Category Archives: Wales Coast Path

Walking from Aberdovey towards Tywyn along the beach

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Yesterday’s walk along the beach was extraordinary.  I had intended to park by the cemetery, but by accident parked opposite the row of houses at the foot of the road from the Trefeddian Hotel, crossed the golf course and emerged from the dunes at the Second World War pillbox.   The sun was hazy and incredibly pale, but at the same time reflected off the wet sand, creating some beautiful colour and light combinations.  I walked for far longer than intended, and it nearly became a case of walking into Tywyn and getting a bus or taxi back to my car!  Instead I retraced my steps, and because of the light it was like doing an entirely different walk.  It was lovely to see a pair of oyster catchers, obstinately refusing to do anything other than stand, preening in the sun!  They are in the video at the end of this post.

 

 

Gales and bleak skies yesterday, sunshine today, a mad but wonderful contrast

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Yesterday morning my first job was to go and retrieve the blue bins that had cascaded down the hill when their trolley fell over during the night.  I was awake much of the night listening to it.  Today was an amazing contrast.  Things started off a little grey, with sunshine filtering through the clouds, but by the afternoon the sun dominated, and although there were still clouds, they were an attractive gradient from pure white to dark purple and charcoal, the perfect foil for the brilliant cerulean blue.  I had only walked down to go to the Post Office, but somehow found myself cutting through the dunes and striding along the incoming tide on the beach. So happy.

A walk down the Dyfi estuary on a beautiful January day

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Thursday last week was a beautiful day, all sunshine and blue skies.  A treat.  About as different from today’s gales as possible!  I went down into Aberdovey to take photos of the interior of St Peter’s Church, because I am working on a new post about the church.  Someone told me that it was open every day, but perhaps that was just in the summer, because it was firmly closed.  I took some photographs in the churchyard instead, and then decided to take advantage of the sun and headed down the estuary.  It was an hour past low tide and the sea was coming in, but not fast enough to cover up the sand flats before I had enjoyed seeing them.  At some points in this video there’s some very wobbly footage, but it was such a beautiful day that even with some slightly dodgy camcorder work it seemed a shame not to share it!

January in Aberdovey

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Wednesday last week was one of those rare but gorgeous January days that provides a welcome reminder that spring lies ahead.  Almost too good to be true. The tide was on its way out, always a beautiful sight as dips in the sand fill with still water reflecting the blue sky, and the millions of deeply scored fractal patterns in the sand are revealed, with the contrast of the dark shadows and bright surfaces always a sensational feature of the low winter sun.  Apart from a few dog walkers the beach was almost empty, sensible people remaining in the warm.

My garden continues to be a source of wildlife activity, all the local species filling up on solid carbohydrates to see them through the bitterly cold nights.

The goldfinches, which turned up in my absence over Christmas, are now a daily presence, between two or seven of them at a time, four on the nyjer feeder with the others bouncing up and down in frustration in the tree. When they first arrived I was very taken by their beautifully minimalist movements and intricate eating habits, but when there are more than four trying to get onto the feeder at a time there can be real jockeying for position in a great thrashing of brightly coloured feathers, with some of the angelic looking little things chasing off others quite ruthlessly.  A gaggle of goldfinches is called a “charm.”

Since I moved here in August, all the feeders have been popular, but in the last month the mixed seed feeder has been completely rejected, no matter where I hang it.  Instead, most activity is concentrated on the fat ball, mealworm and peanut feeders.  Do note that I put a soundtrack on the following video, just to get used to the software that I am using, but it is a really lovely piece of Bach, so hopefully not too intrusive.

