As soon as I reached the top of the sea wall, I realised that I had badly misjudged the state of the tide. Instead of miles of firm sand, recently exposed by the retreating sea, I was faced with a jumble of storm waves breaking against the bank of stone cobbles at the back of the beach. My objective, the dunes of Ynyslas a couple of miles to the north, was temptingly visible through a shroud of misty salt spray – but, stumbling across the shifting, irregular stones, I made only slow progress. Cursing my cursory examination of the tide tables, I realised I had read the time for high water, rather than low.
After I had walked for half an hour, the dunes looked as far away as ever and I began to consider alternatives. Looking east, beyond the ridge of stones and the Afon Leri, I could see the great flat expanse of Cors Fochno – a rare survival of raised peat bog, which forms a key part of the Unesco-recognised Dyfi biosphere. With a backdrop of steep, open hills, this diverse wild landscape is an important ecological resource, protected both by statute and its sheer inaccessibility.
With each step I took along the raised track towards the river, the noise of the breaking waves diminished. Altered by reclamation but still valuable, this matrix of reed beds and pools forms a buffer zone for Cors Fochno itself. In the still air, the only local sounds were the creak of reed scraping on reed and the occasional soft footfall as one of a group of grazing white horses changed position. As a single rook guardedly watched my approach, patches of sunlight appeared – leaving the bog mottled and multicoloured as the diffuse shadow edges moved across it at walking pace.
Arrow-straight as a result of canalisation in the early 19th century, the Afon Leri once had a meandering path into the open sea, a small portion of which is still visible as a shallow, weed-choked channel. In the late afternoon sunshine, the surface of the water was tranquil enough to perfectly reflect both the reeds and the blue sky above them, until the rising wind – chill and penetrating – broke the illusion.
