We approached on one of those single-track roads that are so narrow and obscure you can’t quite believe they are public. The next leg of our journey was squelching along a boggy footpath, flanked on one side by steep woodland with lofty oaks and thickets of holly, and on the other flat estuarine pastures squared off with stone walls. Mossy old oaks and twisted thorns and crabs – a few hard, green apples still clinging to the leafless branches – lined the path, suggesting it had been here for a long time. We had been tipped off about this place and it felt like a secret.

Our view opened out onto the side of the estuary: coffee coloured water swirling slowly towards the sea; on the opposite bank chrome yellow birches flared like burning torches amongst the quiet russet of the oaks. Under our feet the tightly grazed riverbank gave way to a long straight quay built from rough-hewn blocks of stone. It was this we had come to see. Nowadays the river is shallow and ribbed with banks of silt but 150 years ago the Dwyryd was navigable and a flotilla of small boats tied up here. They came to carry the slate from the great quarries above Blaenau Ffestiniog and Croesor – North Wales was roofing most of the world back then. Before the railway came slate was brought down to the coast by horse and cart and loaded on to the little boats, which sailed out to ocean-going ships off Porthmadog, for onward transport to the developing and cities of Europe and North America. All that is long gone now but this forgotten quay is a reminder of those busy and more prosperous times.

The quay is cut every ten yards or so with flights of steps down to the water at each loading point: many boats must have moored here at busy times. Along the top of the quay are rough stone posts three or four feet high – capstans for tying up the boats. On one of the steps my grandson, Nils, finds otter prints in the skim of sand left by the tide, and better still, near the top of the steps, there are several spraints (droppings). Some naturalists say these have a distinctive smell like jasmine tea, which is helpful for identification, and today, for the first time, I get it – the musty/peppery scent does smell like some kind of exotic tea. Pottering along the quayside I am struck by the quiet details of nature: lichen encrusting the stones in yellow and grey patches; three tiny fungi quivering in the breeze, their tops turned up like bottle caps; ivy flowers covering a fallen hawthorn attract a smudge of small flies to their late nectar. There is a deep sense of harmony between this old industrial site and its natural surroundings. In its day I suppose it would have seemed modern, even brutal, but now, disused and forgotten, it seems to enhance this lovely estuary.

All of this is beautifully caught in an exhibition of art works by Marged Pendrell at Plas Brondanw, which is not far from here. The exhibition is called ‘Flotilla’; its centrepiece a host of little boats, which specifically reference the trade in sea-going slate. The works are made from found objects and materials including slate, copper, lead, wood, sand and peat – the very ‘stuff’ of North Wales. Marged has a refined sense of the interplay between natural and man-made elements, combined with a magpie’s eye for collecting and rearranging natural objects so that they become more than the sum of their parts – metaphors for life’s processes. The whole exhibition chimed with the sense of ‘rightness’ that I had at the quayside. Even Plas Brondanw itself is an exercise in unexpected harmony, its turquoise and gold wrought-iron complementing beautifully, if counter intuitively, the backdrop of the mountains.

I accept that such things are a matter of perception and taste but perhaps it is the ‘job’ of humankind to strive to give voice, in whatever way we can, to the beauty and intricate complexity of the world we are born into. Looked at from a whole-earth, Gaia perspective we are the ‘component’ that has the reasoning, imagination and language which enables the planet to see its self in the mirror and glory in what is. As the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling put it: “uniquely in us, nature opens her eyes and sees she exists”.

For exhibition details: http://www.susanwilliamsellis.org