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Photos: Big G


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This month Big G reveals one of Anglesey’s coastal secrets. NWB’s editor met him the other night in the hot dog van queue at the Padarn Lake Hotel fireworks display in Llanberis (great stuff, by the way, especially when one of the biggest fireworks fell over and sprayed sideways across the football pitch!) – anyway, Big G seemed genuinely excited about his latest find. A really special discovery it seems – I guess if you keep looking they turn up eventually…

Slopers....on a most welcome intrusion; that is what greets visitors brave enough to stray from the round-Anglesey-path and descend narrow footways to the pebble wastes of Abraham's Bosom below. (GR 215 810)

It is the one detached boulder that captures the eye, like a small piece of Porth Ysgo, shifted in some ancient event.

A stumble northwards brings one to the thin end of a dark wedge of the same stuff, the shape and size of a modestly steepled church.

It is not obvious that we have cause for thanks and praise until the last facet is inspected. It will then dawn on the visitor that they are in a very special place despite a degree of tidal inconvenience rarely experienced by boulderers.

We are not talking extensive new kingdoms here - just a little piece of traversing heaven, with a hot landing for the fallen.

Feast on the grain.

Whilst we might be slow to notice such an edifice from the land, surrounded as it is by craggy undulations, (climbs very poor hereabouts) it is quite a feature from the sea. Indeed it would be easy to envisage its presence in a storm; as 'back in the day' some vessel falters to a merciless grounding, falling foul of the swells that magnify in the sombre narrowing of the bay. The crew screaming at the dark forces that draw the creaking hulk to its unholy fate, the ships mate gawping over the bow, as in the half light, a god-forsaken steeple thrusts skywards from the restless froth. And as the fracturing hull utters its death rattle in that final second before their lives are dashed, the deck-boy, eyes afire and throat screamed-raw, mouths the word....."Slopers!"

Even keel, even keel,

Big G

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