A bit of a gap since that last post - life getting the better of me yet again! With the Abergavenny Writing Festival at the beginning of the month, a unscheduled hospital visit and a week in West Wales, life has been more than a little hectic. Now - hopefully - some degree of normality is restored and I can get on with some concerted writing again.
But I wouldn't have missed our visit to Ceredigion last week. The woods were full of bluebells, the hedgerows alive with primroses and violets, the fields overflowing with lambs and the skies with red kites! We were visiting some of the places associated with the Welsh folk tales I've been working on (I'm including a sneak preview of one below) and we were fortunate to be blessed with lovely weather in which to do so. And plenty of opportunity for me to practice my Welsh!
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Daughters of the Sea
Cardigan Bay, where the Irish Sea eats into the coast of Wales, extending from Bardsey Island off the Lleyn to Strumble Head by St. Davids - it’s beloved of holiday makers and hikers, marine biologists and music makers. Seals and dolphins revel in the fish rich waters, puffins breed on the craggy cliffs, history surrounds you. But sunning yourself on the beach at Aberdovey, admiring the pastel coloured houses around Aberaeron Harbour, enjoying your 99 as you stroll along the front at Aberystwyth, don’t be fooled by the light dancing on the water. Cardigan Bay has a darker side, a capricious streak, her curve a lee shore for the unwary. Catch the sea in a turbulent mood beneath scudding storm clouds and you’ll understand how its inconstancy has led to many disasters, shipwrecks and drownings in the past. And local folk tales handed down the generations will tell you why.
All along the coast you’ll find sea caves, some submerged, some partly so. Living beneath the waves, inhabiting those caves is Dylan, the sea god. He is powerful, strong, benevolent at times but vengeful at others; his mood can change in the blink of a shark’s eye, the flick of a whale’s tail. He can lure the incautious sailor way out beyond the horizon, lulling them with gentle waves on sparkling seas, then, for his own sport, call up wind and rain, squall and tempest to toss and terrify, to rage and wreck. He can rant and rave for hours or in minutes revert to his calmer self, leaving his victims trembling with fear, quaking in awe of the force that all but did for them.
For centuries though Dylan’s problem was not only his unpredictability – he was lonely roaming that huge Bay alone. Then one summer morning he spotted an old man who lived on the coast walking with his three daughters on a beach; he began to look for them each day. Over the years he saw the great joy that the girls brought to their father. They played with him on the sands as children, fished with him in the rockpools; as they grew older they swam with him in the shallows, picnicked with him on the cliffs. Dylan became envious of the man, longed to have the company of the three beautiful young women he had watched growing up. One day as the man and his daughters walked at the water’s edge Dylan called up a mighty storm and sent a huge wave to swallow them up. It drew the struggling girls down into a sea cave, threw their distraught father back on to dry land.
Delighted with his acquisition, Dylan took the three young women as his companions, alone no more. In the months that followed though, whenever Dylan saw the old man walking the beach alone, heartbroken at his loss, a huge pang of sadness welled up in his chest as he remembered his own loneliness. But he could not relinquish the company he had craved for so many years. How could he share it? For days he puzzled over the conundrum, then one night, looking at the girls as they slept in a moonlit cave, the idea came to him. He turned his three companions into gulls, which belong to both the sea and the land.
The next morning as the old man made his daily pilgrimage to the site of his daughter’s loss, he mournfully called their names; he was amazed when three white gulls flew instantly from the sea and would not leave his side. Tears poured down his cheeks as he recognized them as his beloved girls. Thereafter the gulls would return to the sea each night but would spend each day with the old man until his death.
Now when you walk by Cardigan Bay you will see thousands of gulls swooping and diving, squawking and squabbling over remnants of fish and discarded food. But watch out for three perfectly white birds who always fly together, who frequent the same sandy beach for hours on end, who gaze deep into rockpools, who splash in the shallows as do excited children. And watch them as evening draws on, skimming the waves and disappearing beyond the horizon. You will know who they are, you will know their story.
(Copyright Gill Garrett 2022)
