Legacy

I’m standing on St David’s head, a granite outcrop that meets the wild Atlantic on a Pembrokeshire peninsular. I stand here on my own, with the wind buffeting my hair and jacket and the sea shifting 100 feet below. I walked out here in that temporary world between dusk and night and maybe it’s the darkness falling but I sense that I am not alone.

This is an ancient landscape where ancient peoples dwelled. The rock here is 470 million years old, and the area has been populated for at least 6,000 years. This part of Wales is scattered with standing stones, burial chambers, and stone circles. Even the stone walls that divide the fields and border the cliff tops have stood so long they are no longer man-made features alone. These walls are alive with plants and flowers. The stones themselves are covered in green, white, and orange lichen as big as dinner plates. Given lichen can take 10 years to grow 1 cm these walls speak of ages past.

St David’s head, where I am stood, has a neolithic burial chamber that frames the sunset on particular days of the year. Perhaps if it were not for these stones, I would not sense the legacy of the hands that put them there. It is strange to think of all the people I would meet on this isolated wild headland if the last 6,000 years were to collapse into this moment, if all those temporary moments were to form a multiple exposure on the slide of film that is this place.

Suddenly spooked at the idea of being surrounded by eons of ghosts, I turn to go home, but safety is too far, so instead, I turn to face the spirits. I believe there are more good people than bad in this world, and that if that is true now, perhaps it has been true throughout time. I walk with the company of all those people. This is a landscape of collective legacy, of accumulation of lots of unnoteworthy events. This place gives the sense that to be alive is to leave a legacy.