Uppingham by the Sea | Page 9

Idris on one side and Plinlimmon on the other.
The River Dovey, which cleaves the circle of mountains, flows in a
broad estuary along the base of the northward hills, under which, at the
mouths of the estuary, lies the little port of Aberdovey. At the other end
of the arc formed by the coastline, close under the slopes of the
promontory which closes the plain at its north-west corner, stands the
village of Borth, three-quarters of a mile of straggling dwellings, which
vary in scale and character from the primitive mud-cabin of the squatter
to the stately hotel which formed the headquarters of the school. The
little town is irregular even to quaintness, without being picturesque. Its
houses are not grouped according to size and character, but dropped as
it were anyhow, in chance collocations, tall and low, thatched and
slated together. Two or three gigantesque meeting-houses, featureless
and sombre, domineer over the roofs around them. One or two others of
a less puritan design, and not out of character with the church on a
knoll a furlong off, compensate their severer rivals. The shape of the
village is determined by the narrow ridge of terra firma, the mere
heaping of the tides, between the quaking marsh and the encroaching
sea. The nidus of the present settlement is the tiny hamlet of Old Borth,
perched on a spur of the promontory, and well out of reach of flood
tides. We are not sure that the mother may not outlive her colony,

unless substantial measures are taken to guard against another 30th of
January. Near Old Borth, through a gap in the hills, comes the River
Lery, a trout-stream known to our anglers, thanks again to Sir Pryse
who owns it. It races bubbling round the furze-clad knoll, whose Welsh
name is translated Otter's Island, on which stands the church, and then
is silenced in a blank straight-cut channel, which conveys it through the
marsh into the estuary at Ynyslas. Up the gorge of the Lery runs the
railway, which carried us so often past the massive church and steep
pine-grown graveyard of Langfihangel-geneur-glyn, and across the
broad meadows of Bow Street, to the civilisation of Aberystwith. For
Aberystwith was our Capua, and used to draw large parties on many a
blank afternoon for marketing or amusement.
Then there was the beach, four miles of it, from the rocks of Borth
Head, where the waves could be watched breaking on the
seaweed-covered reef, and sending up columns of white spray against
the black face of the cliffs, away to the yellow sand dunes near the
Dovey's mouth, and the reaches of wet sands where we noted on
summer days "the landscape winking through the heat," almost with the
effect of a mirage. These sands, firm and sound under foot, were a
famous walking-ground at all times; but they changed their character
very much with the seasons; at one time retreating and laying bare a
beach of shingle under the pebble ridge; at another, swinging back to
cover them up again. In the former state of the shore a suggestive
phenomenon might be observed. At low-water mark there appeared
certain dark shapeless lumps, which might be taken for rocks at a
distance, but were in fact the roots and stumps of a submerged
pine-forest. Remains of the same forest are found in the marsh. Wood
can be cut from the buried trunks, looking as fresh in fibre as if the tree
still grew. Here is the verification of the legend (or is it, perhaps, the
suggestion of it?) which records the fate of the Lost Lowland Hundred.
Once on a time (the Cymric bards answer for it), a flourishing tract of
country stretched at the foot of the hills which are now washed by the
tides of Cardigan Bay. The fishermen of Borth, as they creep past the
headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in the clear
waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must once
have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not indistinctly

descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a little combe.
It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule the fancy of
masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain it away as a
pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. 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