At the very tip of the Gower peninsula, a beast rears west. Its English name, Worm’s Head, derives from wyrm, a monstrous serpentine beast – a Welsh dragon of sorts. To me, the lumpy sometimes-island, connected to the mainland by a jagged causeway at low tide, looks like a turtle, with a long narrow carapace peering into the Atlantic drizzle.
There’s a Coastwatch station overlooking the causeway, where the passages of ships, tide, weather and wildlife are logged and advice is issued to those wishing to cross. Despite warnings, the hapless and unwary still get stranded from time to time. When I arrive, the tide is ripping over the rocks – I’m too late to make the trip. Instead, I climb to the nub end of the land, where I scramble between outcrops of fissured and lichen-crusted rock, over flower-rich turf smelling of thyme, salt and petrichor.
I stop when I spot a hunched form on the next outcrop. The Coastwatch volunteers are not the only sentinels here. A female kestrel is roosting with her back to me. Her head swivels; she scans me, then looks away. I pick a way past her cautiously, giving her has much space as I can, and nestle into a turf-lined hollow from which I can see her, the worm and the sea. The mizzle arrives, pinging softly off my jacket, prompting the bird to ruffle feathers as red as her Welsh name, cudyll coch, suggests, as red as the ochre topsoil here.
She settles again and we both watch the water, whose surface is crosshatched into a texture like skin by small waves reflecting off the rocks. A seal with a pale bib and huge black eyes bobs to the surface, regards us for a minute, then rolls languorously away. My eyelids feel heavy.
I wake 20 minutes later. It’s still drizzling, but somehow I’m warm and, if not exactly dry, strangely unsaturated. The bird is still there and I think perhaps she has been dozing too. The thought prompts an emotion that I can’t name, but it’s close to gratitude.
She doesn’t stir as I leave to climb back up the way I came, and I can still see her silhouetted form a long way back along the cliff path.
• Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 (Guardian Faber) is published on 26 September; pre-order now at the guardianbookshop.com and get a 20% discount
