Bog Myrtle & Peat

Pembrokeshire was sloe-blue in October; cool as rowan stems and clean as a seal in the salt-grey spray. The first redwings had arrived from Scandinavia, but instead of sweeping down from the east, the birds I saw flew in from the sea towards Wales in a churn of back-currents and eddies. Perhaps they’d overshot the mark and flown out to Ireland for a day or two. It’s possible they’d headed west and changed their minds en route, dropping back into land after only half-a-trip across the sea. 

Beneath the girlish squeal of choughs on the clifftops, mullet swam in heavy schools around the tidal weed. They were easy to see, but it’s quite some feat to catch these soft-mouthed, soft-minded fish. They gape and sift at the sunlight, dim and slick as carp. You can’t draw them into a spinning hook or bait them down with a scrap of mackerel; they eat a curious mixture of soft, flavourless things like algae in blobs so small you’d hardly bother to copy them. Just as at the dam below Tongland and the marina at Padstow, mullet look like easy meat – but they’re engaged in some high, distracted purpose, too fey and foolish to be killed. Out beyond their turning shapes the Fishguard ferry powers down towards Wexford.

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The sea was lantern green in Galway Bay. Rollers crashed around the point and broke themselves in mad refractions; a steady wind whipped salt across the road inland to crust the shoreside blackthorn scrub. From County Clare, the next stop west is Boston – so it follows that some of the kelp washed up on this shore has trailed its way for thousands of miles to get here. Oystercatchers and egrets stitch around the rubbery stuff like sewing machines, but this is more like a place for otters. Even if you can’t see where these old familiar creatures lie, the limestone pavement which steps down into the tide is full of cosy options; beds of summer hay and lobster legs, and secret routes like priest’s tunnels which lead to the welcome safetiness of sea.

Not far offshore, dull shapes bob and dive like an outline of U-boats. Cormorants sit low in the water and somersault themselves to plunge down out of sight; great northern divers have more panache, and some are glib and proud as penguins in the shallows. Joining them from a drab little beach, pallid sags of human goose-flesh wade out beyond their depth for a spot of “wild swimming”, just as nature intended.