Guest blog: critically acclaimed Welsh writer Paul Ferris visits Gower
Here's our second “guest blog post” from critically acclaimed Welsh writer Paul Ferris. Paul kindly agreed to share some of his thoughts of a day in Gower after recently publishing his latest book 'Gower in History: Myth, People, Landscape.'
In pursuit of the history and spirit of Gower, that agreeable peninsula in the Bristol Channel west of Swansea. I am spending a day there, revisiting. It is the Fall of 2008, and the book I am writing about the place has got as far as the first draft. Now I am standing back from the text, trying to see Gower as a whole, as a stranger might come to it. The peninsula is no more that fourteen miles long, from Mumbles Head in Swansea Bay to the Worms Head off Rhossili. It is a small place with a long pedigree. I approach from the north-east, via the village of Gowerton, once a place of iron works and coal mines. Ernest Jones, early disciple of Sigmund Freud, and his first biographer, was born there, son of a works manager. The rows of brown nineteenth-century houses declare what Gowerton is, one small corner of post-industrial South Wales. The coal mines and iron works are long gone.
The peninsula starts just beyond it, running out to the west. The road hugs a flat coastline edged with a great salt-marsh, part of the estuary that separates Gower from the Carmarthenshire coast. This is not the Gower of the travel guides. There are no beaches. Instead, a panorama of sea and marsh. I stop and watch a couple of 4x4s move across the horizon as if floating on sand - professional cocklers, driving back ahead of the tide. A bird-watcher, his boots caked with yellow mud, comes up from the marsh, and we talk. He tells me proudly that he saw a green sandpiper an hour ago. He probably guesses I wouldn't know one if I saw one.
A few miles further along the road, where a stretch of low cliff overlooks the marsh, a sign says 'Weobley Castle,' and after a bit of lane, there it is, small but noble, its grey walls glistening in the sun. Technically it's a 'fortified manor house' of the 13th century. To you and me, it's a castle. Three or four people are pottering about inside, looking through the small window-spaces at marsh and tide. The farm alongside sells lamb from animals reared on the salty grass below. I nearly buy some, but it would have to stay too long in the car.
A few miles further west, and this northerly coast ends at the village of Llanmadoc - a straggle of houses, a shop, a pub, and at the very end a little church with battlements that has been there seven or eight hundred years. Drowned sailors of long ago are buried in the churchyard. Next door is a white cube of a building, the rectory, and I call to say hello to people I know. The rector lives elsewhere, in another of his parishes. There are more churches than clergymen.
Having reached this top left-hand corner of Gower, the only way for a car to continue is turn south and make for the bottom left-hand corner, and the village of Rhossili. There, the road runs out in a grassy car park. Two hundred feet below is a beach more than three miles long, a great bow of sand with the bones of ancient wrecks if you know where to look. A high grassy ridge, parallel to the sea, falls away to fields above the sand, and the sun catches its windows. It was once a rectory, when the church was down there too, but now is just a house. The air is full of the crying of gulls.
Rhossili was a place that Dylan Thomas knew as a child, and wrote about in more than one story. He nearly lived there once, when one of his benefactors thought to buy the 'Old Rectory' for him and his family.
The scheme fell through. Rhossili is the only village in Gower without a pub. These two facts may be connected.
I am still in the car park, where I am supposed to be meeting an old friend, to walk out along the headland to the strange serpentine half-tide island at the end, the Worms Head. He calls my cell-phone to say he's been delayed in Swansea. 'Next time,' I say. I forget the walk to the Worm and drive east, along the south coast of the peninsula, towards Swansea.
This is the coast of cliffs, coves, headlands and the long Atlantic rollers bursting on the shore. I pause at Penrice Castle, set in parkland half a mile inland. There are two castles. One is Norman, an ancient ruin. The other, next door to it, is a house, a 17th century mansion, which is also called Penrice Castle. A family descended from the Talbots, and before them the Mansels, lives there now. The Mansels, originally Norman French, have been in Gower for almost a thousand years.
A public right-of-way crosses the parkland, and there are holiday cottages, owned by the Castle (the one that has people in it). A man is fishing in a lake. Below the house is Oxwich Bay, like a lesser Rhossili, crowded with swimmers and sleepers in the sun. The car park by the beach, crammed with vehicles, is owned by the Castle. On a fine afternoon, like today, the five hundred or so vehicles parked there earn the descendants of the Normans more than a thousand pounds; a sort of 21st century treasure.
And then I head back to Swansea, with its great bay, its vacant docks and long-gone industry. And turn inland, to mid-Wales, fifty miles away, where I live now. I still hear the gulls crying.
(c) Paul Ferris 2009
Paul Ferris has written thirty or so books including the standard biography of Dylan Thomas and the only biography of Thomas's wife Caitlin; both books won Arts Council awards. He lives South Wales.
For further information check www.paulferris.co.uk