DISCOVER: CARDIGAN BAY
A huge inlet of the Irish Sea, Wales’s largest bay stretches 50 miles from tip to tail. Roam its wild beaches, glittering coves, rolling hills and historic coastal settlements with Julie Brominicks.
Stretching 50 miles from Bardsey Island to Strumble Head, Wales’s largest bay abounds with magnificent beaches, coastal settlements and a wealth of wildlife. No fewer than seven rivers open into its waters. Roam this huge inlet of the Irish Sea with Julie Brominicks
“DESPITE CENTURIES OF HUMAN ACTIVITY, THE COAST REMAINS A HAVEN FOR FLORA AND FAUNA”
The sun was setting, bathing the fireweed in rosy light as I reached Cwm Buwch waterfall, just south of Aberaeron, where the water spilled off the cliffs into the sea. Gulls were perched on the rocks either side of me and the sky was whirling with clouds. Mist appeared on the horizon, so instead of burning into the sea, the sun suddenly dissolved. It was a transcendent moment and a typical one on the coast of Cardigan Bay.
Cardigan Bay is the large, wildlife-rich inlet of Wales between Strumble Head in the south and Bardsey Island in the north. To walk its length is to see dolphins, porpoises, seals, red kites and choughs, and to find landmarks and relics that bear witness to Neolithic hunters, Bronze Age settlers, Irish saints, Viking raiders, medieval merchants, Victorian industrialists and World War Two weapons-testers to name but a few. Encircling the Bay, the rocky Snowdonian peaks in the north and the golden rolling Cambrians and Preselis in the centre and south are still remote enough to accommodate the Welsh-speaking heartlands. In earlier times, these hills were almost impregnable to the sea-borne traders and invaders who left their marks on the settlements closer to the water’s edge.
Yet despite centuries of human activity borne of the area’s strong maritime tradition, the coast of Cardigan Bay remains a haven for flora and fauna thanks to a diverse landscape of swift rivers, sandy shores, sheer cliffs and pebble coves that combine to create a contrasting blend of peaceful open spaces. You can walk for hours along its paths with only mewling gulls for company. Sometimes you’ll be ambushed by drizzle or a salty Celtic mist that drenches your hair, but draws your attention to the flowers at your feet before suddenly dissipating to reveal a peregrine soaring above the glittering sea.
CHAOTIC CONTORTIONS
The Wales Coast Path loops round the bay from Pembrokeshire in the south, through Ceredigion and into Snowdonia. There are some taxing climbs and one or two remote stretches such as between Llanrhystud and Aberystwyth, but these are interspersed with gentle flatlands and, for the most part, conveniently spaced amenities, allowing you to discover the landscape at a leisurely pace – whether you’re walking it in a single trip or splitting it into sections.
The rocks of central Wales are dominated by slate, with cliffs like those at Penderi, whose ledges are populated by colonies of kittiwakes, auks or gulls. But the low crumbling slabs of boulder-clay between Aberaeron and Llanrhystud were deposited by ice-sheets whose retreat also left five causeways of glacial moraine, or sarns, reaching into the bay. At Ceibwr the cliffs are wicked and black. The rock-scape here is so chaotic, so confused, faulted and folded, whorled and contorted that it made me shout aloud when I reached it. The sea is clear enough to see the barnacled rock
and black caves yawning beneath its surface, and to watch the translucent compass jellyfish umbrella-gliding by. This is a good place to sit with a picnic and admire the geological chaos.
A SHARED TRADITION
Coastal settlements along the bay mean you’re rarely far from an ice-cream. Some settlements are tiny, such as the shingly cove of Borth-y-Gest with its bijou bistros or the terraced Tresaith. Others – such as the cosmopolitan university town of Aberystwyth, the seaside resort of Barmouth or the towns that have grown around a particular export (slate in the case of Porthmadog) – are larger.
But what underpins them all is a powerful maritime tradition, that harks back to a time when shoals of herrings were harvested, the sea teemed with brigantines, schooners and sloops, and even small ports such as Aberporth were major ship-building centres. To me, the place that best evokes this seafaring heritage is Cardigan, though with its hinterland of dairy pasture, it’s as much agricultural as it is maritime. Nevertheless it was the sailors, anchor manufacturers, coal, culm, corn, flour and salt merchants, lime-burners, rope-makers, sail-makers and ship-builders who made Cardigan the most important port in Wales in the early 19th century.
