Letter from Biwmares

Julie Brominicks

I was so angry with Edward I when walking the coast path years ago that I marched straight past Biwmares.

Past these shops lit like jewels in the dark. Past Central Bakery and its hot-bread smells, and Ena’s News where someone waves now from the door. Past the pier, where Scooby is emptying bins. Edward would have kicked them all out to make way for the castle he didn’t even complete.

I ask Scooby if anyone is bothered by it. ‘The castle at Penrhyn’s better,’ he shrugs, piling up bin bags. ‘Summer you get loads of seagulls attacking you. That boat leaves Bangor at six every morning,’ he adds, nodding at the craft cutting down Y Fenai. ‘Oh actually, it’s a different one.’

It’s Isabella Jack, a charter fishing boat skippered by Dave Price, who moors at the end of the pier where his crew are catching shrimp on the pontoon. Dave says there’s lots of bass about. First they’ll fish round Puffin Island (Ynys Seiriol) for live bait – small mackerel, whiting maybe. Then see where the birds are working. Get in and cast among the birds.

The species round here are so diverse. Dogfish, whiting, bull huss, plaice, dabs, tope, smooth hounds, conger, blennies, dragonets. He’ll go after sharks soon. Porbeagles and threshers.

It’s all catch and release, and there’s a limit on bass. You’ve got to look after the fishery. But mackerel are unicorn fish this year. None about. His client arrives and Isabella Jack chugs away.

Now Wyn is on the pier, lowering a bucket. First job is to get water to put the live bait in. Then he unwraps his ragworm. It’s pouting he’s after. He wants ten. He tosses back a small rockling and a couple of ballan wrasse, one with a swimming crab attached. ‘There’s a bass lurking down there,’ he says. ‘The little fish have scattered.’

His father was from Doncaster, his mother from Abergele. What does he think of the castle? He has a colleague from over the border who likes history. ‘You see all sorts of fish here,’ he adds. ‘When the mackerel are running you get dolphins. Gilthead bream recently, probably due to very hot weather.

The bass swim in fast-moving waters, coming down with the tide.’ The sun rises red and wet over the Great Orme and the night disintegrates. Someone drags a dinghy down the beach and it sounds like Scooby emptying bins.

We’re on holiday. Me, my husband, brother, and Mum, who likes a sea view.

Craft shops

Turns out Biwmares is lovely, of course. Craft shops and Beau Book Nook. Central Bakery where there’s always a queue. ‘Wedi bod yn y teulu ers blynyddoedd,’ says Seren: It’s been in the family for years. Ena’s News, where Welsh speakers chat with Tony who had a farm, and Pat in English at the counter. I ask what they think of Edward I. ‘I think history, good or bad, is always a reminder,’ says Pat wisely, whose husband and son are out on the mussel dredger.

We see the dredger west of Gallows Point. Y Fenai (Menai Strait) is swept by powerful currents, so silt doesn’t settle, benefitting sponges, mussels and filter-feeding fish.

It’s the equinox, so all week the tides are very high and often the wind very strong. A group of young people trying to push out with their sails up capsize before anyone’s aboard. The lifeboat goes out to a sick crew member and a throng gathers while swell splashes over the pier and slaps at the sea wall, spitting diamonds. Turnstones flicker by. Rain sweeps over the Eryri mountains and every day at high tide, a common guillemot in winter plumage works its way along the sea wall, propelling itself into dives with flipper-like wings.

The tides are so high the birds have to roost inland. Oystercatchers west of Gallows Point. Egrets line up with the sheep and a couple of herons in a flooded field near Penmon, where a squadron of gulls hunker down with sixty-something curlews brown as thistles.

We visit the jail. It is horribly compelling, especially the gibbet — tyranny wasn’t confined to Edward. Before it was built, they hanged people at Gallows Point which has moorings and sheds and a Spar, and two bats chasing moths that whizz past my ear one morning, when I’m sitting on the gabions.

