A Country Diary: N Pembrokeshire

Cnwcan footpath - cutting and burning gorse. A working party of national park volunteers foregathered for the task. The sun was still burning off the early mists as we looked down over Cardigan Bay. The sea and Poppit sands looked as they do on a summer morning, when the earth bends over to allow the sun to give us a bobby dazzler day with a heat haze forming already. But it was February, and the wind was high and icy.

Briskly, we turned to cutting and sawing. A youth hostel is one of the few changes visitors have brought to this area. On the whole, from the outside, the farmhouses look as they did when they were built - local stone, hunkered down and looking out to sea. I was reminded of the Kincardine coast, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. We made a good job of it, our veins tingling with the sun, and the heat we generated for ourselves.

A smaller expedition took us into Tycanol wood. We were dismayed to discover that dry February had left hundreds of frogs' eggs high and dry in one of the gullies. The spawn was well developed. We managed to push most of it back up hill to where there was some water. The March rains may save some of it. Every year, this is likely to happen, but there's always enough left to turn into frogs and start again. This year, some predator had fancied the mass of protein, and carried pieces off to banks of moss. There were no footprints in the drying mud, but plenty of dry spawn scattered about.

Climbing higher up this oak wood, we were enchanted by a small hazel tree; 1.5m high, it had a single stem, which was almost white. Darker branches on the top had been twisted and dwarfed by the wind to provide a woven cap for the tree, which was already developing its male and female flowers. As soon as the oaks surrounding it gain leaves, this small tree will struggle for light.