 

 

Video: Winter walk on the beach

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The best thing about living in Aberdovey is the ability to walk in some wonderful scenery.  I love the hills and and the rural walks in the summer, but the vast open beach has an energy all of its own, particularly at low tide on a sunny day in the winter and spring.  With the light casting sharp shadows and delineating wild patterns in the multi-textured sands and the gorgeous estuary waters feeding out into the waves there’s almost nowhere in the world that I would rather be.  Except, perhaps, the Sahara desert in the sun 🙂

Short walk along the Wales Coast Path from Tywyn to the Tonfanau footbridge

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It was such a lovely day again that I decided to walk the short stretch along the road that runs along the side of the railway from Tywyn to the new Tonfanau Bridge over the river Dysynni.  It forms part of the Welsh Coast Path, which follows long sections of the 882 mile Welsh coastline, with some unavoidable detours inland.  Until recently one of these detours was where the Welsh Coastal Path met the river Dysynni at the point at which it opens into the sea.  Here it was necessary to divert inland along the Dysynni as far as Bryncrug, returning on the other side of the river to rejoin the coast, an admittedly very attractive detour of some eight miles.  In January 2013 this all changed when a new 50m bridge was installed to link the two parts of the Coast Path.

The bridge is of an unusual design, formed of twin crescent-shaped sides of white tubular steel.  It is a type known as a Vierendeel bridge, named for its inventor, the Belgian civil engineer Arthur Vierendeel (1852-1940), defined by vertical trusses, rather than the usual diagonal ones.  This creates rectangular rather than triangular spaces between the trusses.  Most Vierendeel bridges are in Belgium.  The bridge cost £850,000 and was funded by the Welsh European Funding Office, Traac, the Countryside Council for Wales and Gwynedd Council.  It was installed  on the 16th January 2013 by Jones Brothers of Ruthin.  It is the largest span for a Vierendeel truss footbridge in the UK.  It takes pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders.  The Tonfanau Bridge takes its name from the nearby village of Tonfanau, which has an interesting history in its own right and will be discussed at a later date.

Section of the Ordnance Survey Explorer Map (OL23 Cadair Idris and Llyn Tegid) showing the Wales Coast Path, and the start and end point for the short walk between Tywyn and the Tonfanau footbridge over the Dynsynni. Click to enlarge.

The Wales Coast Path (Llwybr Arfordir Cymru – www.walescoastpath.gov.uk) opened in May 2012 and extends between Chester in the north to Chepstow in the south, following the line of the coast wherever possible.  The route between Aberdovey and Tywyn goes along beach for four miles, but becomes more complicated when it reaches Tywyn.  The map to the left shows the Welsh Coast Path as a line of green dotted diamond shapes.  For those who want to walk this short section, I have marked my starting point in the car park on the sea front in Tywyn and the location of the bridge itself.

In Tywyn you can either walk along the sea front on the promenade or on the walkway that runs the length of the promenade at beach level.  The path then goes on to the extended promenade lying between residential housing and the sea.  This gives you excellent views of the sea, but blocks views of the hills.  Part way along is a turn off between the last of the houses and a mobile-home park.   This is a small lane that crosses the railway.  From there you either walk along the small road that leads to the footbridge or through the fields.  Here, there’s nothing but the raised track of the railway to be seen to the west, although the sea can be clearly heard, but the views to the east are absolutely terrific.

We have been incredibly lucky with the weather recently.  It has generally been cold, and there have been frosts in the village, but the sunshine so late in the year has been a splendid treat.   There were lots of dog walkers out today, everyone making the most of the weather whilst it lasts.

 

 

A proper seaside walk – the beach, the sea, the waves, sun and even a sandcastle

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Sunshine, sand, sea and almost no-one on the beach but me.  Idyllic.  When I woke up this morning it was cold and grey, but by noon the day had clearly decided to fall in line with the weather forecast and blossomed into a glorious autumn afternoon.  I had stuff I needed to do but I was done by 2pm and drove to the lay-by on the road to Tywyn, opposite the line of houses on the other side of the Trefeddian Hotel.   A path crosses the golf course, wends its way through the dunes and drops you by the Second World War pillbox.  From there Tywyn is clearly visible in the distance.  The tide was out, just on the turn, so it took a couple of minutes to reach the water’s edge, although the roar from the waves had been clearly audible from the road.

