Gower Peninsula

Rhossili and the End of Things

You approach Rhossili down a single-track road through farmland and the peninsula starts to feel smaller than it should. Then you park, walk five minutes to the cliff edge, and the bay opens below you: three miles of uninterrupted sand curving in a perfect arc, the Atlantic coming in from the left in long organised lines of swell, Worm’s Head at the far end like a sleeping dragon with its back half submerged. I stood at the top of the cliff for several minutes before starting down.

The beach is tidal and wide, which means the sand here has the particular firmness of a surface that’s spent half its time under the sea. At low tide you can walk the whole length and see the ribs of a ship that wrecked here in the eighteenth century — the Helvetia — still protruding from the sand in the middle section of the beach. It’s been there so long it looks geological.

Worm’s Head is accessible for about two and a half hours either side of low tide, across a causeway of slippery rock pools. The head itself is a series of rock stacks connected by natural arches — you scramble across the Inner Head, the Middle Head, the Outer Head, the last of which you reach through a blowhole passage that the sea has drilled through the limestone. I did this on a calm day and was still impressed. On a rough day, the outer head would be inaccessible and probably attempting it would be stupid.

Dylan Thomas spent time in Rhossili as a young man and claimed to have slept on the Outer Head overnight. Whether or not this is true, the choice of location seems right for the mood of his early poems.

Three Cliffs and the Middle Peninsula

Three Cliffs Bay, on the south coast of Gower, has no road access, which is why it appears on most lists of the most beautiful beaches in Wales. You walk down from Pennard village through the ruins of a Norman castle perched above the cliffs, cross a tidal stream, and arrive at a beach framed by three limestone pinnacles and a natural arch. The walk is twenty minutes and the payoff is out of proportion.

I came here in September when the school holidays had ended and the beach held maybe twenty people. The light was the specific amber of early autumn, the kind that makes even ordinary things look deliberate. I ate a sandwich on a rock and watched a family teaching a toddler what waves do, and felt the particular pleasure of seeing a place through someone else’s first experience of it.

Gower Food and the Cockle Women

Penclawdd, on the north coast of the peninsula, is where Gower cockles come from — or came from, historically, harvested by women who worked the Loughor estuary at low tide and sold from baskets carried on their heads to the markets of Swansea. The cockle industry is smaller now but still active, and cockle stalls appear at Swansea Market (a twenty-minute drive east) where you can eat them the traditional way: cold, with vinegar and brown bread.

The Gower Salt Marsh lamb is the other thing. The animals graze the salt marshes of the north coast, which gives the meat a particular mineral character — mild salt, a faint seagrass quality — and several Swansea restaurants make a point of featuring it. I had it roasted, in a pub that has been in the same building since the eighteenth century, and it tasted like the landscape it came from.

The Cliffs in Bloom

The south coast cliffs in May are covered in gorse and heather and thrift — pink sea campion at the edge, yellow gorse further back, the smell of coconut from the gorse flowers when it’s warm enough. The cliff path from Port Eynon to Rhossili is about seven miles and passes Paviland Cave, where the Red Lady of Paviland was found: actually a young man, ceremonially buried with red ochre some thirty-three thousand years ago, the oldest known ritual burial in Western Europe.

When to go: May for the cliff flowers and empty beaches. Late August and September offer warm enough water for swimming and significantly fewer visitors than July. Avoid Easter weekend and school holiday Saturdays — the single road to Rhossili backs up for miles and the car park fills by nine in the morning.