On Top Of The World
By John Barnie
I’m a fair-weather walker, so I don’t walk the cliffs between Clarach and Borth in winter. Last summer I didn’t manage it at all because of virus restrictions. The coastal path is very narrow with little room to pass walkers coming in the opposite direction, and I have to get a bus back from Borth to Comins Coch where I live, both of which would have breached lockdown rules. This summer I’m hoping it may be different, but who knows.
What I like about the walk—and missed last year—is that it takes me out of myself. Walking from Comins I have to pass through University agricultural research land, then down a winding road past the crematorium (‘Serving Mid and West Wales’ it says at the entrance, so some corpses have to travel a long way).
After that it is up into Clarach Wood and, if it is Spring, through swathes of bluebells, followed by equally extensive tracts of wild garlic, until I descend to Clarach holiday ‘village’, meaning row on row of static caravans complete with funfair, indoor swimming pool, cafeteria, and restaurant—everything you could wish for.
Beyond the village, though, there is a short climb and you are up on the cliffs and it is as if Clarach doesn’t exist. It does of course, but the cliff walk gives a sense of how impermanent everything is.
The exposed rock of the cliffs doesn’t look much—a good deal of it is dull-coloured mudstone—but it dates from the Silurian and is 400,000,000 years old, formed not long after plants began to colonise dry land.
The strata were laid down beneath the sea, but massive forces over millions of years uplifted them, buckling them into waves of rock, in places thrusting them almost into the vertical. The cliffs seem ‘timeless’ and in terms of humanity’s brief 200,000 years of existence, they are.
But time is the enemy of everything and winter storms each year cause the cliff face to collapse somewhere along the path, which has to be diverted. Elsewhere, a section will have slumped a few feet, as if after an earthquake, ready to collapse next winter or the winter after that.
The rock has a life of its own, it is never still, but moving in such slow motion that our mayfly lives cannot perceive it apart from the drama of a rock fall.
Along the path there is only a thin deposit of shaley soil, perhaps 6 to 8 centimetres in depth, that sustains the life of here and now, most of it creeping grasses, sea campion, hare bells, thrift, gorse, dwarf blackthorn with its branches swept eastward by the constant wind off the sea.
Walking here, I feel as I used to in the foothills of the Black Mountains—that somehow you are on top of the world, looking north on a clear day to the hills of Pen Llyn like an island chain and south to Strumble Head, the whole of Wales visible in one panoramic sweep.
I go early in the morning when the world is fresh and holidaymakers have yet to stir. There are few people on the path, too, apart from the occasional runner who barges past without a word. Sometimes, though, you meet someone interesting—the young Belgian woman who had started from Chester and was walking round the coast to Newport. She had what looked like a very heavy rucksack half her height, camping, she said, without any plan, wherever she had got to at the end of the day; and the two botanists who crouched in the grass, very excited about a species they had found.
The past is always with you on the cliffs, the history of humanity and the Earth laid down in strata of their own. At Wallog there is a lime kiln from the time when limestone was transported by ship from Pembrokeshire and Gower to be converted into lime to dress Ceredigion’s acidic fields.
At Wallog, too, there are the remains of a medial moraine from the last Ice Age, Sarn Gynfelin, which stretches some 12 kilometres into the Bay. It looks as if it could be manmade and must have contributed to the legend of the drowned kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a folk memory of the time when Wales was connected to Ireland by a land bridge covered with forests and swamps, echoes of which can be seen at Borth in the stumps of drowned trees, and peat which is sometimes flung up against the sea wall in huge slabs. I have a piece on the window sill, with perfectly preserved birch twigs and what may be heather roots.
Time runs back for hundreds of millions of years on the cliffs where human time is no more than the shadow of clouds sweeping across the sea and up over the land.
But for the moment here we are, and when I reach Borth it is back to what we think of as real time, stopping off at The Sands Bistro for a bacon roll and a coffee, watching the holiday makers trailing children and dogs, and all the paraphernalia needed for a day on the beach.
Everything is leisurely in Borth, even the traffic through the long narrow street that comprises the village. It is the same every summer. Nothing could possibly change.
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Let’s not be too squeamish about unwritten laws of the universe
or at any rate of Earth
I delight in sunrises, sunsets like anyone else
send picture postcards by the local photographer
‘this is where we walked yesterday along stratified cliffs that rose and fell
in a big dipper
it was the edge of all things
you should have been there
PS tomorrow the Museum to look at carts, billhooks and other discards
though we prefer following the folds and upheavals of the cliffs
the rocks’ slow-motion existence
or you might call it concertina, time’s squeezebox
playing music we cannot hear.’