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stared at me as I passed, chewing, their white faces bland but oddly
engaging. I resisted the urge, which always arises when I am watched
by these creatures, to address them. I knew the question I wanted to
ask: what are you doing here?
The lake was surrounded by a fine grey gravel that chinked like
broken glass as I walked on it. Where the stones had been pressed into
the peat by visitors' feet, powdery sage-coloured lichens crept over them.
Wavelets rustled against the shore. There was not a tree or a shrub to be
seen, except for the heather, which was nowhere higher than my knee.
The reserve looked as brown and blurred as an old sepia photograph. It
was a dismal place, almost as grim and almost as empty as the pastures
around Llyn Craig-y-pistyll that I had visited the previous autumn.
There was a single clump of fern amid the heather. I saw one small
heath butterfly - ginger and grey, furry, with a little black eyespot on
the tip of its wing - pausing briefly on a tormentil flower. It was the
only insect I would see on the reserve that day. The bilberry plants had
been grazed almost to the roots. They carried no flowers or fruit:
everything edible had been bitten off. Sheep's wool was dragged
through the heather. But for two distant skylarks, an occasional pipit
swooping away over the heath and the inevitable Canada geese on the
lake, there was neither sound nor sight of any bird. The plants and
animals of this jewel in the crown of the Cambrian Mountains were
almost identical to the miserable remnants - the monotonous, impov-
erished moonscape left behind after the Atlantic rainforests had been
destroyed - clinging to the rest of the wet Desert.
A small party of white-faced ewes lay on the gravel beside the lake
in the sunshine, guarding the kissing-gate halfway along the shore. As
I approached they hauled themselves to their feet and shoved their way
through the heather to join a larger flock a few yards off. Some of them
started rubbing themselves against the fence, rubbing off their scrappy,
unshorn fleeces. Little tufts of wool clung to the knots in the wire.
The notice on the gate told me that 'Welsh white cattle are grazing
this reserve'. I could not see them, but the land was overgrazed and
poached: trampled, pitted and compacted. Here there was no heather,
just grass eaten almost to the rootstocks, a few pillars of creeping
thistle, their purple tips beginning to flower, and short thickets of
soft-centred rush. It looked the same as any overgrazed pasture, yet
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