AWAKENING LEGENDS ON THE CELTIC COAST

Snaking down the western coast of Wales from the windblown Llyn Peninsula in the north to the city of St Davids in the south, follow a path of Arthurian myth and Bronze Age mystery along the Coastal Way, a 180-mile road trip taking in ancient standing stones, deep slate caverns and petrified prehistoric trees

- JULIA BUCKLEY

THEY STAND LIKE SEALS ON THE BEACH AT YNYSLAS, AS I PULL OVER, READY TO WITNESS A 5,000-YEAR-OLD STANDOFF.

I see their dark shapes squaring off against the sea, heads curling attentively into the sky, long bodies spilling behind them. There are hundreds lined up along the sand like soldiers. Tensed for action, waiting patiently for the enemy to arrive.

And so, it does. I hear it coming before I see it. It’s the wind that gives it away — pulling on the waves as they bend back and forth, playing with the dark specks like a cat with a mouse. To start with, it’s far off, the noise a gentle swooshing. But as I watch, it gets hungrier, the waves surge a little faster, pound a little heavier on the dark shapes, slurp a little louder as they circle round them. The tide is on its way, and once it comes, these seals, these soldiers, these amorphous dark shapes will be no more.

Five thousand years ago, this wasn’t a beach. In the Bronze Age, the village of Ynyslas was a forest, thick with oak, birch and pine trees. But then something happened. Maybe it was rising sea levels; maybe, legend says, it was the day a local priestess allowed a fairy well to overflow. Either way, the forest was swallowed by the sea. It reappeared in 2014, when winter storms stripped the sands from Cardigan Bay, unearthing phantom trunks that had been slumbering for thousands of years.