Mawddach Estuary

Moving Water, the Wales Edition

Whenever you visit Wales, you can always be sure of plentiful H2O. Whether it’s tumbling down mountains, as here at the foot of Cader Idris…

Or filling rivers as in the Mawddach Estuary near Dolgellau…

… and the River Glaslyn at Porthmadog (Wales’ tallest mountain, Snowden, in the background…

Or on its sea shores…

at Harlech, North Wales,

Broadhaven

…Newport and Fishguard, Pembrokeshire:

or on the island of Anglesey

Or simply dropping from the sky…

You can tell we love visiting Wales, can’t you? Though usually best to take good rainwear.

Lens-Artists: water in motion This week Sofia inspires us with some wonderful compositions. Go see!

River Of Clouds ~ But Which Way’s Up?

This week Patti at Lens-Artists wants to see shadows and reflections in monochrome. So here’s a cloudy-day view of the Mawddach Estuary in Wales: upright and upside down. Intriguing, isn’t it. It’s making me think of a Rorschach inkblot test.

Lens-Artists: Monochrome shadows and reflections

Beach Walking

This is a walk we did earlier – i.e. back in early October when we staying at Borthwnog Hall on the Mawddach Estuary in Wales. The beaches along this part of the coast from Barmouth to Harlech (where these photos were taken) are stupendous – sandscape heaven with much of the area designated nature reserve.

My only quibble (as a life-long beach-comber and shell gatherer) was the tide had swept the shore so clean, there was hardly a thing to find. So this is my main sighting: the skeleton (test) of a common heart urchin Echinocardium cordatum, also known as a sea potato.

You can see what they look like in real life HERE. When they have all their spines they’re rather hairy entities. They burrow several inches into sandy sea bottoms and both feed themselves with passing particles and avoid getting completely buried with a mobile feeding tube that keeps a clear shaft of water above them.

So there you have it: a heart urchin test. And some rather pleasing red seaweed.

Walking Squares #18 Today Becky is wondering what kinds of things we notice when we’re out walking.

The Texture Of Water?

The Mawddach River after the storm. There’s a tension here – a case of estuarian counterflow as the sea tide washes up against the river’s downflow. There’s an odd perception, too, of evolving solidity – of molten metal perhaps – artisan silver with flecks of gold; or of liquid thickening in the making of a sauce. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting effect.

The photo was taken last Wednesday as we arrived in Mid-Wales on the tail of a colossal downpour. We were starting a 4-day stay, and very much fearing a wash-out sojourn. But we needn’t have worried. We did have some fine days.

This is where we were staying – Borthwnog Hall on the banks of the estuary. A return visit after several years, but this time with a balcony view across the salt marsh at low tide. Fascinating places tidal rivers and estuaries. More photos in following posts.

CFFC: Texture

Vanishing Points In Wales

This week Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge is ‘vanishing point’. The photos here were taken in monochrome on the Mawddach Estuary in mid-Wales and at Marloes Sands, Pembrokeshire.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: vanishing point

Black & White Sunday ~ Traces of the Past

The old railway bridge over the Mawddach River at Barmouth, Gwynedd, Wales

And mazy sands all water-wattled
Waylay her at ebb, past Penmaen Pool.

Gerard Manley Hopkins Penmaen Pool – from a poem written for the visitor’s book at the George Hotel 1876

Black & White Sunday: Traces of the Past

Traces Of The Past ~ The 330-Year-Old Hedge

It’s hard to imagine that this gigantic bastion of ancient yew trees began three centuries ago as a formal terrace row, each tree cut into a neat, small cone or obelisk. Back then in the 1680s, when these trees were first planted, the taste in grand garden design was for the linear and geometric, following the French notion of strict plant control.

A hundred years later it was all change. In keeping with the new romantic landscape style of English gardening, the yews were allowed to grow as they pleased. The aim was to create vistas of idealized nature.

But this more liberal attitude did not last either. Around the time of the yews’ two-hundredth birthdays, Victorian garden men armed with sickles and step ladders intervened, and began creating this arboreal rampart of free-form topiary. Both fascinating and overbearing, I feel. The gardeners apparently hung onto to their ladders with one hand, while pruning and shaping with the other.

Today, the effect is still maintained by National Trust gardeners, now using electric hedge trimmers. Every year four of them start work in late August, and keep on trimming until mid-November – three months’ toil.

The yews are to be seen at one of the National Trust’s outstanding properties – Powis Castle, near Welshpool in Powys, just over the border from Shropshire. We called in there on our way home from our recent stay on the Mawddach Estuary in mid Wales. I’m afraid that on this occasion it was more for a good cup of coffee than for culture.

