The Afon Teifi, one of the most beautiful Welsh rivers, loops round the castle at Emlyn, the bailey of which is sentinelled with field maples. The bank is palisaded with fine alders, hung with purple cones and catkins.
Standing by one of these on an autumn afternoon, I thought about the alder’s remarkable qualities: its capacity to fix nitrogen and fertilise the ground through Frankia bacteria in its root-nodules; its red sap, once used as dye for those referred to in Trioedd Ynys Prydein (a collection of early Welsh verses transcribed in the 13th century but of earlier origin) as “sacred kings and warriors of the alder cult”; its wood, which served a variety of purposes from clog manufacture to the making of whistles.
As I looked up into slender branches of the tree’s crown, a piercing note, more squeak than whistle, came from the bank right by my feet. It was followed by muted huffings and splashings. I looked down, and there, sprawled across roots that stretched into the water, was a bitch otter and this year’s cub, unaware of my presence, no more than three metres away.
Even in the fading light I could pick out every detail of them: the thick, spiked guard-hair of their coats; the small rounded ears; the luxurious vibrissae (whiskers) of the broad muzzle by which they sense prey underwater; the streamlined shape and wide rudders; their wonderful strangeness.
The bitch extricated herself from the playful grasp of her cub, kicked away from the bank and with a powerful arch of her back plunged into the deep flow of the river, less polluted here than it is a few agrarian miles downstream. Hissing strings of bubbles released from her coat rose to mark her progress.
Within a minute she was back, a plump roach in her mouth, her cub whickering at her, tearing at it before she’d deposited it on the moss-covered root. The gifts that come, when you move softly within a landscape!
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The Hills of Wales by Jim Perrin has just been published by Gomer Press at £14.99
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