Letter from Deer Park, Marloes

James Roberts

It’s early morning on my last day in Pembrokeshire. I’ve driven down to Marloes Peninsula as my search for grey seals continues. I’ve had little success so far.

There have been a few glimpses of swimming seals, but I’ve mostly been distracted by the glorious landscape in the late October light. Now I need to get serious and I’m going to a place I’ve never not seen seals before.

Deer Park is another island in waiting, the far tip of the narrow peninsula which once ended with Skomer Island, now 2 miles out to sea. The park has a narrow and deep valley on one side, a gouge. One tap from a god’s hammer and it will separate and become Deer Island.

I’ve been here many times. When I had a residency on Skomer I stayed at the campsite next door in an ancient trailer tent which used to dismantle itself in the night. I climbed aboard a tiny boat early in the mornings to cross Jack Sound, trying not to go green as the waves rocked and rolled us, and fighting the urge to shake visibly as the captain wrestled with the swell.

Swell

At the island he nosed the boat into a tyre hung outcrop which served as a docking place. On bad days the swell came in high and sideways, pushing the boat off course. Once we had to make the attempt several times while I stood on the narrow bow waiting for the signal to jump across.

Several times I got to the landing stage to be told the boat couldn’t go out and then spent a day watching the island from the edge of Deer Park as Jack Sound flew with the tide and Skomer lurked on the horizon, reeling with laughing gulls.

Deer Park, like Skomer, is an archaeologist’s dream. The whole 50 acre site was once a promontory fort. A bank runs north-south along the top of the valley and a few l-shaped enclosures suggest field systems.

History

It has more recently been discovered that a double bank curves down to St Martin’s Haven forming a trackway, a sign that the site was once a trading port for Celtic peoples. Nowadays it’s an open heath, grazed by cattle and ponies, good soil for wildflowers and a feeding site for choughs.

I get a shiver of excitement whenever I cross Deer Park and look out to sea. The sound is a place where water frays. Apart from those brief periods when the tide turns, water rushes through the gap between the islands and mainland, funnelled in from the bays either side of the peninsula.

I’ve seen yachts fighting the current in strong winds, leaning at a 45 degree angle with sails filled. They made little progress. I’ve watched shoals forced to the surface by the rushing water, flocks of gannets plunge diving, porpoises breaching and arcing.

On rare windless evenings at slack tide I’ve seen thousands of shearwaters and puffins gathering in rafts, their chatter ringing over the stones.

I have an old book somewhere on my shelves which shows a photograph of two farmers in a row boat, crossing the sound with 3 cows swimming beside. It’s how things were done here for thousands of years. How many of them must have drowned?

There are several coves here, each like a bite mark in the rock, high and sheer sided. It’s a very long way down to the little pebble beaches below. The cliffs are drilled with sea caves, decorated with huge rock arches and pillars. The coves narrow to little apexes filled with driftwood and fishing debris.

I walk to the edge of one and peer down, having to get close to the drop to see. My stomach lurches a little and I prod the ground with my boot worrying about the fragility of the rock beneath.

On second glance the cliff shelves less precipitously than I thought. I’d break something on the way down, but would probably survive. Until the tide came in. The beach is suspended in permanent shadow. It’s the ideal place for the perfectly camouflaged seals to sleep without disturbance and for a moment I don’t register their presence.

Then a wave sweeps in a few metres beyond the strand-line, making one cow seal raise her head and shuffle further up the beach. Now they all appear, as if they’ve just materialised out of the stones. I count six sleeping cows, and then spot a fat pup near to a boulder just below me. It looks around, wriggles closer to the boulder and falls asleep.

I watch them for a few moments, leaning out as far as I dare to get pictures of the pup. A wave sweeps in, rustles the pebbles like dry leaves, then ebbs away. A dark shape twists out of the turquoise depths and glides parallel to the beach. A bull seal patrolling.

I’m clicking away with my camera, though my lens is far too inadequate to get close shots. Then I give up. Sometimes a camera helps you look, and sometimes it’s a barrier to seeing. Today it’s the latter. So I sit and just watch.

Bladders with heads

Seals have such uninteresting shapes, do they not? They’re just bladders with heads. If you asked a slightly lazy child to make an animal out of clay they would likely make a seal. A quick roll on a flat surface, a pinch at both ends for something vaguely representing limbs, and a couple of pokes with a pencil nib for the eyes. Finished mum, back to the iPad.

Watching seals struggle up and down a beach you almost want to cry for the poor things. I bet it hurts as they scrape their sausage undersides over the rocks, wriggling like obese and uncoordinated maggots. You’d think they’d puncture and start to leak.

Why hasn’t some good natured naturalist showed them how to roll? It would be quicker, easier, and good fun as they rolly-pollied down to the sea, too dizzy to quite know which was the surface and which the depths when they got there. What a laugh!

A bit of that activity and those so sad, so lonesome eyes might brighten up; the so sad, so lonesome songs they sing would become sparkly sea shanties, real toe tappers. Poor things, they’re so lost.

On land. A seal in water is an altogether different entity.

There is one swimming below me now. As it slides down into the deep it becomes a twist of indigo shadow, a knot of the sea untangling. It is testing new forms. In an instant it is snake and dolphin, horse and turtle. It’s a spear fisher, a plunge diver, a rising bird, a rising flock.

It twists and spins, becomes a dark eddy, a plume in a kelp forest, a whirlwind, a whirlpool, a water whorl. It straightens, glides out. It’s a long haired woman diving for pearls. She goes down deep, disappears. No wonder the old stories tell of seals changing shape, shedding their skins.

I walk to the next cove and spot more sleeping cows, eight in total. There’s a tangle of debris near to the cliff, a bonfire stack of driftwood surrounded by pink buouys and a broken lobster pot. In among the debris is a tiny pup, much smaller than the one sleeping in the other cove.

This one seems agitated, opening and closing its mouth, though I can’t hear its squeals above the waves. It’s calling for its mother. It turns and struggles to climb over a long bleached branch and it ends up wriggling away to curl next to the lobster pot, mouth still yawning open, snapping closed.

I can’t identify the mother among the group of cows close to the tideline. None of them take any notice of the pup. Perhaps the cow is swimming, or hunting, replenishing her energy for the next feed. The pup seems (almost) as demanding as a human child. It continues to fret and fidget. Hard to imagine that in only a few weeks it will be off, independent, with the whole ocean to roam. Little shape changer.

An arrow of sunlight catches an arch in the rocks and blazes for an instant like a wild eye. The sea takes on a mackerel skin. Skomer and Middleholm seem to rise out of the water as if coming up for air. Even islands here are able to slip their skins.