On the Pembrokeshire Coast.

Auckland Star, Volume XVII, Issue 298, 18 December 1886, Page 5

On the Pembrokeshire Coast.

A glance at tbe map will'show that the extreme west of Pembrokeshire is broken into two great headlands or peninsulas. Of these the southernmost is St. Bride's, and the northern one T>ewisland or St. David's. Both headlands in their ceaseless warfare with the Atlantic have been forced to cede some of their territory to the enemy, and the sua now surges triumphantly round Bamsay Island, and the islets known as " The Bishop and his Clerks," which it has plundered from St. David, as further southward it has wrenched Skemar Island and Stockholm Island from the gentle St. Brigida. Between the two promontories, stretches the magnificent bay, which the waves have hollowed out of rocks whose carboniferous strata have proved too soft to resist them. There is a very interesting pussage Gerald de Barri, writing in the twelfth century, where he says of this coaßt: "We then passed over Niwegai (Newgaie) sands, at which place a very remarkable circumstance occurred. The sandy, shores of South Wales being laid bare by the extraordidary violence of a storm, tbe surface of the earth which had been covered for many ages then appeared, and discovered the trunks of trees cut off, standing in the cea itself, the strokes of the hatchet appearing as if-oaly made yesterday; the soil was very -black, and the wood like ebony ; by a wonderful revolution the road- for ships became impassable, and looked not like a shore, but like a grove, cut down perhaps at the time of the deluge or not long after, being by degrees consumed and swallowed up by the violence and encroachments of the tea." Nothing could have prevented a similar gradual submergence of this whole coast, had not an invincible, ally in the shape of the ptimtuval igneous rocks come to the rescue, and saved the remnant from annihila tion. At Hock Ca=tle and all around we may coo them, these splendid chffs and crags, towering up majestically in proud defiance of eea and storm and wind, while eastward over the plain they rear their lichened pinnacles, and spread abroad their serrated ridges, gaunt- and grim against the s-ky, kindling the imagination und inspiring the fanoy with something of a religious urce a? though Ihoy were old tutelary gods kef-pins; silont but sleepless watch over a threatened land. Ir.deed, the whole stretch of country about St. David's is wild and desolate in the extreme. What with Dane andfaxon and Norman, it has had a- stormy history. Times without number it has bsen swept by the hurricane; once at least we know it to have been rocked by an earthquake r> ature would seem to have conspired with man to do it violence. And yet, for all thi°, here in the ■ far off wilderness the torch of Christianity has burnt d on unextinguished for more than a thousand years, and amid a loneliness where it would occasion ua no surprko to find not even the ruins of a church, the astonished eye is greeted with the spectacle of one of the most imposing cathedrals in the world.—" Macrnillan's Magazine."