Passengers for Morfa Mawddach station, to use the formal language of the announcement, “should inform the conductor that they wish to alight”. Your reward, if you do so, is a single narrow platform overlooking the salt marsh on the southern side of the Mawddach estuary. The station was once an important railway junction and, almost hidden by the undergrowth, an abandoned platform edge marks where a second track curled eastward towards Dolgellau. This line has been closed for more than 50 years, but the trackbed has found a new life as a route for walkers and cyclists.
Following the gentle curve of the trail, engineered for the exacting needs of steam trains, I was steered inland between lines of trees. Wet pasture and fen fell away on both sides of the raised route, and on this cold, grey afternoon only the antics of the newborn lambs brought any movement to the scene.
Near Arthog I turned north alongside the sea wall. Here, glistening mudbanks were marked with the tracks of wading birds while dark water sluiced along deep tidal channels. The path cutting the corner across the fen was wetter than I’d hoped, and those who had walked it before me had braided the route ahead into unattractive boggy sloughs. As I pondered my options, aware of time passing and the ground yet to cover, I realised that pools of water were forming in the thick carpet of dormant vegetation around my boots.
Muddy but unbowed, I reached the shoreline rocks near Fegla Fawr and found an old sign I had missed on previous visits. Corroded and tilting slightly, it warned of “Very Dangerous Currents in Channel Between High & Low Tides” – a form of words that, in my fatigued state, I found oddly perplexing. Does the same risk also occur between low and high tides? And, as high and low water are effectively mere points in time, isn’t the danger almost continuous? Today, officialdom would probably say “Dangerous Currents” and be done with it – leaving a tired old pedant like me with fewer points of argument.
