Green paths through heather, low sun picking out tints of its late flowering, led to the ramparts of Foel Drygarn. This easternmost top of Mynydd Preseli is a rewarding objective for short winter days. It only reaches 363 metres above sea level, but geographical and historical texture compensate for lack of height. Three huge, ruined, late bronze age cairns lie within its defensive hilltop enclosure. The dragon-crest tor rising from moist haze westerly is Carn Goedog, whence came the speckled dolerite menhirs of Stonehenge.
The Golden Road – an ancient ridgeway from Crymych to the Gwaun valley – faded into distant dove-grey, slipped across low ridges that terminate in successive fine headlands along the north Pembrokeshire coast. There’s a spaciousness, an atmosphere about Preseli that enchants. I offered prayers of thanksgiving to the Reverend Parri Roberts and the poet Waldo Williams, who successfully resisted postwar military designs on 16,000 acres of this prime landscape for more of the training areas that blight so much of Britain. “We nurture souls in these areas,” Roberts wrote; and through his efforts Preseli does so still.
The sun dropped behind Foel Cwmcerwyn as I turned to the descent. A cold wind blustered against rocky outcrops. High above, wings outspread, long tail fanned and canted, a male kestrel, a flame-winged sky-jewel illuminated by the last light, hovered on the updraught. I sank into the heather before his presence, thought inevitably of what Gerard Manley Hopkins considered his finest poem, The Windhover. In recalling it, I marvelled too at the precise attention with which he rendered this exquisite little falcon’s quality of movement, of being: “…how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing / In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, / As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow bend…”
The kestrel stooped into shadowed heather, missed his prey, rose to regain in a flurry of gold-vermilion the slant sun-rays, and at the last veered swiftly away over the moor to his dark forest roost. I followed on down, soul-nurtured and thankful.
