And
perhaps we might mention in this connection, that one of our party, on
the first view, was half persuaded he had seen a sea-serpent. Well, this
prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during
the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in
a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge
of Borth and the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys
a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a
meaning threat of claiming his own again. But that is a story which must
be told in its own place.
Such then were the geographical details of the spot in which we had
settled, and they made up a landscape, which, if it can be more than
rivalled in other parts of the Principality, has yet a characteristic and
impressive beauty. The following extract may serve, for lack of a better
rendering, to describe how the scene looked to the eyes of someone who
watched it on a June afternoon from the grassy slopes of Borth Head:
My eyes run on with the tide which drifts inland up the estuary, and,
farther than vision can really follow, track the march of its glancing
ripples, as they swim on past shoal and sand-dune and morass up to the
dewy gates of the Spring, in among green-clad river meadows and crisp
close-skirted woodlands which the salt breath of sea-winds restrains
from a richer luxuriance, on past springing knolls plumed with dark
firs, and dimpling valleys mellow with the contrasted gold of the
oak's young leafage.
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