At the western end of Black Rock Sands, the beach where Roman Polanski filmed the battle scenes in his powerfully unsettling 1971 version of Macbeth, is a dark crag of ancient rock, trap-dyked, quartz-seamed, dripping. In it are the sea-caves that Robert Graves inhabited with the “Things never seen or heard or written about” of his poem Welsh Incident (1929). A dull winter’s afternoon intensified their gloom. The bright orange flash of a kingfisher whirred around sombre overhangs until it found shelter among deep shadow. I turned to face seawards.
This dark time of year has a discreet beauty. Outflow from the silted inlet of Ystumllyn gushes across the sand, spreads and gathers light from sea and sky. Streaming clouds are coloured like shot silk. Beneath them combers collapse and retreat with a sound that brought to Matthew Arnold’s mind “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery” (Dover Beach). We project on to landscape what is within, seek what TS Eliot called “the objective correlative” to our own state of being.
Even around the midwinter solstice, there is much to be seen here. I catch at a strange, writhing, black line moving fast across the middle distance, imagine it for a moment to be one of Graves’s monstrous things. It resolves into black specks as a low-flying flock of scoter settle on the water and begin to dive for food. Here, between Morfa Bychan and Criccieth, has for a century or more been one of the reliable places to see these large ducks, their lovely blackness accentuated by flashes of bright orange on the upper mandible. Comparatively rare this far north, they stay offshore, sight of them obscured and then revealed by the swell, adding anticipation to their mysterious presence.
Overhead a kestrel sears past, intent on the huge starling roost among the withies at Ystumllyn. To the west, the sun stretches down into the sea beyond Ynys Enlli. Silence is disturbed only by the cries of gulls, by the oystercatchers’ shrill vehemence, and a pulsing of small waves into the pebbled shore.
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