On the Pembrokeshire Coast.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 184, 25 December 1886, Page 8

On the Pembrokeshire Coast.

A glance at the map will show that the extremo west of Pembrokeshire is broken into two great headlands or peninsulas. Of these the southernmost is St. Bride's, and the northern one r>ewialaud 01 St. David's. Both headlands in their ceaseless wartare with the Atlantic have been forced to cedo some of their territory to the enemy, and the sea now surges triumphantly round Kamsay Island, and the isleta known as " The Bishop and his Clerke," which it has plundered from St. David, as further 3- uthward it has wrenched Skomar 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 hive proved too soft to re sist them. There is a very interesting passage in Gerald de Barri, writing in the twelfth century, where he says of this coast : " We then passed over Niwegai (Newgaie) sanda, at which place a very remarkable circumstance occurred. The sandy shores of South Wales being laid bare by tho extraordidary violence of a storm, the surface of the earth which had been covered for many ages then appeared, and discovered the trunks of trees cut off, standing in the ?oa itself, the strokes of the hatchet appearing as if only made yesterday ; the soil was very black, and the wood like ebony ; by a wonderful revolution the road for ?hip? became impassable, and looked not like a shore, but like a grovo, cut down perhaps at the time of the deluge or not long after, being by degrees consumed and swallowed up by the violence and encroachment" of tne fea," Nothing could have prevented a similar gradual submergence ot this whole coast, had not an invincible ally in the shape of the primeval ignoous rocks come to the roscue, and euved the remnant from annihila tion. At Rock Castle and all around we may see them, these splendid cliffs and crags, towering up majestically in proud defiance of *ea and storm and wind, while eastward over the plain they rc.r their lichened pinnacles, and spread abroad their serrated ridges, gaunt, and grim against the sky, kindling the imagination and inspiring the fancy with something of a roligioua awe as though they were old tute•ary gods keeping silent, but sleepless watch over a threatened land. Indeed, the whele stretch of country about St. David's is wild and desolate in the extreme What witn Dane and Saxon and Norman, it has had a stormy history. Times without number it uas been swept by the hurricane : once at least we know it to have been rocked by an earthquake js ature would ?esm 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 burn* don unextinguished for more than a thousand years, and amid a loneliness where it would occasion us no surprise, to find not even the ruins of a church, tho astonished eye is greeted with the spectacle of one of the moat imposing cathedrals in the world.— " Macmillan'a Magazine."