Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/41

Rh that all who appealed to her might obtain the husbands they desired or forget all about them.

The picturesque ruins of an abbey stand on the highest part of the island, and a modern cross has been erected in memory of the many pilgrims who visited the shrine and were buried there. Round the Abbey are the remains of the monastic gardens, still fruitful, for the once well-tilled land. helped by rotting seaweed, an excellent fertiliser, produces the best early potatoes for Carnarvon market. Starlings and a most valuable member of this isolated colony, a donkey, were occupying the ruin on our first visit, and we have since found that patient steed the best method of transporting baggage across the soft and shifting dunes. Llanddwyn was never large, but in Tudor days it was important; its inhabitants entertained and traded with the One method of transferring the wealth of the visitors to their own pockets was a peculiar occult science, divination from fishes, but I have failed to find how the finny tribe revealed the future; the monks of St. Ddwyn knew.

We sat amongst the ruins watching the children from the cottages playing in a hollow below. Beyond the four white cottages is a small harbour, where at one time there was a lifeboat and where the pilot boats can be hauled up the sandy beach. On a headland is a tower, used as a landmark before the lighthouse was erected, and beyond the lighthouse, on a couple of stacks, hundreds of terns lay their nests on the bare, jagged rocks or amongst the dense tangle of tree-mallow and sea-beet. Drying their wings on a tangle-covered stack were three or four cormorants, heraldic birds holding their black pinions half unfurled; nearer an orange-billed oystercatcher eyed us suspiciously. Beyond, a wide sweep of firm sand stretched to Aber Menai, once a ferry to Carnarvon, and behind were the billowy dunes, their loose