Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/42

20 tops lifted like smoke in the stiff sea-breeze. Across the streak of twinkling water, looking cool under a hot sun, lay the Welsh shore with its stern background of mountains, the Snowdon range. Far away to the right, beneath the peaks of Yr Eifl, was the precipitous face of Careg-y-llam, haunt of the chough in those days, and where the guillemots still line the ledges in thousands. Towering above was the shaggy top of Carn Madryn, beyond the Rivals, and to the north Carnedd-goch, scarred by the Nantlle quarries; the snow-capped conical peak of Snowdon itself and the sister height of Crib-y-dysgyll, a great snow mound, were straight before us. The Glydyrs and Carnedds were white alps, Y Foel Fras had a wintry cap; we might have been gazing on Alps, dazzlingly white in hot summer sunshine.

The monks of Llanddwyn are forgotten; the children of the pilots play above their nameless graves and hunt for cowries on the shore where they once landed; starlings nest in the walls, feeding their noisy young in the Abbey refectory. Drifting sand from the Irish Sea has buried deep the village that was, and rabbits burrow and wheatears nest where once the pilgrims trod.

Two streams, the Braint and Cefni, rise in the inland marshes, and enter the sea on either side of Newborough Warren; the latter was once a trickle through a great marsh, now it is a broad, embanked tidal stream, draining the whole of the vast Malldraeth Marsh. Much of this land is under cultivation, rich, fertile soil; but here and there are unreclaimed reaches, wet tracts where reeds, rushes. and horse-tails flourish, and where in places the water-violet and mare's-tail abound. Old spoil-banks, where pioneers dug but did not mine for coal, rise above the level, and thick double hedges and deep dykes cross the marsh to mark out the fields where the black Welsh cattle wade in the lush, rich grass. A few pools or llyns