Among the glittering spillways, a vastness of light and water, the self is overwhelmed by the immensity of mountains and sea, and the intimacy of samphire lawns, sea aster flowers and creeks. We wander into the salt marsh with sheep, a drift of Canada geese, an egret sharpening its idea of the strike, a group of Romany foragers, a raven and a story.
When the monastery at Bangor-is-y-Coed was sacked in the early seventh century, on account of its allegiance to the Pelagian heresy, the surviving monks fled to what is now the magically circular walled church of Llanfihangel-y-Traethau on a little hill above the Dwyryd and Glaslyn estuary.
Pelagius – who surely came from the sea – was a 5th-century Briton who preached that Christians should save themselves without divine aid; his followers had also been condemned by the powerful Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604) for rehabilitating heathen beliefs.
From Llanfihangel the heretic monks were guided across the dangerous sands to continue their journey to sanctuary on Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) at the western tip of the Lleyn Peninsula.
This story is told to us by the great heretic of letters Jim Perrin, as we enter the marsh at Glastraeth. There are times when ideas share the same light as the place in which they are encountered and this is one of them.
Stepping from dry land on to the gleaming, shifting, sandbanks and salt marsh of the tidal estuary questions the nature of the individual, suddenly far more vulnerable to the power and beauty of nature.
Walking this trackless almost-land requires leaping (or gallumphing) across winding creeks, squelching in mud washed down from valley farms and mountaintops alike. This speaks of an erosion where footprints on footprints bring us closer to the Pelagian pilgrims than may be first assumed, but it is also the continuing legacy of the ice age shaping of mountains and rivers.
As JH Prynne wrote in his poem The Glacial Question, Unsolved (White Stones, 1968), “the Pleistocene is our current sense, and what in sentiment we are, the coast, a line or sequence, the cut back down, to the shore”.
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