Between downpours on an early October evening, I walked into the Gwaith Powdwr – “powder works” – nature reserve. Black powder in this context: this site was once home to Cooke’s Works, a subsidiary of Nobel and one of the world’s most advanced explosives factories.
On a June morning in 1988 I stood in my garden a mile downriver at Abergafren, felt the ground shake, saw an enormous mushroom cloud ascend thousands of feet into the air. My first thought was that the inland nuclear power station at Trawsfynydd (which there is now talk of reopening) had gone up. But it was an explosion in a nitroglycerine mixing shed at Cooke’s, which killed two workers. Their bodies were never found.
With demand for explosives in the local quarries declining, the factory closed in 1995, and the site, with its enviable location above the Dwyryd estuary, with views to Snowdon and the Rhinogydd, was given to the North Wales Naturalists’ Trust. With careful work by researchers from Bangor University, and funding from the EU Life initiative for environmental and climate protection, it was detoxified, cleared and planted. It is now flourishing native woodland and heath, with birch, ash, alder, willow, oak and rowan covering the rubble, paths threading through, and hides well positioned to view the abundant birdlife on the river below, in the heather, and among the young trees.
To escape a flurry of rain I ducked into the pendulum hut, where the massive cannon once used to test the explosives remains. Outside, late second-brood red admiral butterflies clung to sodden blooms of buddleia in the underbrush. A wren scolded from a drystone wall. Heather and gorse were still in flower. Rain had beaten down this year’s dying bracken. No lure of sunshine brought out the basking adders.
Nightjars that have colonised here departed south weeks ago. I wish them safe passage, safe return, and am so glad for once to have a success story to impart from the natural world.
• The annual William Condry memorial lecture, in honour of the late country diarist, on the wildlife of mid-Wales, will be given by Iolo Williams at Tabernacle/MoMA, Machynlleth on Saturday 13 October at 7.45pm
