A thick, cold mist hanging in the air gave the breeze a harsh, raw edge. While the rain had stopped, however briefly, the heavy soil was wet beyond capacity and the grass of the pasture stood above terraced pools of muddy water. A product of glacial times, the boulder clay that lurks below the turf is made up of the irregular geological material swept along by the ice and then deposited in rough aggregations. While almost impervious to drought, the resulting soil is slick and unforgiving when wet, a cloying morass that sucks at your boots.
As I walked up the lane, the sound of falling water was everywhere, as trickling threads of run-off flowing across the fields merged into deeper runnels and plunged down into the brook beside the path.
For this rainwater, the route to the sea is short but tortuous. The ice sheets that created the debris of rock and clay also blocked the scheme of streams and rivers that existed before glaciation. A great tongue of ice, extending across the shallow valley that would become Cardigan Bay, prevented meltwater draining to the west as the climate warmed. Lakes increasingly filled the blocked valleys until the lines of hills between them were overtopped, and rapid, tumultuous erosion cut new channels towards sea level.
Once the ice sheets finally retreated, much of the old drainage pattern was more or less restored, apart from a few odd corners like the valley spread out below me. Massive flows of water as the world thawed opened a channel almost a mile wide between this ridge and the foothills of the Cambrian mountains, yet today, the only river in this valley is a quiet stream less than 10 feet wide. A quirk of the landscape carries it northwards through this cut in the hills before the misfit river turns west to reach the sea at Clarach a mile or two further on.
Having flowed along almost three sides of a square, the watercourse meets a humble end as a collection of channels flowing through, and across, the curve of the beach. The water-rounded pebbles that form this final barrier are themselves largely of glacial origin, another hint at the overwhelming scale of these events.
