Welsh Journals

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MUMBLES HEAD Evan Evans along in lazy pockets. At times a gust took them sliding in dusky eddies across the smooth surface. Old shells lay white and not quite buried. Grass thrust up in clumps, sheaves of aggressive blades that were dry and sharp. They twitched one against the other as the commotion of waves was carried over the dune-crests. Birds had left their light arrowhead marks. Sweeps, ridges and hollows of sand were restless in their insecurity, their shapes at the mercy of breeze and puff. Another tide might have a full wind as its usher, changing landscapes and laying bare an ancient spar of ship-timber, seamed, outlandish. He saw the Bryn above Perkin's Farm, where the thrusting wind from the sea always blows. Its long slopes carried a thick cover of jumbled grass and fern, broken by the threads of thin paths which were erratic and stony. They strayed into the heath, circled the Holy Well, divided suddenly, and were altogether unused to many feet. Clouds often rested upon the top of the hill. Pits laid open the flesh of the ridge, showing the hard shiny dark-red rock that made the core of the Bryn. There was plenty of air for the birds that swooped or fluttered but never flew with as much purpose as they did below. Fat sheep ambled, as their woolly sides ignored the gorse spikes and scattered yellow petals. He saw the cliffs at Overton Mere, where the frantic waves scrambled across the rocks. The sea had scoured a long cleft and the wave-cut platform was trenched into canyons and spines as though a wide-toothed comb had patterned it. Green pools lay high, aloof from the waves. Rushing and booming, frothing and creeping, the sea covered the rock. As the folds of water moved inshore they