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Ll?n Peninsula

HELL’S MOUTH

By David SelzerAugust 25, 20222 Comments1 min read537 views

Though all the lanes leading to Hell’s Mouth are lined

with parked cars nevertheless we find a place

in the official park between a van

hiring out surfing gear and one selling

ice cream. The path to the beach is crammed with folk,

and the strand itself littered with bodies

and surf boards, almost obscuring the breakers

from the distant North Atlantic everyone

has come to see or ride. We retreat,

noting the orderly, overgrown ruins

of the RAF air gunnery range.

Some mobile phones here will roam to Ireland.

The world, at certain latitudes, has become

a small, crowded space. The popular place name,

it is claimed, was bestowed by English sailors

fearing the hell of the surf, its deceiving

misty spray, the desert of the hinterland,

and the ship-wrecking maw of the bay

with jagged cliffs at either end like molars.

The Welsh name – Porth Neigwl – may be translated,

‘Gateway of Clouds’.

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By David Selzer

CILAN UCHAF

By David SelzerAugust 25, 20220 Comments1 min read344 views

From a grassy cliff top, shorn by sheep and wind,

at the Llyn Peninsula’s southern most tip,

we can see across North Cardigan Bay

to Harlech and the heights of Snowdonia,

stretching east to Bala, south beyond Barmouth,

north far beyond Porthmadog. Below

are gulls silent in the thermals – beneath them,

a sickle-shaped cove of sand and shingle.

The ancient place name translates, ‘Highest Chamber’.

Through a gate, beside a fishermen’s path,

in some farmer’s field is an unsignposted,

small neolithic burial chamber,

looted aeons ago, of course, but its vast

capstone and the smaller uprights, though slipped

a little, too long ago to be remembered,

are effectively in place. Whether the stones

were already nearby – ice age detritus –

or had to be hauled from afar, someone

thought life mattered enough to acknowledge death

with a major piece of engineering.

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By David Selzer

MAM CYMRU

By David SelzerSeptember 24, 20200 Comments1 min read382 views

The purple, jagged rocks on the island’s shore

were molten lava from volcanoes –

mere craters for aeons now – across the straits,

and limestone boulders in the hinterland

the slow detritus of the last ice age.

RAF Typhoons have flown from their air base,

ten miles or so from here, every day,

leaving the island with their stormy thunder,

over the mountainous Llyn Peninsula

out into the north east Atlantic,

as if it were quite another sea.

This island was Mam Cymru, the granary

of Wales. Its ubiquitous, redundant mills

are unmarked monuments to a past

bountiful, precarious, and brutal.

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By David Selzer

WATCHING THE STORM

By David SelzerJuly 20, 20190 Comments1 min read317 views

From Llandwyn Beach we watch – safely, distantly –

rain clouds, across the bay and the beginnings

of the Irish Sea, obscure the coast

and then the three mountain peaks, one by one,

of the Ll?n Peninsula. We hear thunder

trundle on the high ground and rumble

in the valleys, and see lightning fork,

furnace yellow, in the ash grey clouds.

Watching a storm at such a calm remove

is like two scholars in faux panama hats

watching the past, observing history.

The tide is much further out than ever;

low rocks exposed we have never seen, brown

with rack, adorned with limpets, mussels, clams;

Caernafon Bar ghostly beneath the waves.

We have been side by side on Traeth Llandwyn

at least once almost every year

since August ’62 – the month Mandela

was arrested, and Marilyn Monroe died.

We had walked from Newborough village

through the plantation of pine saplings

to bind the dunes, keep sand from barricading

doors, occupying the cemetery.

We were alone that first summer’s day,

the wide, embracing strand entirely ours.

The wind shifts suddenly with the tide.

We pack away our novels – Colm Toíbín,

Anne Tyler – and fold up our chairs. We pass

a large jubilant family gathering

setting up a windbreak and a barbecue.

As we drive along the metalled road,

through what has become a forest, the rain falls –

wipers flick it away.

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By David Selzer