The castle dates from around 1200 when it was the stronghold of the last Welsh princes of Powys. In the sixteenth century ownership passed to the English Herbert family who acquired the title Earl of Powis. Indeed, they appeared to have acquired it on three separate occasions through history until the title eventually stuck fast to the family.

One of the Herbert daughters married the son of Clive of India (Robert Clive 1725-1774) – he who plundered the subcontinent under the auspices of the British East India Company. The Clive fortune paid for repair and development of the castle, and Robert Clive’s collection of valuable arts works gathered during his India days are on display there. You can tell I have very mixed feelings about this. But scruples aside, the house is well worth seeing and it contains many treasures.

The garden, though, is the best part. The setting is magnificent, with stunning views of the Welsh borderland. A whole day (and indeed several days at different seasons) could be spent exploring the many layered terraces, the lawns and woodland walks. The planting is on an epic scale with many unusual herbaceous varieties deployed. Specialist garden history talks are also available, and when energy flags (and as intimated earlier) there’s a good restaurant-tea room for re-charging purposes. Although to be on the safe, take your own picnic as well. It’s a long way from the grand lawn to the courtyard refreshment station.

Please visit Paula at Lost in Translation for more traces of the past. This theme is going to be regular every-other-month challenge on her blog, which is good news. Thank you, Paula. I have lots more traces in my archive.

Unexpected: Monochrome Mawddach Sunset

The most unexpected thing about this shot is that it came out at all in such low light conditions. I do love the Dynamic Monochrome setting on my Lumix. It creates all kinds of unforeseen magic, even with much added zoom.

I suppose the other piece of unexpectedness here is the perversity of shooting a limpidly pastel sunset in monochrome. But I like the way it silhouettes the old railway viaduct across the estuary mouth. In Welsh it is called Pont Abermaw, and in English, Barmouth Bridge. It was constructed mostly from wood during the 1860s, and included a drawbridge section that would open allow tall masted ships to pass through, sadly not a facility much needed these days. It would be fine sight though, so please add your own sailing ship to this vista.

Black & White Sunday This week Paula requests we show her the unexpected. Please drop in there for more creative renditions of the theme.

#MagesticMagicalMawddach

Magnificent Magical Mawddach

We drove through one hundred miles of rain to reach it. From South Shropshire to the Welsh coast clouds piled on clouds and the rain dashed down the windscreen with only brief interludes of drizzle. Climbing and climbing the precipitous road through Dinas Mawddy, sky and mountains closed in, reminding us that we humans are rather puny ineffectual things, and that the motorized carapace that transports and shelters us may just not be enough in a land like this. Even the sheep, inured to the place, stand hunched and motionless on the hillsides, backs to the downpour.

And then at last we’re here, on the banks of the Mawddach Estuary, just downstream of Penmaenpool, and the rain recedes, leaving stillness and shadow, the slow curves of the river, Welsh Black cattle grazing the salt marsh, a buzzard calling, canoeists returning to base, and on the far horizon the knowledge of the sea, though unseen, marked by a sudden flush of brightness out in the bay.

Curve

#SnowdoniaNationalPark

The River Runs Through It: Afon Mawddach Between Land And Sea

I’m on the last lap of Ailsa’s current challenge with this post. These photos were taken last September when we were staying near Dolgellau in Gwynedd, mid Wales. The Mawddach (roughly pronounced Mouthack) Estuary is a glorious place -for mountains, birds and all round peacefulness. You can walk or cycle beside much of it, too, following the Mawddach Trail that was once the railway line from Dolgellau to the holiday town of Barmouth.

The old toll bridge at Penmaenpool

We followed the route to the most southerly point where the Mawddach meets the sea, at the bleak little town of Fairbourne. You could call this place a failed resort. In the late 1800s, and after the arrival of the railway, baking flour magnate, Sir Arthur McDougall developed it into a holiday destination for English East Midlands workers. These days, though, it has a desolate air, although it does have a magnificent beach. We bought an ice cream at the dingy seaside caf, but when we broached the sea wall to see the sea, it was so windy it blew our ice creams away and all over us. That’s not supposed to happen when you go to the seaside. Nor did we have Mummy to wipe us down. What a pickle.

Fairbourne Beach looking towards Barmouth

Now that summer’s done, we take the Dol Idris path

Thursday’s Special: Manscape to Landscape

Where’s My Backpack: Where Land Meets Water

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge