We walked along the Malltreath Cob, completed in 1812 as part of a project to reclaim the Malltreath Marsh from the tide, straightening the River Cefni as a canal all the way to Llangefni. This was where Charles Tunnicliffe RA lived in a house called Shorelands, moving there from Manchester in 1947, with its fine views of remote marshes and seabirds:-

No sun today, until the early evening when it came out unusually bright:-

We had lunch in Caernarvon, which always looks as if it might be coming up in the world, with a funfair in the town square and bunting in the streets:-

It’s not often that we can see the summit of Snowdon quite so clearly, hovering mysteriously behind the conical shape of Moel Eilio, which this morning is swathed in cloud:-

I walked out to the beach today in the hope that it would clear from the west as it often does in the late afternoon.   It only half did.   A foggy sun and a single boat on the sea:-

After a couple of days in which the mountains have been buried by cloud, I walked down to the river to reassure myself of their continuing existence:-

We went in search of Llaniestyn Church, a tiny little grey church in nearly open countryside west of Llanddona.   We were half helped in finding it by a mysterious nearby signpost wrapped in a woolly blanket:-

Inside the church, I admired the early font:-

The elderly collecting box:-

And the carved description of annual bequests:-

But I managed to miss the carved relief of St. Iestyn, which I now discover is the main point of going there.

Menai Bridge has lost all its banks, but kept its wonderful hardware shop, Evans Bros., and acquired a picturesque antique shop, Hawthorn Yard, which had the spoons we needed:-

I have been reading The Great Level, Stella Tillyard’s recently published novel mainly about Jan Brunt, a Dutchman who is employed as an engineer to undertake the draining of the Fens in the early 1650s: a book which totally inhabits the physical and mental universe of the seventeenth century and the period of the early Commonwealth – its industry, its uprightness, its sense of its own rectitude, and above all, its language, infused at every level with the language of the bible, as the new order conquers the old, more heathen peoples of the Fens, living close to the water. It is a great feat of imaginative inhabitation of someone else’s world, about attitudes to nature and ownership, ending with a poetic description of life in a plantation by the James River in the New World.