Morfa Halen means “salt marsh” in Welsh. This tidal island is a delicious invention of Sky Arts’ new detective drama, Under Salt Marsh, although it has very real antecedents in north Wales. Shell Island on the Mochras peninsula, near Harlech, inspired writer and director Claire Oakley.
Morfa Halen is cut off from the mainland nightly, when the tide swamps the causeway. This isolation is emphasised through an overhead shot of a car cutting a foamy, white swathe through the blues and browns of saltwater and sunken grasses. Immediately, Morfa Halen is established as the kind of closed community on which the detective genre thrives: think monasteries, country houses and Oxbridge colleges.
Under Salt Marsh uses familiar detective tropes to tell a story about environmental precarity and community displacement – but its treatment of Welsh language and identity is more conflicted than its ecological politics.
