Land of Falling Water

Glimpses of paradise

Friends,

This week’s instalment has been written partly in a blissful location next to falling water (see above), and partly in an ancient building located next to the noisiest, most chaotic crossroads in Wales, where farm trucks filled with sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, ponies and horses, even hounds have been rumbling past my studio window all week on the way to the Royal Welsh Show, which, I’m told, is the biggest agricultural show in Europe. As I write this there is a quiet interlude down on the street, where hundreds of portly cyclists are panting past, dressed in the most ridiculous livery I’ve ever seen, their faces almost the colour of an emergency. Summer in the tiny town of Rhayader.

This story is all about waterfalls, and the way we fall, with or without grace. It’s for paid subscribers, so please think about supporting my ongoing labour of love for the wild by upgrading your subscription. There are lots of stories and images behind the paywall just aching to meet you . . . for the price of two slices of bread, a tomato, a piece of not-quite-healthy-looking cheese and a squirt of mayo at a mid-market sandwich kiosk.

What follows is food for the soul. Hope you enjoy it. J

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There’s a beach I go to when I’m craving peace, at times when I can feel something moving inside me, some rumour from the ancestors trying to swim up into the well of my consciousness. Actually it’s not really a beach. It’s a fringe of dark earth pocked with stones, steeply shelving into Garreg Ddu reservoir. I sit on the bank above it, in the deep grass and wildflowers. After a few minutes I become a new ecosystem for beetles and flying insects. It’s what we are, at the end of things, ecosystems - places for the consciousness of other beings to pass through.

I’ve just read, on some promotional web matter, that Garreg Ddu and its 4 sister reservoirs are a wilderness of water. It’s a lovely definition, though being man-made it’s a stretch to call it wild. But I’m going to go along with the definition, temporarily. If I widen my attention beyond the boundaries of the lakes and include the surrounding hills and mountains, this place is a little wilderness of sorts, or at least the closest you can get to it on these islands.

There’s a waterfall near my little beach which is better qualified for the definition of wild. It plunges down a steep mountainside, threading between walls of stone, breaking into multiple strands, then recombining to form shallow pools which slide over lips of rock, and eventually into a channel leading to the reservoir. An oak wood has grown among the stones on the hillside. The trees are small and twisted, their branches almost touching the ground in places. Each branch is filled with so many bryophytes that there is no exposed bark on them at all. Moss smothers every boulder, heather and bilberries cover the ground. If William Blake had come to this place he would have seen all the green worlds contained within. Sometimes I think I’ve glimpsed them.

I’ve taken many photographs of the waterfall and the wood, but it’s a place which defies the process. This may be due to a lack of contrast, the blanket of green and the smothering of the sky by trees. Or the incredible complexity, the myriad of forms. It’s a place which boggles the eye. I’ve given up trying to capture it as a whole. Now when I go there with my camera I spend most of my time close up to the details, the branching forms of bearded moss, the tangles of water through stones. It requires me to be on my knees most of the time, which is appropriate.

Strange how some places engulf us, how they shut out the world.