Chapter V: The New Country

_All places that the eye of Heaven visits_,
_Are to a wise man ports and happy havens_.

RICHARD II.

The primitive man, after he has satisfied the claims of appetite, stitched his skin-mantle, and thatched a hut, may begin to spare time for reflection on the quality and flavour of the prey he has eaten, or the picturesqueness of his cabin. Till then his estimate of things is quantitative. He asks not of what sort his food is, but whether there is enough of it, and regards less the cut of his coat than its thickness.

The analogy of our circumstances must be our excuse for postponing so long a description of our new settlement, its physical surroundings, and the complexion of our domestic and social life. Not in truth that we had returned to barbarism: but who could dilate on the beauty of mountain scenery, in sight of which he was perhaps to starve; who would criticise the pattern of his dinner-service, or be fastidious in carpets and wall- paper, before he could reckon upon dinner, or call shelter his own?

But a week is over, and we have all settled into our berths. The boys have found that there will be dinner every day; the masters that no one will have to pitch his tent on a sand-dune, or spread a straw litter in a bathing-machine. The level of comfort was, of course, not uniform. How should it be? Probably there is a choice of corners in a workhouse or casual-ward. Some of our party tasted the painful pleasures of the poor in the scant accommodation and naked simplicity of cottage lodgings. It was long after our arrival that we discovered a valued friend still sitting on the corner of his packing-case, and brewing his coffee on a washhand-stand. The fire smoked all day; but this vice in the apartment was neutralised by a broken window. Yet he should be quite happy, he said, if he could get a glazier _and_ a sweep (like smoke and draught, one would not do without the other), a bolster, an occasional clean towel, and a little warm water in the morning.

Those who had brought a family with them into camp were more seriously troubled with the cares of providing quarters, and pondered regretfully on the peace and roominess of home. Still as we are leaving no one houseless or dinnerless, we may turn aside to describe at more leisure the place we lived in and the manner of our life.

The stage on which our little history was enacted is a maritime plain of irregular semicircular shape, with a sea-front of five miles, and a depth inland of from two to three miles. This plain, a dead level stretch of peat, of which part is coming under cultivation, while part is still marsh, is surrounded by a ring of hills, which rise in successive well- defined ranges of increasing height, till they culminate in the summits of Cader Idris on one side and Plinlimmon on the other.

The River Dovey, which cleaves the circle of mountains, flows in a broad estuary along the base of the northward hills, under which, at the mouths of the estuary, lies the little port of Aberdovey. At the other end of the arc formed by the coastline, close under the slopes of the promontory which closes the plain at its north-west corner, stands the village of Borth, three-quarters of a mile of straggling dwellings, which vary in scale and character from the primitive mud-cabin of the squatter to the stately hotel which formed the headquarters of the school. The little town is irregular even to quaintness, without being picturesque. Its houses are not grouped according to size and character, but dropped as it were anyhow, in chance collocations, tall and low, thatched and slated together. Two or three gigantesque meeting-houses, featureless and sombre, domineer over the roofs around them. One or two others of a less puritan design, and not out of character with the church on a knoll a furlong off, compensate their severer rivals. The shape of the village is determined by the narrow ridge of terra firma, the mere heaping of the tides, between the quaking marsh and the encroaching sea. The nidus of the present settlement is the tiny hamlet of Old Borth, perched on a spur of the promontory, and well out of reach of flood tides. We are not sure that the mother may not outlive her colony, unless substantial measures are taken to guard against another 30th of January. Near Old Borth, through a gap in the hills, comes the River Lery, a trout-stream known to our anglers, thanks again to Sir Pryse who owns it. It races bubbling round the furze-clad knoll, whose Welsh name is translated Otter's Island, on which stands the church, and then is silenced in a blank straight-cut channel, which conveys it through the marsh into the estuary at Ynyslas. Up the gorge of the Lery runs the railway, which carried us so often past the massive church and steep pine-grown graveyard of Langfihangel-geneur-glyn, and across the broad meadows of Bow Street, to the civilisation of Aberystwith. For Aberystwith was our Capua, and used to draw large parties on many a blank afternoon for marketing or amusement.

Then there was the beach, four miles of it, from the rocks of Borth Head, where the waves could be watched breaking on the seaweed-covered reef, and sending up columns of white spray against the black face of the cliffs, away to the yellow sand dunes near the Dovey's mouth, and the reaches of wet sands where we noted on summer days "the landscape winking through the heat," almost with the effect of a mirage. These sands, firm and sound under foot, were a famous walking-ground at all times; but they changed their character very much with the seasons; at one time retreating and laying bare a beach of shingle under the pebble ridge; at another, swinging back to cover them up again. In the former state of the shore a suggestive phenomenon might be observed. At low-water mark there appeared certain dark shapeless lumps, which might be taken for rocks at a distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the tree still grew. Here is the verification of the legend (or is it, perhaps, the suggestion of it?) which records the fate of the Lost Lowland Hundred. Once on a time (the Cymric bards answer for it), a flourishing tract of country stretched at the foot of the hills which are now washed by the tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not indistinctly descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a little combe. It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule the fancy of masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain it away as a pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. And perhaps we might mention in this connection, that one of our party, on the first view, was half persuaded he had seen a sea-serpent. Well, this prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge of Borth and the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a meaning threat of claiming his own again. But that is a story which must be told in its own place.

Such then were the geographical details of the spot in which we had settled, and they made up a landscape, which, if it can be more than rivalled in other parts of the Principality, has yet a characteristic and impressive beauty. The following extract may serve, for lack of a better rendering, to describe how the scene looked to the eyes of someone who watched it on a June afternoon from the grassy slopes of Borth Head:

My eyes run on with the tide which drifts inland up the estuary, and,
farther than vision can really follow, track the march of its glancing
ripples, as they swim on past shoal and sand-dune and morass up to the
dewy gates of the Spring, in among green-clad river meadows and crisp
close-skirted woodlands which the salt breath of sea-winds restrains
from a richer luxuriance, on past springing knolls plumed with dark
firs, and dimpling valleys mellow with the contrasted gold of the
oak's young leafage. Above these, hills moulded on a grander scale
heave up their broad shoulders to the sunlight, which is reflected in
pale but tender hues of blue or violet or rose from their bare rock
masses, or the slopes hardly less bare, which are swept by great
winds, and browsed yet closer by climbing mountain sheep. At this and
the other point the bosses of the hills are lighted with the sparkle
of gorse-thickets, or dusky with heather not yet kindled into bloom.
Lower down there are belts of woodland, fencing off the pastures which
strew the lowest terraces of the mountains from the barren wastes
above them, and these pastures are brightly flecked with patches of
white-walled homesteads down to the brown edge of the marsh. And so,
ridge after ridge, the hills enclose the scene in a half-circle, of
which this breezy headland, our "specular mount," is an extreme horn.
But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land
between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant
and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness
the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of
various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents
sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen
into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower
barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy
with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with
here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a
deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the
waste flats around them some acres of sweet grass, or a broad field of
flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and
fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the
base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its
surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the shore, or solitude-
loving creatures native to the place--plover and duck and long-winged
herons, but also of cattle and horses grazing on the cultivated edges
of the marsh, which make us look for the homes of their human masters
at no great distance. Why there they are, lying overlooked at our
feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings
clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing
a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell
of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one
great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag
waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the
kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be
plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may
listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp,
and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its
ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if
it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise
away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If
they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a
chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage
will be less problematical than here.