End point

I'm on a peninsula on the end of a peninsula on the end of a peninsula, somewhere around about the point where St Brides Bay meets St George's Channel, meets the Bristol Channel, meets the Celtic Sea, meets the Irish sea - all one big washing machine driven by the power of the Atlantic. The magical south west tip of Wales where nature still shakes a defiant fist at human depredation

In a handful of hours we have seen hosts of swallows and martins, stonechat, skylark, cormorant, raven and many other birds, clouds of red admiral, a painted lady, a hard-working dragonfly, washed up jellyfish, shellfish of diverse kinds and too many flowers to list. We are very familiar with the area but it never fails to cause a little shock - as if someone wound up the colour and contrast controls to max while we were not looking

We walked the length of the hard-to-access beach, then climbed back up the cliff to a trig point, where we could watch the sunset over the bay to the North-West, or look out over open ocean to the south

And breathe

Of course, there are too many pictures to blip, so I picked a slightly dreamy one to match my mood. The boat is anchored, waiting its turn to enter the deep-water terminal at Milford Haven, to unload its cargo of gas - its value increasing every moment it waits, I assume. Even here in dreamland, reality can't be entirely ignored