Gogledd Cymru: A Road Trip, June 2023
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By Sam Francis
Day 1.
We wake at Pistyll Rhaeadr waterfalls. New greens are settling in. Foxgloves sculpt the edges of pathways and roads pink and purple in their standings. Water throws itself of the vertical rock face like mad continuously, over and over in a racket of smashings. The very last of its throwings hit the small shallow pool at the bottom in a clatter. A slippery green moss grips the scarp, holds onto the curves, and softens the sharp edges, slurping the water.
Moss lovely moss, soft thick voluptuous, smooth and skin-tight wrapped around boulders. It is possible, it seems, to disappear into moss. There is a wall at the top of the waterfall so thick with it, it is as if the wall is made of it. A moss wall. I push my finger into it and it is swallowed up into a soft mossiness. Moss sucking in my hand and swallowing my wrist until my arm is deep in as I am eaten whole by it.
I don’t know what happens then, but suddenly it is the end of the day and we find ourselves on the top of the world at Dinorwig slate quarry, north Eryri (Snowdonia) with a sweeping view over the hills, flats and valleys. It is a former place of function and industry and the hard toil and labour of many men. Just purple spooking ghosts now. Slate walls falling, slipping, sliding. Slate buildings still intact and not so much. Old quarry buildings half fallen. Lime green rockbrake ferns growing between the slate on the hillside. Twisting roads lead down to quarry platforms and a big blue lake. A steep rail track like a fairground ride that once moved slate down the valley and men around for fun at the weekend. The Llanberis mountain range just over there; being climbed probably. Three Billy goats gruff appear. We size each other up for some moments. I am in their territory, so retreat. Their hooves tripping over slate. Bone on mineral. Slate falling down the side of the mountain sounding like imminent death. Sounding like bells that have lost their dingers, or zylophone blocks being thrown into a barrel from height. A woman’s laugh bounces around the quarry from across the valley where old buildings just about stand. A solitary night bird calls on repeat. Someone or some two are fucking somewhere. The wind is joining in licking. The grey slate turns deeper purple as the June sun crashes.
Day 2.
Over the water to Anglesey. Swimming and sunning our bright white flesh bodies at Porth Swtan beach.
The sea is a blue luscious dip and front crawl.
End of the day at Cemlyn nature reserve. Edgeland industrial flatlands. Power station rising. Look out for selkies on the rocks. Chipper yellow bastard cabbage owers paint the hedgerows, and I spot my first wild carrot of the year unfurling.
I find a triangle stone, spiralled in the palm of my hand.
Dinner and an air dance show with the feathered ones. An endless screech of sandwich terns nesting on tiny islands, zipping back and forth to sea, beaks stuffed with fish for their hungry chicks. Beautiful, sculpted creatures with a slash of black painted on top of their heads. Wings like waves, tails like tuning forks. Fine crafted like a pair of old scissors. Birders with big telescopes and notepads stand on the edges tracking their movements.
It’s white here. Puffs of sea kale flowers bounce the beach like balls. What looks strangely like snow in the rock-pools at mid summer is a feathered white seaweed interwoven. Vast white paper skies and a white wind. White feathers on the backs of birds; a white stone attached to seaweed attached to a white stone.
On the edge of the shingle stands a tumbledown house wrapped almost entirely in green. One day I want to live in a green house so wild I can no longer get out of the door. Green consuming me. What a way to go.
Day 3.
Wake up at dawn to a frenzied cacophony of birds. Spot an oyster catcher with a fluffy wee chicklet on the ledge of an abandoned building, and wonder about the all or nothingness of its first flight.
Onto Newborough pine forest and Traeth Llanddwyn. We take the red route for a moderate 3 hour walk taking in the forest that edges the beach that funnels off into an ‘Ynys’ meaning Island.
The forest: Towering skinny pines. Tranquil magical. Soft underfoot. Divine spring-fresh smell thrills the nose. Sister says it’s like loo cleaner from the 80’s. The pathways are dotted with ‘toothpaste pillows’ - blobby rocky outcrops formed from lava eruptions many aeons ago.
The tide is peak high when we emerge from the forest. The beach vast and lingering, the sea crystalline blue, lightly lapping. There is a spaciousness and lack of people here. The jagged Eyri mountain range curves all around the horizon. Its variegated outlines loom in the heat haze of the day. They seem unreal like clouds that aren’t really there.
Though it is known as a tidal island, it is still accessible by means of light wading we discover. Upon it, we walk around the perimeter and at each turn is a new secluded cove, low lying with dreamy blue eyed water. Each bend reveals another breathtaking view; a cove, a nook, an outcrop, a tiny island, a ruin, a lighthouse, a swathe of soft sand - all appearing like a mirage. Yellow horned poppies grow out of cracks. Disembodied crustaceans laid out on a rock, gnarled shell-toes, rock samphire picked for dinner. Totems and talismans.
The sea, the sea, the sea!
The Island is considered one of the most sacred, being of Saint Dwynwen - the Welsh patron saint of lovers. Her story is one of love, heartbreak, devotion and magic. Charms are hidden around the island to be discovered. A Celtic cross high up on a mound is inscribed with the words: ‘They lie around did living tread this sacred ground now silent dead’. A shrine in a recess of the tumbling church wall, holds a polaroid photo of a couple kissing beneath an archway and an etching on slate that reads I love you Gwyn I always will, Wyn xx **when I return to my notes to write this, autocorrect had changed Gwyn into Green**
We choose a cove at the tip of the peninsula, and clamber up gnarled black, green-blue rocks and sit and watch the glinting sea, mesmerised for hours. Acid green seaweed mounds form outer space worlds upon the edges of the water.
A seal, a seal, a seal!
There are three together at one point, yet it is one that remains for hours. And I am thrilled anew each time its little sealy head emerges, bobs around, looks about and arches up out of the water before submerging again. It’s so quiet that once, I think I hear the sound of its watery exhale as it emerges, and the flomping, swishing sounds of its sleeky, slick body as it arcs back beneath the water line.
And the birds, the birds, the birds!
More species and sheer numbers of birds than I have ever seen in one place. Dive bombing from height into the water emerging with fish. A scurry of sanderlings pick over a dead crab. A white guano-tipped island is scattered with black winged cormorants screeching and flying low over the water to fish for their young.
Blissed out after floating in the sea, and not consciously thinking about anything, I stop suddenly, casually, and reach my arm down, and pick up a tiny little two holed hag stone out of the melee of small pebbles at my feet. This all happens in a flash and can only be the magick of Saint Dwynwen.
I think this is possibly the most beautiful, and breathtaking place I have ever been. I am awed. I think it may even be sublime. And yet there is a kind of strangeness about it too. The vast pine forest, the vast expanse of beach, and then a vast expanse of mountains; and then the Marilyn good looks of the Ynys - that is almost too much.
This; a place with footpaths laid with a billion tiny white shells that crunch underfoot as pilgrims and day trippers walk upon it, releasing magic up into the air with each footstep.
The following days can be found at https://samfrancisco.co.uk/goggled-cymru
Sam is an artist and roadside naturalist who writes. She has had an on-going preoccupation with the colour green for some time. In dialogue with non-human life forms, her work explores themes of aloneness, often within the landscape, through an eco-feminist lens. Hybrid text plays a central role in her visual work, through sound, film, photography, installation, print, and reflections on space and place. Publications include a piece on the anatomy and culture of nettles in Caught by the River, and a text about island disorientation featured in Vernacular Journal, with green and blue poems with indie platforms Seedlings and Gilded Dirt. Her eco-feminist almanac Teasels will be published by Hazel Press, July 2025.