The beach was spectacular, the damp sand reflecting blue sky and white clouds, with deep dips holding pools of water like liquid silver and white-topped blue waves thundering as crests broke, chaotic shapes forming and reforming.   The main strandline was up by the dunes, clumps of dark weed, but there were long strands of weed shimmering in the sunshine, some floating in pools some strewn along the sand.  I took a few photos and a couple of videos as I walked towards Tywyn, got wet feet, and generally had a great time.  It really was a spectacular afternoon.  A lady on the checkout at the Co-op in Tywyn, who also moved here from London, told me that the novelty lasted six months with her, but I really don’t see it ever wearing off for me.  Mind, I haven’t survived an Aberdovey winter yet.

Crossing the sand dunes.  Close to the beach they are stablized by marram grass.

The first and last photos are burnet roses, small and delicate, that are usually found in sand dunes. The pink petals belong to a blackberry bramble and the blue berries are blackthorn, also common in sand dunes.

Lovely shapes and light on the wet sand

Ecofacts. The shells are a limpit with a beautiful yellow shell, an elegant variegated scallop, a saddle oyster and a purple-black common muscle. An articulated crab claw has become detached from its owner. This was the first cuttlefish bone that I have found on the Aberdovey beach, beautifully laminated. Within the calcium-rich shell there are chambers that that fill with gas or water allowing the cuttlefish to rise or sink.

Here are two of the videos.  I am still trying to get the hang of this whole video thing.  The autofocus on the little camera that I use for video was having trouble today, unsurprisingly, and it was having trouble with the shifting light too.  And of course, it was absolutely not all the camera’s fault that these are anything but perfect.  This was my first time trying to video the sea, and the learning curve shows rather acutely!  Huge fun though, and I’ll get there eventually.

The lay-by to park for this stroll on the beach is at The Crossing, just where the A493 goes around a slow but definitive bend. It is opposite a very fine terrace of tall houses. The footpath is a track on the left of the lay-by and takes you over two stiles across the railway. You then cross the golf course to walk along the path through the dunes and down on to the beach by the Second World War pillbox, marked on the above map with a red rectangle.

 

A splendid afternoon beachcombing at Aberdovey

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The strandline

When is a potato not a potato?  When it’s a sea potato.  When I moved here eight weeks ago I bought a book (a lot of the best bits in my life start with the phrase “I bought a book”) about beachcombing and the strandline (also referred to as the wrackline or driftline).  The strandline is that trail of debris that marks where the tide last deposited its load.  In London I lived a three minute walk from the Thames in a section of the river that had been used from the 17th Century until the mid 19th Century for shipbuilding.  A favourite walk at low tide (there is a 7m difference between the Thames at low and high tide) it was a rich source of objects, telling a partial and fragmented story about how the foreshore had been used and what the river carried and dropped on its travels.  But at Aberdovey, apart from collecting the occasional shell or decorative pebble, I had never paid much notice of what was at my feet at on the beach.  I was too busy enjoying the dune vegetation, the rolling waves and the gorgeous views.   At Aberdovey my invariable habit has always been to walk one way along the top of the sand dunes and then back along the water’s edge, fastidiously avoiding those dark, unappealing fly-covered lumps of festering decay.  Today, however, they were my goal, and to my amazement they were a wonderful treasure trove.

Common otter shell (Lutraria lutraria), 12cm long, which burrows to depths of up to 30cm.

I had been feeling almost housebound due to the gales and the torrential rain brought by Storm Bronagh.  I am glad that the weather front was provided with a name, as it gave me something specific to have a real grumble about.  On Sunday, however, I woke up to glorious sunshine and immediately decided to abandon all the outdoor DIY and gardening that I ought to be getting on with and head for the beach.  There was a lot of wind and big patches of fluffy white cloud, but mainly big blue skies and a beautiful autumn sun the colour of electrum.   I threw my cameras, spare batteries and a lightweight waterproof into my ruck sack, mainly to block the wind, hauled on my fiendishly ugly hiking trainers and checked the tide tables – low tide at 3pm, hallelujah.  I took the car in case the weather turned and I needed a rapid escape from rain, parked opposite the fish and chip shop and set out optimistically for my first lump of black gunge.

