Clik here to view.
Flash of azure and translucence across dark flow of the Teifi, then stillness. I follow the darting trajectory. Clipped to a winter-blanched last-year's stalk of water-sedge is a keeled skimmer – common dragonfly of our running water. Intertwining starred complexity of water-crowfoot makes an illuminated manuscript of the stream. Sun dapples a bank from which an adder slips away.
Two green hairstreak butterflies, gracefully viridescent, dance past on a soft wind that sifts through reeds, sets waving the tall golden flower stems of bog asphodel, and silky white plumes of cottongrass that has colonised the old peat-diggings. From pillows of sphagnum that over millennia have built up this extraordinary place, carmine glitter of round-leaved sundew attracts the eye, slowly digesting its captured insect-life.
At pool-margins, opening flowers of yellow water lilies give off their subtle wine-scent. Marsh marigolds – index-plant to glacial retreat – adorn black flats of stinking mud. A kingfisher, an airborne jewel, whirrs past, stickleback in its beak, and disappears into a thicket of riparian willow. Here and there on the boardwalk, otter spraints tell of another blessing presence along the trout-and-minnow-rich river. But today it's one that I do not see.
This great bog of Tregaron is a natural treasure chest, spacious and lapidary. So lovely in its extravagant detail, the wider view is uncannily beautiful too. To walk here is to attune to landscape's evolving nature. The ghost of a great glacial lake that once spread through the melodic hill basin still thrills my senses, as does the slow process of the ages that has shaped this present form – these low, rising domes of peat still infinitesimally proving with life-yeast of the long centuries.
For me, nowhere better expresses landscape's dynamic of change. Two red kite – miraculous survivor of the Welsh uplands – glide overhead. A drake teal skitters into osiers. Muted harsh discords of unseen geese flying low from pool to pool rouse in me a queer plucking sensation, compounding awareness of time, and of the harm we do to this temporal heaven.
