To contemplate is to find a space for observation. To muse is to stand open-mouthed. Inspiration is an inward breath. From a footbridge looking downstream, the Afon Ceiriog hurries towards its destiny at waters-meet with the Dee. On a straightish reach at Pont-y-blew, water the colour of dark ale between the deep green corridor of alder trees is a border between Wales and England, Shropshire and Wrecsam. The bridge straddles the dotted line on territorial maps but the flow beneath has freed itself from division to become a 1:1 map of its own making, its own self.
Around the river, other maps of land are being drawn by shadows from low sunlight. Time is as fluid as water here. Mounds, ridges and platforms in the grass speak of a hidden landscape. In the ancient flood meadows, tall ash trees, some touched by decline, some not, mark the edges of a lost road. Closer, things are more immediate. On the flowers of creeping thistle are little gatherings of soldier beetles, Cantharis cryptica, feeding on pollen and aphids, but really here for mating (soldiers of love not war). The cowpats in the grass are pockmarked with Aphodius dung beetle holes.
In a such a grim year for insects in particular, this is good news for nutrient cycling, pasture fertility, reducing livestock parasites and bats. Other insects are few and far between, except for the hopelessly delicate troops of Ephemeroptera mayflies over the surface of the river, having saved this as their last day for sex and death in dappled sunlight in dappled sunlight.
The Ceiriog emerges in the Berwyn hills, flighty and spirited; it rushes down the Glyn valley, crosses under the canal aqueduct and railway viaduct at Chirk, in defiance of Victorian-engineered nature, and shimmies down to the Dee to become a twist in that hawser being hauled out to sea. Ceiriog is said to mean “the favoured one”. It certainly was for our once prime minister David Lloyd George, who described it as “a little bit of heaven on Earth”.
A kestrel alights in an oak, clicking through the dial of its hawkish gaze from observation, to muse, to inspiration, drawing its ferocious maps of kinship with the favoured one.
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