The strandline is primarily made up of seaweed, which is at the heart of the local marine ecology.  What washes up with the tide is what grows in the vicinity and tells you something about what’s going on out there, and it is home to a wide range of creatures.  When it washes up on the seashore it also acts as a host to other forms of life, including insects and birds.  Seaweed is an algae and an autotroph, meaning that it makes its own food from sunlight, carbon and water.  Unlike plants, seaweed does not have roots, absorbing water through its leaves instead.  Photosynthesis, the which captures energy from the sun, is achieved via pigments, chemical compounds.  Green seaweeds contain mainly or entirely chlorophyll, whilst brown and red seaweeds contain other pigments as well.  Although all seaweeds require water, most spend a significant amount of time out of the water during low tides.  Seaweeds generally attach themselves to rocks or the seabed and stay attached via a “holdfast,” a clump at the base of the plant and can pulled free either due to storms or when they die.  I could only identify around half of the seaweeds from my books because in the general chaos of the standline masses, it was very difficult to pick them out.  There were miles of long, black spaghetti-like weeds that could have been either one of two species, but I couldn’t work out which from the photographs.

Crab

Embedded in the seaweed itself or simply sharing the strandline are all sorts of interesting ecofacts, as well as man-made objects.  Shells dominate at Aberdovey, with cockle shells littered everywhere, and some clam shells, including a dense patch of razor shell clams, quite a few oyster shells, some mussell shells and bits of crab claw and carapace.  Drift wood was conspicuous, as well as fresh wood and branches presumably thrown into the river and estuary by the storm.  One of the seaweeds turned out not to be seaweed at all, but is in fact an invertebrate called Hornwrack.  Another find that surprised me was the sea potato, of which I had never heard before.  There were remarkably few man-made intrusions.  There were some bits of nylon rope and a giant piece of “high pressure gas pipeline,” according to the label, but other than that there was none of the plastic that has plagued beaches around the country.

Sea potato (Echinocardium cordatum)

The sea potato (Echinocardium cordatum) was a curious thing.  It was clearly an exoskeleton and at first I thought it was a sea urchin, but on closer inspection, it clearly wasn’t quite the same thing.  I brought one home with me, and it was incredibly fragile, the shell immensely thin a piece breaking off almost immediately when I tried, very gently, to wash it.  One of the several that I photographed appeared to have spines attached, and when I delved into my books it turns out that Echinocardium cordatum does indeed have spines, but unlike those on sea urchins, these lie flat, facing backwards on the surface of the shell (called a test) and look like coarse fur.  Like other echinoderms (spiky skinned) the patterning on its surface is divisible by five (called pentameral symmetry).  Also known as a heart urchin, it lives buried in the seabed, into which it burrows and use tube feet to pass food to their mouths. Apparently they are quite common.

Hornwrack s not a seaweed, but an invertebrate (an animal without a backbone) colony

Hornwrack (Flustra foliacea) is not a seaweed, although the word “wrack” in its name might imply that it is.  It is actually an invertebrate (an animal without a backbone) colony belonging to the bryozoan group, commonly known as moss animals.  It looks just like a seaweed.  It is a common strandline find, each frond an exoskeleton containing  tiny boxes which contain an individual animal called a zooid, making up a colony of inter-dependent creatures.  Annual growth lines can sometimes be seen on the fronds, because it stops growing in winter.  It lives offshore attached to shells and stones, filters food particles, and has a slight lemony scent when fresh and wet.  Utterly fascinating.

Laver

Laver, as anyone who lives in Wales will know, is an edible seaweed that tastes delicious in all sorts of things.  There are five related species, the principal one of which is Porphyra umbilicalis, a purple-coloured weed.  A traditional Welsh recipe involves using oats to make laverbread (cooked laver) into cakes.  Before you head out to collect it, do be aware that it requires cooking for eight hours before it is usable!  Easier to buy it in tins from most of the food stores in Aberdovey, including the butcher (who, incidentally, makes the most terrific pork and laverbread sausages).

