Aye-aye, skipper. A butterfly – the large skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus) – alights near the art installation on the headland commemorating the Royal Charter steam clipper carrying gold miners returning from Australia with their treasure that sank off the coast of Anglesey in the terrible storm of 1859. Seeking a moment’s respite from the bullying sea breeze, the skipper folds its wings at 45 degrees and the fierce July light turns it into flakes of gold.
On the sandy edge of the Irish Sea, history is written by storms and there is no permanence but the anarchy of weather and tide. And yet inland, in gentle hills beyond the campsites, the roofless medieval chapel at Din Lligwy stands before trees that conceal the remains of iron-age roundhouses and smithies, and up the hill behind them is the great stone slab of a Neolithic burial chamber.
Over 5,000 years of history pass in the time it takes a column of gulls, pothering and yipping higher until they catch a thermal draught, their laughing loosening into dreams overhead, to ride a couple of miles from the sea and back again.
The skipper butterfly pauses inches from the lip of the cliff under which sand martins burst like peashooters from their nest holes into the sky. Painted lady butterflies in sand scarves and silver jewellery have flown in from somewhere over the sea; an unkindness of ravens from their colony at Newborough Warren have arrived looking for trouble. Meanwhile out at sea, beyond the dark island with its stone rocket tower, guillemots bob and flap before diving, and oil tankers loiter on their way to the Amlwch oil terminal under lolloping clouds from Liverpool.
Across the beach, a few dogs run as fast as they can as if chasing their own lost natures; a lone egret, sharp, white, steps like a marionette through silvery pools; in the dunes, a few dark ringlets and small blue butterflies skitter, lost souls in the marram.
You, the skipper, all these golden lives, did not come into this world, says the philosopher Alan Watts, you came out of it, “like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
