I know I’m in Wales but my brain won’t compute. Scotland it suggests, maybe Brittany? Trying to process the shimmer, the tidal whoosh, the lattice of twisted branches, it refers to memory – perhaps ancient memory.
Irrigated by an oceanic climate, oak woodland similar to this once dominated the Atlantic fringe of Europe, from Scotland to Portugal. The gale-stunted sessile oaks belie their age. Light, too, deceives. Bouncing off the Cleddau, it shifts through the trees.
And the water sounds strange to my ears – neither river-gurgle nor wave-play, this is estuary music. The steadily increasing ‘whoosh’ crept up on me even as the sound of oars in rowlocks and the chatter of friends who rowed me to Lawrenny, dissolves. At the Garron Pill’s confluence with the Daugleddau Estuary, I hear the ‘wheeep’ of a sandpiper and the tremulous warbling of curlews. This soundscape – and its indication of a landscape less disturbed
