Its funny how the same old phrases stalk us through our life.
I have always made my living from the Wilderness, or what passes for it in this tired old Country.
First it was the Shore, & Sea, then Bog, & Forest. Always they bordered that other main land use, Farmland.
In Wales that usually means pasture for grazing.
Grass.
We see it as nice green stuff, preferably framed into interesting tree-lined shapes called fields.
Seen in a simple equation, that stuff is what Stock eat that makes milk and meat and so the farmer's income.
Even more simply, and money is always seeking out the lowest common denominator
if its not grassland, its wasteland.
Fit only for a dump.
Being on the edges of farms, meant the way to the land I wanted to get to usually involved clambering over a farm dump.
In my time, I have bought two bits of forest, and a tract of bogland, and the first thing I had to do with each was get a digger in to clear their entrances of head-high piled farm waste. This is no longer the rusty kettle, a few rolls of spent pig-net and some broken glass, but oil drums, rotten big-bales of silage,old plastic wrap, mangled concrete and dairy chemical waste. Tons of it.
I still have a bit of forest up near Aberystwyth, and a friend rang me last week to say a neighbouring farmer had been dumping over the fence.
A carcass or two and some asbestos.
We have a history of such incidents. So its back on the phone to the officials who are meant to police such events.
Usually they are in a meeting, on a course, off sick or on leave.
The squashy department.
Also, there still seems some perverse official impulse to protect farmers from the consequences of their own idiocy. As if they are a special case.
They will probably scold him, like a naughty child.
Now, what on Earth has this to do with the Sea?
I get to the beach where I net along a footpath, then over a fence, and down a scramble of a cliff-path. Nothing official. Used, going by the wear, by very few others.
I was out in the afternoon, carefully plucking a small lobster out of the net. I had meant to check the net that morning, but it had been too wild; a crashing swell after a night of howling offshore winds.
Southerlies have been getting up like wild banshees in the night, filling me with fearful scenarios far fuller of surf and spray than the eventual sea I found in daylight. Still, it had looked too moody for me.
So there were some small crabs and lobsters stuck who’d been attracted by the catch.
I hate that.
Then above my head, I heard a monstrous clanking, and looked up in time to see a tractor bucket tipping a thorn tree over the cliff. Right in the gully where the path was.
Then another. In the end there was a wall of thorn fifteen foot high.
No doubt there was a logic in it. He had been mending a fence, so had grubbed back the thorn hedge, and blocked a gap with the waste.
I couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of persecution though.
Farmers dropping things on my head..
I paddled round to another beach, which was luckily not running its usual winter swell.
Access to the sea is an issue in many places.
The coast has always been a busy place, for trade and fishing. The best arable land and the mildest climate have long attracted intense cultivation.
As well now, it is a place where people gather to gaze out their sunset years, bringing a plague of suburban territoriality with them.
Also a lot of it is no good for launching as its too steep or exposed or muddy.
When I was winkling, I had to contend with a tycoon caravan-site owner who wouldn’t let me go down to the beach.
I used to take a bicycle, as there was a bridle-path, and a bike is a horse in law.
He was not pleased.
Negotiating with the Sea-Gods and their moods and perversities is hard enough, without having to contend with petty tyrants.
I went back today with some secateurs and devised a new, discreet route down the cliff.
It feels even more special there now.
Good comes out of all in the end.
‘The site-owners they are all leeches,
For local views showing no care.
-You’d think they’d invented the beaches
Go down through their camps if you dare.’
(the grockle song)