The second most common type of seaweed on the beach was the wrack (Fucus), of which there are multiple varieties.  Channelled wrack is shown near the top of the page, the picture here is bladder wrack.There was also serrated wrack and spiral wrack on the beach.   When I was a child, the air bladders used to fascinate me, and they are used by the seaweed for helping it to stand vertically in the water to improve its chances of reaching sunlight for photosynthesis.  Bladder wrack has small air bladders arranged in pairs.  Egg wrack has single large ones arranged in a row along each frond.  Channelled wrack has a curled frond  that forms a channel to retain moisture.  Serrated wrack has no air bladders at all.

Egg wrack and serrated wrack

Seaweeds are generally classed by colour, and there are several green ones listed in books, but I only found one on the strandline, which was gutweed (Ulva intestinalis).  It was spread across a piece of driftwood, absolutely lurid against the wood and against an otherwise muted backdrop of weed and sand.  It likes estuaries and brackish water, but was a bit off the beaten track where I found it, which was beyond the estuary and on a part of the beach that overlooks open sea.  It consists of thin hollow tubes which, when it is alive, are filled with oxygen.  It is edible and said to be delicious.  It is lying against a bed of either Mermaid Tresses or Thongweek, which was the most common of the seaweeds that had washed up on the strandline in clumps.

Sea oak (Halidrys siliquosa), also known as pod weed for obvious reasons, is another common seaside seaweed, which has mutiple branches and rather flattened swollen bladders at the tips of its fronds.  The bladders have internal divisions that are clearly visible.

Sea oak

Razor clams were dotted around the beach, but at one point on the beach it was a positive graveyard with dozens of them concentrated in a small area.  As far as I could tell they were all of the same type, the straight edged bivalve (double shell) pod razor clam, Enis siliqua, with an outer coating called a periostracum.  They live buried, aligned vertically, in the sand of the seabed and feed by extending a tube (siphon) above the sand into the sea to extract nutrients.  When the tide is out they burrow into the saturated sand, and retreat further in response to vibration.  As they borrow they eject water, which leaves a keyhole shape on the surface.  I ate rather a lot of them when on holiday in the Algarve, Portugal, and they are delicious.

The common or native oyster (Ostrea edulis) is scattered across the beach in the form of single shells.  The photo here shows the typical concentric scaly ridges on the outside of the shell, which is thick. Oysters were a mainstay of the diet in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, cheap nutrition, but were over-harvested during the late 19th Century, when prices went through the roof, and are still seriously depleted and now considered to be a delicacy.  The most common strandline finds have grey shells with blue bands, but grey and brown ones are also found, and at Aberdovey the majority I found on Sunday were brown.

There were a couple of seagulls, but the only other feathered friend I shared the beach with was a beautiful pied wagtail (Motacilla alba yarrellii), his tail flicking up and down in the characteristic way that gave it its name.  Like me, he was beachcombing, but for rather different ends, foraging for small molluscs, insects (particularly the flies that settle on the decaying seaweeds) and seeds.  They don’t look like natural seashore foragers, but are sometimes called the water wagtail because of their affinity to streams and open water, and they are always on the beach in Aberdovey in the autumn and winter, hopping from one promising site to the next.  He kept a wary eye on me and as I moved nearer he flew a little further on, always at the absolute limit of the range of my camera lens, meaning that the photo is very fuzzy.

