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.