Category: nature
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‘Like an inedible chocolate’: a defence of slugs
It was in London that I saw the book, quite by chance. The picture on its cover, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, by Ceri Richards, was instantly familiar. The title, The script of the stones: a short walk at the end of the world intrigued me (as does any book…
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The second death of Kilvey Hill
Swansea, like Rome, is built around several hills, but the tallest of them is Kilvey Hill, just to the east of the city centre. The Welsh form of Kilvey is Cilfái (‘nook in an open place’), though the original name, it seems, was Y Bigwrn. Pigwrn means ‘peak’, but it can also mean ‘ankle’, and…
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Tri aderyn gaeafol
1 Dryw Codi’n raddol y mae’r llwybr o’r traeth. A finnau yng nghanol fy negawd olaf o dringo’r llethr yn fy sgidiau rhedeg, bron ar unwaith bydda i’n ymladd am wynt, cyn bod y llwybr yn mynd yn fwy gwastad a rhoi digon o nerth imi allu wynebu’r grisiau serth tuag at ben Trwyn y…
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Saving the gannets
The jaunty oil sketch may look charming, but it conceals an ugly story. It was painted by a well-known Cardiff artist, Thomas Henry Thomas, after a visit he and three friends from the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society made to Grassholm (Gwales) on 26 May 1890. They’d come to study the bird colonies, especially northern gannets and…
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New Atlantis: the vanishing of Tuvalu
In the daily TV quiz show Pointless, Tuvalu is a regularly pointless answer in ‘countries of the world’ rounds. Even people who’ve heard of it would find it difficult to point to where it is with any accuracy on a map of the Pacific (latitude 5°–10° south, longitude 176°–180°). It consists of three reef islands and…
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Afon ar ei gwely angau
Y peth mwyaf trist am ein taith gerdded llynedd ar hyd Llwybr Afon Gwy, o Gas-gwent i Bumlumon, oedd Afon Gwy. Hynny yw, cyflwr amgylcheddol Afon Gwy. Y gwir blaen – gwir na allai neb ei wadu erbyn heddiw – yw bod yr afon yn prysur farw. Roedd yr arwyddion yn amlwg, hyd yn oed…
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Where it all started: Alfred Russel Wallace in Cwm Nedd
On Sundays I would stroll in the fields and woods, learning the various parts and organs of any flowers I could gather, and then trying how many of them belonged to any of the orders described in my book. Great was my delight when I found that I could identify a Crucifer, an Umbellifer, and…
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Sarn Helen, end to end
Several stretches of Roman road in Wales are labelled ‘Sarn Helen’. The one Tom Bullough sets out to walk, in a roughly straight line except for a lurch eastward to Brecon Gaer, is the road that leads from the fort at Nidum (Neath) to Canovium (Caerhun, near Conwy). He has recorded his trip in a…
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On magpies
We’d both noticed that there seemed to be more of them, now that the cold weather has arrived and the last of the leaves have fallen. Always in pairs, they perch like snipers on the higher branches of the large, ailing cherry tree at the bottom of the garden. Often they land on the kitchen…
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John Clare and the snipe
Slow radio at its best achieves what no amount of ‘fast radio’, with its assumption of the attention span of a hoverfly, can achieve: thought connections that stay in the mind long after the programme has ended. Paul Farley’s recent day (half an hour on the radio: The Poet and the Snipe) looking, in vain,…