Considering Wild Beauty.

A writer of travelogues or fiction might describe a landscape as having ‘a wild beauty.’ It’s a reasonable term, being mildly evocative, although rather hackneyed now. But what if the same turn of phrase were used to describe a woman, especially one you might encounter in unusual but entirely apposite circumstances? Would that make it less clichéd and therefore more acceptable?

I met one once, you see, when I was hiking along a path which followed the cliffs rising above the Irish Sea in south-west Wales. I’d been there earlier in the year, in June, when the hot sun shone, the sky was uniformly blue, the sea bluer, the cliff tops festooned with wild thrift so they resembled a cottage garden, and the slithering of adders could be heard as they escaped my approach. But this was not June; this was in the autumn of the year and the view was different. Might I say that it was wilder but not as beautiful?

The sky was as universally grey as it had been blue on the earlier occasion, the sea a nondescript colour approximating to brownish. The breeze was light and cool, the rain moderate, and there was neither a carpet of thrift nor the sound of adders in the now fading wild plants at the edges of the path.

A woman stood before me a little further along the path and remained motionless as I approached. My eyes were naturally fixed on her, since she was superfluous to the view and yet seemed oddly to belong there. The view of her became clearer as the distance lessened: a slim woman of apparently middle age dressed in what looked like a gown of some rough material. Her hair was long, wavy, thick, and appeared untended. Her face, however, was the stuff of which portrait painters might dream – perfectly formed and radiant, as though glowing without being obviously so. The term ‘wild beauty’, for all its commonplace vulgarity, would be entirely appropriate to the lady. And then she spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand. I assumed it was Welsh, but before I could apprise her of my ignorance, she said something in English:

‘You are the son of Lotte.’

I said nothing while I considered who Lotte might be. And then she said:

‘Careg Guinion.’

And then she faded and the dream ended.

It happened when I was young man and intrigued me more than a dream has a right to intrigue. I wondered why it was so clear. I wondered how I could know that the name Lotte (I heard Lottie) should be spelled that way. I was unaware of ever having heard the name. I gather the word ‘Careg’ means ‘rock’ or ‘island’ in Welsh. There are several rocky islands so named in that vicinity, but I couldn’t find one that preceded ‘Guinion’ on a map.

It still intrigues all these decades later, so if any Welsh speaker happens to read this post and can offer elucidation, I would be glad to hear it.