Jenny Rose

We cycled out along the path to the railway bridge across the Mawddach. Across the marshy fields, to the village whose name had been rattling in my mind for a while, since the IPCC reports and the headlines, the predictions, the failures and the floods. The road has houses on one side, on the other a slope up to a promenade. We can hear the sea everywhere but can't see it; how strange I think, to be at the sea front but below the beach.

One of the houses is half-finished, a brick shell with lengths of metal reaching out. Next door, an empty chalet slumps around smashed panes and holes in the wall. A For Sale sign stands guard.

We meet a man pushing a mower along the verge who is friendly, jovial. He's not worried about the sea. “We've got 300 years yet.” he declares. “My granddaughter's four – she'll live out her life here, if she wants.” We fall silent, make our goodbyes and go in search of ice creams. It seems rude to confront someone living here with the evidence of their fate.

On the beach, a wind you can lean against pours in and it's impossible to speak. I find driftwood, build a cairn of pebbles in remembrance. A seagull hovers at just above head height, and I see how quickly the tide is coming in; the water streaks across the flat sand. Is this how it was back then, in the story, when the gate-guard was drunk and not watching, and the waves roared in on the back of a storm, and the flat fertile land was swallowed up? I remember the petrified trees to the south revealed at low tide, shrouded in seaweed, memorials out of their element and place.

I think about the long sweep of the bay, and then the country behind, rolling on to the south where my father grew up in a house shadowed by the mine and blackened with the coal that wriggled into the lungs of the miners and sent out a curse through history. My dad died long before 1.5 degrees and collapse and extinction were part of everyday language. He loved the sea, loved to explore the world waiting for us under the water. Perhaps we could all become shells, urchins, fish; perhaps these watery bodies will finally return to where we came from.

In 1916, ospreys disappeared from the UK due to habitat loss and egg collecting. In 1954, suddenly, they were back – a breeding pair returned to Scotland and slowly but surely the birds increased and spread until now there are around 300 pairs, including on the Dyfi river where I encounter them.

Ospreys are huge - the females can grow to a wingspan of six feet. I learn how the birds – Pandion haliaetus - were mis-named twice; after the ancient Greek king Pandion whose son was turned into a hawk, and from the Greek for 'sea eagle'. Ospreys are neither eagles nor hawks; they form a species all of their own, found all over the world. Osprey feed on fish they catch from the sea, diving into the water and taking off again from as deep as 1m, heaving themselves and fish out and up. They have 'reversible' toes, nostrils that close underwater and a membrane that covers their eyes like goggles.

“I'd like to be reincarnated as a bird of prey” I tell my partner. We're by the canal near home, watching swifts hurtle around narrowboats. Human-made canals, built for industry, the domestic end of wild. And yet this canal leads to the river Severn, with it's huge tidal reach, and the river goes out to the sea. I remember the ospreys and imagine what it could be like to be creatures of water, land and air all at once.

Every year, the ospreys migrate. Every day, people leave where they are. There will only be more; the ospreys seeking their perches, the climate refugees from water and fire. We all need a liveable home.

When I was five my father built me a house in an old apple tree and its roof became my perch, up amongst the branches. Apples were a backdrop to my childhood; the scent from the local varieties stacked in boxes in the porch. Each old apple name a story, a song, telling of the land that was here. When I was ten we moved from that house, and one of the new owners' first acts was to take down not just the treehouse but the apple tree itself.

There's grief for the many smaller things; the insects lost, the toddler shoes of my children, the vistas of my life that my father didn't live to see. I can sink into the skylark singing itself alive alive alive, even as my heart aches for the lark, and the nightingale, and the swift and the hazel dormouse, and the ash trees and the old apples out beside the river. Love equals joy plus grief; this is the mathematical proof of my life, and of the wild. As sure as the tides, and as sure as the Mawddach and the Severn lead out to meet the sea as it comes rising.

The Ospreys of Cantre'r Gwaelod

Sean Borodale & Alun Hughes