Wild swim at the Witches’ Cauldron
How it felt, before I forget…
I kept telling myself I was just coming to see the coastline. And I could well believe it, the ragged grey-green beauty threading away from us, twisting itself into intricate and intimate whirls and loops and quiet pools. My companion, tilting his head back to feel the sun, said simply “It makes you feel so small.” And in a rush of perspective I realised the truth of it. It was like I had been drawn up into the sky and saw our little band of adventurers as tiny black dots below, hugging the ancient, impassive coastline for dear life, between the green and the wild blue. Oh the feeling of release in that moment, the great rushing sigh of gratitude that propelled me along that coastal path, skipping over uneven ground and outcrops of rock. I smelt sea salt and lavender, warm grass and fen orchid.
The moment was perfect. This was our adventure. The sun bright in the suddenly empty sky, nothing but earth and sea and the ellipsisical dot dot dot of our little party moving steadily towards our destination. The Witches’ Cauldron, a collapsed cave, formed where the sea picked out soft crumbling shales and sandstones along a fault.
At first we didn’t know how to get in. The Cauldron was set inland from the coast, surrounded by tall cliffs. Its wide, inviting expanse of water was fed by a cave network that ran under our feet and out into the bay. Finally we noticed the stony path that led down to sea-level, a steep switchback that we had missed on our first pass. Climbing down required hands and feet and hesitant, good-natured co-operation. We didn’t know each other well, so we slipped and gripped and apologised our way down, lending arms and encouraging smiles as needed.
When everyone began stripping down to their underwear I admitted to myself that I too was going into the water. I had always known really. And as I slipped out of my jeans and summer shirt, I was forced to discard my reservations as well.
I threw myself off the narrow ledge and into the deep water of the Cauldron below. And as I fell, the wind caught and swept my cares from me, real life evaporating off my skin like I was trailing streamers. The impact of the cold water drove my breath from me. My lung capacity instantly shrunk to a thimbleful. I took ten short panicked breaths before I realised that the air was returning. I had never been so conscious of the machinery in my chest.
Now I smoothed wet hair away from my eyes and took in the Cauldron from a new angle. As I started to swim, I was surrounded by people laughing and splashing, buoyed up with the freedom of it all. We floated on our backs and laughed at the canvas of the sky stretched taut above us, jumped off outcrops of rocks and ducked and dived and flitted through the waves. And all the time the sides of the Cauldron bounced our cackles and shouts back at us in reassuring happy echoes.
We didn’t know each other well.
We will never all be together again. I know faces but not names.
And it doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. A tiny rebellion against modernity, safe in the rocky embrace of the Welsh coast. No one learned a profound truth. No one fell in love. But in that moment, in that place we found a source of joy that can be traced back unbroken to our earliest days.
Tiny dots of life against the wild blue …
