reflections part two

I start, slightly Victorian photograph, of myself boarding a boat to go to the Greek Island. A 21st birthday present a trip to Greece, all by myself and looking cross that the photographer has caught me and will no doubt make me pay. Pink and white stripes that dress, and for crying in a bucket what was I doing with a vanity case?

But I needed to wander from an early age, as a child I trotted round on a pony, exploring Hainault Forest or woods round Chigwell.  My grandfather sent me off with a friend and our two horses to a farm in the Midlands in the summer and we had our adventures and roamed the fields on horseback.

So when I started this journey of reminiscence and look back on the places I  went to in later times have not been surprised at how far I have walked.

A favourite place was Solva in Wales not far from Jennie in her home high in the hills of my favourite country.

The sea always has a strong pull on us, is it because we live surrounded by water or is it that this was the origin of our species crawling out of the water to land.

Whenever I made the annual journey to Solva, I would pull over at Newgale beach and let Moss out for a run on the long beach.  Often in winter the sea breached the stone shingle bank that protected the campsite on the other side of the road and the sea would splatter shingle all over the road.

I wandered around the cliffs of Solva, for Wales had many attractions to a megalithic person as myself, not withstanding coastal paths that still held the wild flower in their embrace.  

I took Paul a couple of times, the last time we went with American friends, their aspirations of Welsh cuisine slightly higher than was offered but Bucky enjoyed that whole lobster to himself, and when we explained that getting rid of hedges so that they could see over them, would be difficult in our nature loving country they understood.  I know Bucky never forgave me for taking  them on the long route to the  sacred spring on the Presceli Hills he was so sure was there, and then complaining about the bogs he encountered down the hill.  Or the bottle of expensive Welsh whiskey that the three of them indulged in back at the inn but I did enjoy taking them round my favourite places, and not forgetting sitting in Jennie's and Keith's lovely old kitchen.

So the following photos will take you around the inlet that is Solva, the 'drowned valley' that sits on the other side of the village.  I absorb history as if I have a porous skin, the landscape will sink like a blanket round my shoulders and I think when I look at the old rocks that poke through the slight green surface vegetation of the times when volcanic eruptions made them millions of years ago.

Old stone foundations on Carn Llidi

prehistoric fencing?

rocks made vertically

A drowned valley

misty and narrow, this particular path had two  defended Iron Age enclosures

Solva harbour