This Sea Has Feasted on Forests

by STEFANO BUCKLEY

Why Borth? A fair query. The day was rough and hefty, fitful, wet. And yet it was tempting, with its rushes of wind followed by quick stillness. It was those knocks of wind that caught your interest, bursting at the window like ripe fruit thrown, and those coy quiet spells after that led to wondering. Was it really such a bad idea to head out? Indeed, they led one wandering. I had recovered from a recent cold, true—nose still raw and rose hip red—but I would not be in Wales much longer.

Northward pushed the bus to Borth, braving a brief curse of hailstones. The Sun had not yet set, but would soon. Watching rays grow longer and lower across the pastures as the bus blurred past them, I reflected on logic’s lesser part in adventure. Sending me out of the house had been a week cooped up inside, watching the late-November days die outside my bedroom window as I snuffled and sneezed and did nothing. Why Borth? Because I was bored.

And, of course, because of the story. I had known it awhile, had probably come to Wales not a small bit because of the story, or at least the suggestion it gave: that Wales was a place where stories like this were taken somewhat seriously. That old one about the land of Cantre’r Gwaelod, low-lying realm by the sea, whose prosperity was guarded against the ravages of water by a system of sluices and dikes. Later legend, and the one told most today, has it that a certain Seithenyn became drunk and forgot to close the water gate that it was his duty to close. The earliest story, found in the Black Book of Carmarthen, implies the involvement of Mererid, cupbearer and maiden of the well, in the disaster. What is sure is that Cantre’r Gwaelod—the “Lowland Hundred”—was too low-lying. Hungry Cardigan Bay saw its chance and took a bite of the West of the country. Wales has kept the story in its own mouth since.

The bus stopped. There was the town, that strip of shops and cottages, lulling in this last hour before afternoon dusk. And there the beach, strand of shattered shingle stretched between the village and the old ocean. Gooseflesh under my two jumpers and raincoat, knowing she was the same sea that had wreaked ruin here those thousands of years ago. I wandered off the main road, no one in sight, and took the first turn that led me down to the beach.

Whatever arbitrator of the atmosphere there is had done fine work: no side had the clear advantage. Thunderheads of deep slate in their colour and weight lay louring over the South. The Sun, trapped in such moisture that his light flared as though by a magnifying lens, blotted brightly the western quarter of the Sky. Between the two, and in the other portions of the air above and around, was vapour and a mizzling drizzle and mist. I stomped towards the latter, on towards those weather-weary hills around the Dyfi Estuary, who sloped off into the sea’s agitated brine. The smooth sand was so saturated it had become glassy, so that washes of powder blues, white golds, and muddy purples were painted slickly on it by the sky. I coughed, the echo of my recent cold reminding me that I could have chosen a better day to walk in the wind and wet.

“Borth,” Y Borth in Welsh, means “port,” “landing-place for boats,” “harbour.” The village does have a long history of herring fishing, and I could well imagine fisherfolk climbing ashore after long days at sea, their nets full of silver and their feet crunching across the pebbles like mine. But the legend of Seithenyn and Mererid still stuck in my mind, and I recalled that the root word that birthed “Borth” also means “gate.” The image of an angry grey tide sweeping through unclosed floodgates surged across my mind.

My lips were beginning to numb, fingers starting to curl with the cold into unusable claws, when I came across the first tree. It was ten feet up from the tideline, not driftwood but a tree truly fixed in the dull brown of the sand. That was where it had grown. It had very little trunk, only a splaying of thick stubby roots, but my breath stopped. A remnant of unimaginable age. An oak maybe, or a pine, part of the grove that had stood here three or four thousand years ago. Back when the water was farther off—not lapping against it as now, not lending it a beard of seaweed as now. Many see the story of Cantre’r Gwaelod as a folk memory of when sea levels rose after the last ice age, a distant sister to the biblical flood narrative. More trees continued from this first, washed free of their deep sandy sleep by storm and current only in recent decades.

The barriers between eras collapsed as I stood there in that phantom woodland. The bulky wind blared, the gulls’ own calls outdone. I began walking through the beach of stumps, once a birch-place and a pine-place, place of soft hazel, white willow. My human form was taller than the trees now. It was both impossible and not, to think of badgers burrowing in the salt and silt around me, or of red deer and their spring-speckled fawns. Impossible too, to think of a time when these trees were still seeds on the branches of their mothers. Of those trees before them, likely few remained: long since decayed into the sod, when the beach had had a floor of fern and leaf mould. Now all washed away.

Human footprints have been found here dating from the Bronze Age, pressed into the peat that is sometimes exposed at low tide. And stones as well, stones that bear the signs of having been heat-shattered, heated and then rapidly cooled—perhaps plunged into water to induce a boil, and so cook food. The trees are thought to be four thousand years old, the footprints and these stones three thousand. I think on the wonder of stories, which like amber capture fragments of the past and carry them through the long years. Only stories do it with breath and voice and ink. Silent echoes heard on this grey beach; hundreds of mouths down the hundreds of generations, remembering this place since the ice melted.

I walked far up the strand, and found it hard to turn back when I did. Returning to a life not lived in nearness to that older epoch, the one the trees came from, gave a strange feeling. Yet I did not relish the thought of walking that shore in the dark, with stumps to stumble over and a crashing sea to my side. This sea has feasted on forests, I reminded myself. I would make an easier meal surely.

Darkness dropped during the bus ride back. I was alone and in the company of many thoughts. So much change here—forests, beaches, tarmac roads, buses—and yet this stretch of coast remained itself, remained Borth. Night had come quickly, smothering the fields, the hedgerows, not betraying what era they were in. There was a quiet melancholy to my mood, as if I had said goodbye to someone that I or anyone would never see again. I wondered what new stories we would tell, should the climate crisis push sea levels even higher. Outside the window, under the cover of wind and night, a murky sea continued—continues—to chew at Wales’s shoreline.