a landscape that draws you in, like the Elenydd moors or the high Arctic, through its abstraction. Nothing’s solid here; all’s sketched and coloured in shifting tones of water and light. Even history has become ambiguous, uncertain. These are drowned lands, their legends tide-steeped, wind-honed.
I come here for the birds, to which the fluid landscape accords a peculiar gift. Its bas-relief undulations, its distances, absorb and hide. What on first glance appears empty, on closer scrutiny teems with life. Though on this grey and turbulent day, with a flooding tide, little stirs. A couple of oystercatchers, heavy-billed, speed past. A little egret lifts out of a filling channel and braves the buffets as it heads back towards the old heronry at Penrhyn Point. In the stand of Scots Pine at the furthermost end of the promenade ravens discourse, shear down to the water’s edge, soar aloft with shellfish in their bills, to drop them from a height on the concrete sea-wall before folding their wings and swooping down to pick out the morsel of flesh.
I return, rain at my back, to the boating lake by the car park where the boys of summer circled their battery-powered, radio-controlled craft. The usual cackling gaggle of mallard chase after white crusts dispensed to them from strollers’ bags. A glorious presence suddenly surfaces – a drake goosander, low in the water, bobbing on small waves.
This element in nature of surprise, of the unusual, so enchants. He’s six metres away. I’ve never been this close before. In their usual river habitat, these magnificent, large, hole-nesting ducks are shy and rightly so, given the licences obscenely issued for shooting them.
I circle round and catch, in a glimmer of wan sunlight, the subtle pink infusion of brilliantly white plumage, amuse myself with making up Farrow & Ball tags for it, and for the slicked-back, bottle-green, teddy-boy mane, before suddenly, with an arch of his long neck, in a quick spasm, he dives again and is gone.
