Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 255

Cardigan, to ensure that all of this fish that's caught can be kept
locally and sold locally.'
A local fisherman tells me that some £6 million worth of scallops is
caught in Cardigan Bay every year. The population on and around the
bay is tiny and overwhelmingly poor. The dredging industry exists
because of lucrative markets abroad. There is no obvious mechanism
by which local people could outspend these markets, even if they
developed a sudden craving for coquille St Jacques at breakfast, lunch
and tea. In other words, of the many unlikely propositions I have heard
issuing from the mouths of ministers, this must be the most ridiculous.
One October, two years after I discovered that lime trees were grow-
ing there, I returned to the Nantgobaith gorge with a friend. Instead
of following the forestry track on the north side of the little river, on
which I had found the leaves which suggested that this might be a
fragment of primeval rainforest, we slithered down the steep south
bank of the gorge. We wanted to walk where no one had walked for
many years, and to see which trees were growing in the scarcely
accessible parts of the wood.
This fragment must owe its existence to the topography: the land is,
or was, too steep to clear and too dangerous for keeping sheep. We
slipped and slithered in the soft black loam which barely coated the
rocks to which the trees clung. Below us the river roared through nar-
row passages and over cataracts. Had we lost our footing we could
have slid down the gorge to our deaths. Clinging by our fingers to
exposed roots, the stems of saplings, slippery emergent rocks, we
slowly lowered ourselves towards the valley bottom.
When we reached the river, we began picking our way over
moss-slick boulders in the mist raised by the many rapids and falls.
Before long we came to a white chute of water between two crags.
Standing on one of them, I peered gingerly over the edge. 'Wouldn't it
be amazing,' I asked, 'if we saw a salmon leaping the falls?'
'I would love to see that.'
'I doubt they run up this river. And it's probably the wrong time
of - bloody Norah!'
As if I had summoned it, something bronze and glistening arced out