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I want to speak to Malcolm in Anglesey Bait Centre, but it is always extremely busy. Dave Price is in there, buying lures. ‘Have you got any candy kings?’ he says. Another customer is discussing big game lines, big poppers and spooks, and another wants eight packs of squid.

We take a cruise around Ynys Seiriol (Puffin Island) to look at the shags and seals and a pair of peregrines. We watch red squirrels in the woods, and examine the slipway down which Catalina flying boats were launched in the war.

Manchester accents

I hear a lot of Manchester accents. ‘We’re all on the run,’ someone tells me. ‘Methu dweud pa dîm dwi’n cefnogi – I can’t tell you what team I support,’ says Tony in Ena’s News, ‘because of all these Mancunians, but it’s Liverpool. And this is Arwel Hughes. He’s an Evertonian but he grows all red flowers.’ ‘Methu prynu blue begonias!’ says Arwel, then recites for me an englyn by Dewi Wyn about Menai Bridge.

Uchelgaer uwch y weilgi – gyr y byd
Ei gerbydau drosti;
Chwithau, holl longau y lli,
Ewch o dan ei chadwyni

Every morning skeins of greylags fly in from over Y Fenai, to feed on the fields. One time when I’m cresting the rise by the castle, they are so close over my head, I hear the wind twanging their feathers like rubber bands.

That’s where later, a dog presents me with a slobbery ball. ‘This is Ober,’ says Matt, who works on the fish farm at Penmon. ‘We farm ballan wrasse. Not for eating, they’re cleaner fish. They’re hatched in Scotland and get transported here when they’re tiny, like swimming eyelashes. They grow to a certain size, then we send them out to the salmon farms so they don’t have to use pharmaceuticals. They eat crustaceans in the wild so they have teeth. But generally they’re quite chill.’

On Gallows Point, Tommy is chilled too, on his lunch break in Anglesey Fabrication Limited, listening to Canadian country music while gazing out at the water. ‘They build the boats’ — he nods to another shed — ‘and we do the metalwork. This job just came in, the metal frame on the back. Another boat bashed into it. Everyone’s chilled on the boatyard.’

But bass fishers are restless, or constantly moving at least. At low tide they’re out digging for bait. The pontoon goes up and down in the swell and the guys with rods keep their feet, playing lines like puppeteers.

A man short on teeth hurries over the hill to try his luck further west. And here are two men with a dinghy on the slipway, sorting out rods.

Ozziy, a barber, and Ali, a taxi driver who left Liverpool at four a.m. Ali had a big lake in front of his house where he lived in Kurdistan. ‘Sweet water,’ he says, ‘so when we came here fishing was the first thing I wanted to do. We have been fishing all over the UK but this is the best place.’ He rolls a cigarette.

When I finally catch up with Malcolm and Nicky in Anglesey Bait Centre, Malcolm’s hands are red. They were tanking up rag till four a.m. and will be working till midnight.

When he opened forty years ago, he worked seven days a week and slept behind the counter, but now he has three days off a year. ‘The old way of competing is unsound,’ he explains. ‘Now it’s catch and release, and we have species-oriented challenges, not competitions.’

Regulations

He says the regulations on bass have had a positive effect on numbers. ‘We were all upset at first because the limit only applied to recreational fishermen, but now the commercials are regulated too, everyone’s happy. We might be seeing the same for mackerel soon. It’s almost like a religion. Business or fishing, it’s got to be sustainable or it doesn’t work.’

I missed all this when I stomped past Biwmares in a huff. Time to make my peace with the castle, where I tell the woman on reception I was mad with Edward I. ‘That’s a very long time to bear a grudge!’ she laughs.

Turns out I like the castle, or how it is now anyway. With the rain sweeping in soft veils, the broken walls feel like cliffs. And I like how it’s been colonised by valerian, and sedums, and pigeons.

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