(Nimue)
This tree is some 4.500 years old. It was preserved by a peat bog, then covered over with sand. Back in 2014, storms stripped the sand away, revealing it again. As a consequence, the beach at Borth has the remnants of an ancient forest, and peat bog, where seaweed grows on the tree stumps. It's something I've wanted to see for years, and I was finally able to encounter at the weekend.
This isn't a petrified forest in the usual sense of the term- those are far older. I don't know what the proper technical term is for something peatified in this way. To walk amongst these trees is to be in two different landscapes and times. The present moment of the beach and the frozen historical time of the trees overlap in a way that it is very strange to encounter. It was a remarkable experience.
Every landscape is full of history. Often it isn't self announcing in this way. Seeing it brought to mind just how much history is under our feet, all the time. The unseen presence of the past informs the present, and that influence acts on us even when we aren't conscious of it. This is one of the things I think about when the idea of 'spirits seen and unseen' goes past in a Druidic context. History exists in the soil. What is long gone is also still with is. The echoes of things that happened hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago are still here. Time is intrinsic to landscapes.
What makes this even more fascinating is the local folklore about a lost city - a kind of Welsh Atlantis beneath the waves. When the forest was revealed, it had a walkway in it - I think we saw part of it. People lived in this lost forest. Whether the story is a folk memory of that, or the result of the trees being exposed before, or of something else entirely, isn't clear.
(Photograph by Keith Errington)
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