mergansers

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.