With thanks (again) to Caroline for yesterday’s super walk.  We took the footpath at the top of Gwelfor Road towards Tywyn, which has some great views over the estuary and Cardigan Bay.  Young lambs were lovely to see, leggy and alert whilst their peaceable mothers grazed.  The walk emerges at the cemetery on the main Aberdovey to Tywyn road, which is full of gorgeous primroses at the moment.  A brisk walk back along a very windy beach was superbly fresh.

Passing some abandoned farm buildings in a sheltered dip surrounded by low hillsides, we stopped to look in detail.  Brilliant white quartz and black slate/shales and mudstone were arranged differently on both buildings, the contrast remarkable and rather beautiful.  Door lintels were made of wood, still in situ, and roofs were tiled with slate, although only tiny pieces of the roofs remained.  One of the walls of the lower of the two buildings had begun to fall outwards, and was propped up with vast buttresses.  An attempt to restore the upper building’s wall with breeze blocks was accompanied by a corrugated asbestos roof that is now disintegrated.  The thickness of the stone-built walls, the heavy buttresses, and the tiny slits for windows are all somewhat reminiscent of Mediaeval castle construction, as is its derelict condition.

Information about mermaid’s purses (egg sacks of small native shark species) can be found on an earlier post. This one, a cuckoo ray that I found on the beach yesterday (Leucoraja naevus), has been reported to the Shark Trust to contribute to their data collection project.