Westerly gales bring turmoil, rain and herring gulls. You hear them calling as the wind drops. Their white feathers catch the sun against a background of slate-gray sky as the next turbulence prepares for action. When the storms subsided, we went to pay them a visit at Strumble Head, where the lighthouse automatically flashes its message day and night.

The roads are narrow weaving their way from one farm to another through a Celtic landscape. You could be in parts of north-west Scotland, western Ireland or western Cornwall. You'd find the same rocky outcrops, lichen-covered stone walls and a coastline of cliffs and rocks.

In Madagascar or Australia, we accept that megalithic people made the countryside their own through the need to remember the dead as well as the living. It happened in north Pembrokeshire. Standing with your back to the lighthouse, you look over farmland to a range of low hillocks created by tumbled rocks. In amongst them are "earth fast" monolithic monuments. Probably tombs, one end of the capstone rested on the edge of a pit cut out of the earth, the other end held up by stones. It's all guesswork, but such tombs must have merged into the landscape to be uncovered for their next use by people who knew the area through their own journeyings and retained a clear map of their personal territory.

Visitors become enthusiastic about the magic of this land. Put another way, this feeling could be attributed to a landscape unchanged for centuries which still retains some of the power developed by its earliest inhabitants. Random speculation on a raw March day.

The two choughs were real enough - first their idiosyncratic call, then their presence poking for grubs above the gray sea. Proper science appeared on St David's day. Everything is coming early, even April 1, it seemed, when we woke to discover new EU rules have standardised the measurements of leeks to ensure quality. Perhaps my thoughts on the magic of this wonderful country are not so daft after all.