It was nice to head out of the county the other day to take some property pictures for clients in Newport and Llandysul. On the way back I struck gold as I found myself on top of the Preseli Hills as a great sunset was developing. It was a lot colder than it looked from inside the car with a Northerly wind whipping over the tops of the hills but it was a fine sunset to enjoy before my fingers became too cold to feel.
There's the remains of an ancient settlement up here so I guess there's a long tradition of watching the sunset from this vantage point. The view would have been very different when the settlement was occupied. Most of the hills and valleys would have been thickly forested but the land has long been shorn of its trees and is now primarily used as grazing for sheep and cows. There's an element of the concept of shifting baselines at play when enjoying this view. Daniel Pauly developed this concept in reference to fisheries where scientists would set a baseline for the expected prevalence of a species based on numbers encountered at the start of their careers rather than before human intervention. This explains why we readily accept the decline in species because we are usually only comparing what we see to what we have seen in our living memory. Early records show that mariners would be able to scoop fish from the sea with a saucepan as populations were so healthy yet over the generations the baseline has shifted and now we accept that the oceans are far less populated. Looking over this view we accept that the nearest group of trees is in the far distance yet if I was 1000 years old I'd have been shocked at the loss of trees and wildlife. Wouldn't it be something to see trees return to this view and get the chance to ride a wolf into battle against a massive bear thats trying to eat all the chanterelle mushrooms growing in the woods!?