References:

Plass, M. 2013. RSPB Handbook of the Seashore. Bloomsbury
Reader’s Digest 1981.  Field Guide to the Birds of Britain. Reader’s Digest Association.
Sherry, P. and Cleave, A. 2012.  Collins Complete guide to British Coastal Wildlife. Collins
Trewhella, S. and Hatcher, J. 2015.  The Essential Guide to Beachcombing and the Strandline. Wild Nature Press

 

The Aberdovey Second World War pillbox

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Walking towards Tywyn from Aberdovey you will come across a Second World War pillbox, an ugly concrete box with a small square hole in each side.  It has subsided unevenly into a dip in the beach at the foot of the dunes, an incongruous contributor to the area’s heritage.  It can be reached easily along the beach from Aberdovey.  It’s a fairly short walk from the car park, a little way beyond the Trefeddian Hotel, which is visible through a dip in the sand dunes.  If you prefer a short-cut there is a public footpath from a big lay-by on the A493 that takes you across the sand dunes and drops you very close to it.  Not that it’s a tourist destination, but it is certainly a local landmark, and sitting in an unspoiled stretch of eternal pale yellow sands with the rich blue sea beyond, it has an emphatic presence all of its own.  It is at grid reference SN59549635, at the end of the footpath known as The Crossing.

The pillbox is marked as a red box by The Crossing. Source: OS Explorer, Cadair Idris and Llyn Tegid. OL23. Ordnance Survey 2015

There are two war memorials in Aberdovey.  There’s a lovely 1999 memorial to 3 Troop 10(1A) who were stationed at Aberdovey during the war for their training (see my earlier post about this) and there’s a little shrine and plaque listing the dead from form both wards inserted into the wall of St Peter’s Church.

In some ways, the pillbox is an even more substantial monument to the bitter truth of war, mute but evocative.   The fact that it sits there, so out of place, so thoroughly ugly, is an appropriate shock to the system.  As detritus of war, it is something that demands a response and forces an  acknowledgement of the realities of the past in a way that a conventional memorial, however heartfelt, does not.  Although it was a lovely day for a walk, the sands endlessly beautiful and full of light, when I arrived at the pillbox it was just as dismal as I remembered.  Ugly, lop-sided, surreal, a scar on the landscape, a slap around the face.  A savage, palpable war memorial.

Pillboxes were part of a network of small defences that were put in place along the coastline, at road junctions and on canals to counter threats of Nazi attack on Britain.  The network consisted of a number of measures including offshore minefields; beach and manned seafront obstacles like barbed wire and landing craft obstructions, pillboxes and minefields; and cliff-top and dune defences including pillboxes and anti-glider obstructions.  The pillboxes, 28,000 of them, were sometimes round or hexagonal to avoid blind spots, but there were were seven different types in total (Types 22-28), with variants.  The Aberdovey one is a Type 26 prefabricated square with an embrasure in each wall and a door, now slightly subsided into a slight dip in the sand, 3ft or so deep.  Some pillboxes were brick- or stone-built but many, like this one, were made of concrete that was sufficiently thick to be bullet proof.   My thanks to the Pillbox Study Group for this excerpt, which explains the thinking behind pillboxes and other defence structures that were put in place in WWII:

On 25th June 1940, General Paget, Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief Home Forces submitted General Ironside`s anti-invasion plan to the War Cabinet in the form of Home Forces Operation Instruction No.3.

SECTION 13 of the Instruction stated: “The general plan of defence is a combination of mobile columns and static defences by means of strong-points and stops. As static defence only provides limited protection of the most vulnerable points, it must be supplemented by the action of mobile columns. However mobile such columns may be they cannot be expected to operate immediately over the whole area in which it is possible for the enemy to attempt invasion by sea or air. It is therefore necessary to adopt measures for confining his actions until such time as mobile columns can arrive to deal with him. This will be done by means of stops and strong-points prepared for all round defence at aerodromes which are necessary to prevent the enemy obtaining air superiority, at the main centres of communications and distributed in depth over a wide area covering London and the centres of production and supply. This system of stops and strong-points will prevent the enemy from running riot and tearing the guts out of the country as had happened in France and Belgium.”

In total there were 6 pillboxes every 500m from south of the river Dyffryn Gwyn, which flows into the sea just south of Tywyn, to the entrance of the river Dovey.  Prefabricated pillboxes were built of concrete panels and were then bolted into place on site.  The pillboxes to the north of this one are badly damaged, perhaps in an attempt to destroy and remove them.  Aberdovey had an Observer Corps, a Home Guard and a Coastguard Station during the Second World War.

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