You arrive near the mouth of the Teifi between tin sheds and garages, where green weed clings to the quay walls as the tide ebbs. Warehouses that once stored wine,
tobacco and salt still stand tall at the bridge, and the river, smelling salty and fresh, laps at the muddy banks.
A slew of beaches ring the bay. Long drifts of dunes border Ynyslas and Harlech, which is back-dropped by the Rhinogydd Mountains. Others have a pebbly silver charm like Tan-y-Bwlch where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers knapped flint on the banks of the Ystwyth. One of my favourites is
Penbryn. Approaching from coastal hills the path suddenly becomes peaty and ducks into the wooded Hoffnant Valley, where sounds of the sea are replaced with the chatter of long-tailed tits and the bubbling of a stream. Bare, bright sea-light gives way to the fecund, dappled green of oak and hazel, moss and tall ferns, and the salt-wind to a damp kiss of sweet air. Then, just as suddenly, the path runs to sand and delivers you onto a broad, cliff-hugged white beach, with white foam smashing into a black cave. I swam here in the effervescent bottle-green sea, alone except for a cormorant, and looking back to the jungle-like woods and bright white shore, felt I’d arrived somewhere almost Jurassic.
It’s not all hills and rocks and beach. Cardigan Bay is full of intriguing flatlands. Some of them are saltmarsh, formed by accretions of estuary silt colonised with fleshy stems of marsh samphire and clumps of cord-grass. And Borth has Cors Fochno, an expansive raised peat bog populated by sundews and bog myrtle. A forest was buried here 4,500 years ago beneath a rising sea and dozens of petrified stumps are still visible on the beach at low tide. And then there’s the village of Llanon. The coastal plain of Morfa Esgob, or The Bishop’s Land, between the village and the sea is divided into strip fields known locally as slangs. Fringed by daisies and fiddle dock, the fields are planted with wheat or beet, their brown, white, green and yellow stripes a dazzle of colour against the sea.
RIVERS CALM AND CRASHING
In the south, rivers such as the Teifi and the
Aeron meander green and serenely through lush dairy valleys but you leave them behind in the north when you reach Snowdonia. Here the rivers become swift and stony, tracing a turbulent icy-clear, boulder-strewn passage to the sea. The Mawddach has its gathering of gold-mining hills and the
Dwyfor hurries past the grave of Lloyd George. But it’s the Dwyryd I fell in love with, when crossing Pont Briwet at sunset while the tide was in retreat. Upriver, pylons straddled the rocky gorge like giants and the water was deep, reflective and tropicallooking, its surface glinting like steel. But seaward, the shifting rivulets were all molten magenta and the fiery sun had lit-up one of the pylons like a Christmas tree.
These pylons are just one of many human landmarks along the way, jostling for attention with Pen Dinas hill fort, the medieval church at Mwnt, the fish-traps at Llanon and the Second World War tank-traps at Fairbourne. The remains of Criccieth Castle loom imposingly on a rocky headland. Nearing Aberdaron, I passed the ruined manganese mines of
Rhiw, once busy and industrial but now abandoned to the hills that drop to the sea and the black-backed gulls and choughs that quarter the air above.
Aberdaron, too, has a rich human heritage, marked by the centuries-old passage of pilgrims bound for the holy island of Bardsey. The tradition of pilgrim hospitality is still alive here and you’ll find warmth in the huddle of inns and cafés, braced against the winds and snug between shapely hills. I climbed them to see Cardigan Bay spread below me, suffused in mist – a scene steeped with a sense of arrival but also of imminent departure, to Bardsey perhaps or beyond. Like the tides, we humans are always ebbing and flowing, coming and going, leaving marks on the ever-shifting coastline among the sandbars and sarns, peat-bogs and caves, drumlins and cliffs, while dolphins swim in the bay.
“THE WATER IS DEEP, REFLECTIVE AND TROPICAL-LOOKING, ITS SURFACE GLINTING LIKE STEEL”