Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 64

seen a British landscape as devoid of life as the plateau some local
people call the Cambrian Desert. In most places the nibbled sward
over which I walked contained just two species of flowering plant, the
two that sheep prefer not to eat: purple moorgrass and a small plant
with jagged leaves and yellow flowers called tormentil.
I followed the Bwlch-y-maen - rocky hollow - trail over bare hills
and down bare valleys until it brought me to a point overlooking a
wide basin, cradling a small reservoir called Llyn Craig-y-pistyll. I sat
on a rock and felt myself slumping into depression. The grass of the
basin was already dressed in its winter colours. There were no tints
but grey, brown and black: grey water, cardboard-coloured grass, a
black crown of Sitka spruce on the far hills. The occasional black scar
of a farm track relieved rather than spoilt the view. My map told me
that if I walked for the rest of that day and all the next, nothing would
change: the plateau remained treeless but for an occasional cluster of
sallow or birch, and the grim palisades of planted spruce.
As I glared at the view, the weather front passed in a litter of cloud-
lets and the sun broke through. Far from enlivening the scene, it
brought the bleakness into sharper focus. Now I could see the grey
wall of the spruce trunks and the green battlements that surmounted
them. The emptiness appeared to expand in the sunlight. I trudged
down to the lake. Five Canada geese sat on the far bank, the first birds
I had seen since leaving the woods, two hours earlier. They waddled
into the water when they saw me, and floated away, grunting softly.
Sheep scoured the far bank.
The water was surprisingly low for autumn, exposing the shaley
rubble of the banks and the black mud of the reservoir floor, rutted
with sheep tracks. I sat by the water and ate my lunch. From where I
sat, the tops of the spruce trees looked like an approaching army edg-
ing over the hill, pikes raised. I realized that, though this was a Sunday,
I had not seen a soul. I leant against the exposed bank of the reservoir,
mentally dressing the land, picturing what might once have lived there,
what could live there again. Then I rose, stumbled up the hill and ran
back along the track. When I returned to the glowing hearth of the
ruined wood, with its occasional bird calls, I almost wept with relief.
The Cambrian Mountains cover some 460 square miles, from
Machynlleth in the north to Llandovery in the south, Tregaron in the