21 February ’99

Cascades string the mountain whitely. Water and wind joined in one voice over the welling ground. Daylight blackens over the torn lake. Wet rock shines briefly. The wind skirls and pivots, and flaps wildly at the ridge.

25 April ’04

Up the cwm, along in the deeps of Nant Cadair, a slim grey trout darts adeptly into shadow. Surface ripples blown upstream refract a moving net of light over a streambed boulder. Higher, sliding water shines the baking rock. Water rattles down a stony gully towards the turquoise lake. Two buzzards glide moth-winged in the spacious air. Across the blonded grasses of the ridge, the dome of Mynydd Moel trembles through heat-haze. Flotillas of little cumulus sail north. Over the scarp-edge, male and female ring ousels chip and whir. Sun silvers the well pool's window, and on its membrane pond-skaters and whirligigs surge and rest, the last making little waves of passage. Above, three buzzards carousel as if hung on invisible wires, backlit against a shadowy wall of rock and scree - one making a chipping cry (what does that mean, in the machinery of its life?). Meadow pipits flit, or squeak from fenceposts. A bumblebee drones by. A sudden ‘zip’ of air. Ravens circulate under the crags, blacker than the shadows there. Further up the moor, with a glimpse of Mawddach, even boulders, their shadows dark, seem to be just resting, as if really animate. Drainage streams wriggle down the moor, mapping it. The mountain ridge sinuates in humps towards the sea. Haze thickens the sky. Calls of ewes and lambs become masked by the growl of a light plane that banks in over Penygadair then is lost southwards. A black raven grunts, flashes silver in a turn, settles into a cliff. Blue eyes of all the pools back below: the well pool and all those of Mynydd y Gadair. The grey crust of Mynydd Moel, raked brightly against the sky, forms a stair up to its summit, where heedless of interruption, a raven preens.

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