“One of the strangest bits of landscape you will find anywhere in Wales” is how the late country diarist Bill Condry described the quarried limestone ridge jutting out into the confluence of the Cresswell and Carew rivers – themselves tributaries of the Daugleddau (“the two Cleddaus”) a few miles upstream from Milford Haven. It’s a site of special scientific interest now, a nature reserve run by the South and West Wales Wildlife Trust, and one of the most atmospheric places I know. The Welsh poet Robert Williams Parry has a phrase that perfectly evokes the mood of these former industrial sites now returning to nature: “llonydd gorffenedig” – an accomplished silence.
You feel it as you descend the lane, cross wildflower meadows, pass a small grove of walnut trees and enter the reserve. The boats that used to moor in canals around this nose of rock, to load with limestone for farms along the coast and across the Severn Sea, are long gone. The canals themselves are little more than muddy low-tide rhines now, where an occasional solitary egret fishes before flying off, black legs trailing, to the treetop colony in the woods across the Daugleddau shared with its cousin herons.
Sometimes a bank of mist drifts upriver, muffling all sound, beading with bright drops the mallows, the orchids and the glasswort that grow across the margins of the wood and spread out into the saltings. At other times a pungent tang of sea wormwood infuses the still air of August, and brown hairstreak butterflies, the imagos of which fly from late July to early October, drift down from the leaf canopy of the ash trees. Soon they will lay their exquisite tiny eggs on the blackthorns. In the winter, local naturalists come here to monitor their population, these western coasts being one of this lovely small butterfly’s strongholds.
(Thecla betulae). Photograph: Dom Greves/Alamy Stock Photo
I made my way along a clattery foreshore of loose stones between ash wood and salt marsh to round the point, beyond which those canals lead into the Cresswell. There’s something reminiscent of JG Ballard’s drowned worlds about this landscape. Man has been here, made his mark, and left. Now nature, beautifully, reclaims it. Only the human traces are remotely sinister.
