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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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AFON CONWY
The river – tidal here, beginning to open,
becoming estuarial – rises
among the reeds on the boggy moors
in the foothills of the mountains, rushes
down waterfalls, becoming this wide,
settled course. The mountain ranges are shades
of mauve, lilac, delicate purples.
Through the hazy March sun snow glints on the peaks.
At low water, sandbanks, mid-river, glow
golden. On the glistening mud-banks along
the east shore, curlews and lapwings feed.
The blackened, wooden ribs of a sunken boat
protrude. There are branches, torn nets, a buoy.
The light airs from the south become a light breeze
until the tide turns and a fresh breeze rises
from the north. Pennants and rigging snap
and jangle as a chill wind takes hold.
The incoming tide melds with the river
in brown-water flurries at the edges
of the banks, then the runnels fill, and eddies
whirl wider and wider until all is one.
4 responses to “AFON CONWY”
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I am reminded of weekend trips, up-front in my father’s Jowett Javelin – no seat belt or booster seat, walnut dashboard – exploring the grandeur of North Wales. We discovered lakes and castles and went as far as Portmerion picking blueberries on the way on the Denbigh moors. It must be over fifty years since I was last there! Living in the West Country since 1966, my own children made similar trips but mostly among the soft rolling hills of Somerset and Wiltshire though occasionally across the Severn Bridge into South Wales and – the younger ones at least- strapped down in air-bagged safety.
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A wonderful evocation of one of my favourite parts of Wales!
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Again, very evocative of a place we are familiar with, David – the RSPB reserve on the eastern bank is a haven of peace and overlooked by a shimmering castle (in sun), or it is merely lost behind a temporary curtain of drizzle. The cafe does good coffee and soup on cold days.
Mostly though, folk burrow under it at 70mph in a tunnel, so they miss all of that.
The reserve was created by that same tunnel, or rather by the engineer who designed and built it, as locals didn’t want ‘another bridge’ to spoil the panorama when they were planning the A55, and which, in more open-minded times, was also known as the E22 connecting Dublin with Holland, Germany, Sweden, Latvia, and Russia. I had the designer come to Canolfan Conwy Centre to talk about the project at a technology teachers’ conference. “This was a ‘first’,” he said, never having attempted this before, usually having to drill through solid rock rather than burying a tunnel in mud.
They cast the concrete tubes on the shore and then sank them into the estuary bed, thus creating the ponds now so much used by passing birds, probably some from even those places the E22 once served. Still, birds have no time for such borders, and pass over them, unhindered. We on the other hand…
If readers have never been, I can recommend this RSPB reserve – https://www.rspb.org.uk/days-out/reserves/conwy – at all times of the year. It’s just a nice place to ‘rest’ between east and west, and signed off the A55 just before the tunnel eastern entrance. Even without birds you can just sit and drink it all in….perhaps even with David’s excellent poem to hand. I wish I had been able to read it to the audience at that conference a few decades ago.
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Both this and ‘Black Diamonds’ prompted vivid memories. Wales has so many beautiful estuaries that shift in mood and spirit hour by hour and offer intriguing angles for the explorer – at shore and mud level, and at lofty expanding views. Conwy has its huge castle as its northern outpost, wrapped in the amazing bridges by Telford and Stephenson. Recently I researched and visited the sad village of Dolgarrog, on the west bank, swept away with many lives in a flood spilled from the eroding walls of quite a small reservoir. An echo linking to the devastation of the deep mined valleys. Water and coal took so many Welsh communities in the cause of industrial wealth. Sadness and beauty hand in hand.
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