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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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CEMLYN BAY, YNYS MÔN
Across the bay – with its sweeping shingle beach –
is Wylfa nuclear power station,
outcome of ‘the white heat of technology’,
a Harold Wilson ’60s slogan, and now
in the process of being decommissioned.
Not for it the brutal elegance of
cooling towers. It looks like a motley
of allotment sheds some Gargantua
might have thrown together from discarded sheets
of asbestos and corrugated iron.
Beneath the headland path we are standing on
are petrified sediments laid down
perhaps five hundred million years ago.
On either side among the grasses
are thrift, bird’s foot trefoil, and sea kale,
and, crossing it, a fox moth caterpillar.
We can hear oyster catchers and terns
on the salt water lagoon behind a ridge
of shingle along one stretch of beach.
***
The lagoon was mud-flats, breeding ground
during summer’s low tides for mosquitoes
not seabirds, until one Captain Hewitt
RNVR Rtd. had a weir built
to keep the water levels high throughout the year –
and now as well as terns and oyster catchers
there are mergansers and little grebes.
Vivian Hewitt – son of a brewery
magnate; plutocrat; apprentice
railway engineer; Royal Navy test pilot;
collector of Great Auk skins and blown eggs;
first man to fly from Wales to Ireland,
to be exact from Kinmel Bay, Rhyl,
to Phoenix Park, Dublin, through dense fog,
in a Bleriot-type wood and wire bi-plane,
an event eclipsed by the Titanic’s
sinking some thirteen days earlier –
looked for somewhere deserted to live
on the ship wreck prone north coast of Anglesey.
He bought a seventeenth century farmhouse
a hundred yards from the bay, and a mile
and more from the nearest neighbours; lived there
for thirty five years with his housekeeper
and her two sons; constructed the bird reserve
and sanctuary. Around a large area
of land adjacent to the house he had
local craftsmen build a twenty foot high
brick wall to keep the non-native trees, shrubs
and flowers he planted and re-planted
safe from the prevailing and unstinting winds.
Each experiment died or failed to thrive.
***
We post some photos on social media.
A friend on Facebook tells us that, this spring,
walking to Cemlyn Bay on the coastal path
through the old wind-swept woodlands in full leaf
beside the power station, he could hear,
beneath the bird song that filled the green air,
the unrelenting hum of giant fans
cooling forever the reactor’s
redundant and myriad rods of fuel.
5 responses to “CEMLYN BAY, YNYS MÔN”
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I very much enjoyed this, David. Fascinating detail about Hewitt, and a great ending, with the fans. Recently I read ‘The Blue Book of Nebo’, by Manon Steffan Ros, a novel (young adult, I think, so suitable for us both) involving an explosion at Wylfa: well worth looking at.
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I love the way your poems prompt me to recall and re-imagine places I have visited. The first time I visited Cemlyn bay I was looking for somewhere to swim and, whilst I persevered with my quest, it was with some unease. For me this poem perfectly captures the ambiguity of the place. The way it’s ‘nature’ has been transformed, and the hazard of failure.
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A splendidly evocative poem, David, about one of our favourite places, in any and every season. In September it was strangely silent with all nesting birds gone, particularly the spectacular terns conveying their beaks full of eelworms from the sea to their screaming young, and flying within inches of our heads, seeing us as nothing more than an obstacle to be swept over and around. The sea that day was flat calm, the warm air deadened by it, not making so much as a ripple over the stones. We took family from Finland who just sat and stared and absorbed for about twenty minutes, transfixed.
The second thing about the power station which seemed odd on our first visit apart from the incessant hum, was all the new infrastructure: a social club, what looked like a hotel, empty car parks, barrier controls, newly mown grass, roads, street lights, sign posts… all totally deserted apart from one security vehicle. We assumed its occupant was watching us, having got nothing better to look at. I hope he enjoyed my wife and I stealing a kiss near a camera – forever recorded. It was like a disaster movie, the population having been laid quietly to rest by a virus (as we once thought Covid might do) and we two were the new Adam and Eve – although, as she pointed out, post-embrace, that ship and power station sailed some years ago. So it was just going to be us two, a spy camera, and the humming woodland.
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The artifacts of our striving and going off on tangents as we experiment with or tamper with forces far beyond us remind us we are lonely artifacts ourselves. Thanks for the mergansers and oystercatchers. Terns are among my favorites. Currently reading ‘Landlines’ by Raynor Winn, and don’t want it to end.
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A mixed sediment of human intervention, some work, some don’t. How do we know when nature will accept our experiments? A good image: the hum that remains, the humming remains of the power plant.
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