Country diary

North Pembroke

By west-leading footpaths I amble out of Trefdraeth to odd and ancient little Pont Ceunant and up on to Carn Ingli common. From Bedd Morris - a fine bronze age standing stone across which a rash of legends as thin and tenuous as its lichens have spread - a long moorland mile curves past Carn Clust-y-Ci (the Dog's-Ear Cairn) and on expansively to the bronze age burial mound of Carn Briw, above which is the rocky summit of Carn Ingli: a jewel of a miniature mountain, extraordinarily commanding in its presence, marvellously spacious in its atmosphere.

Angels kept the early Christian saint Brynach company here, and various new age philosophers and guides insist they hover around still; lay down your head in the heather, enter your dreaming and they will come to you, say our modern sages and gurus for the spiritually needy. Perhaps they do still manifest; as a good thought or an intended sudden kindness, or the plumed featherings of high cirrus clouds - "things / Extreme, and scatt'ring bright" - that promise light and warmth after weeks of the dull, cold drench.

To rest within the hillfort ramparts or to bask on warm slabs of glaciated Preseli bluestone under an autumn sun is in itself a version of heaven, particularly when a flock of curlews from the estuary wheel round and careen in across the moor on bubbling currents of song. My companion on this crystalline day was Jane MacNamee, who has edited a collection of women's writings on nature from Wales. I dream-dozed contentedly on the ice-scoured summit slabs, listening to the angelic effusions as she rhapsodised and identified around the extraordinary view. Ynys Enlli (the Island of the Tide-race) was visible off the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula miles to the north, the Wicklow Mountains away west of it, and all the redolent peaks of Wales were like glittering beads strung on the horizon in a great lunula around a north-easterly quadrant.