A day in Gower
South Wales, Late Winter 2019
It is always a delight to feel one season in the midst of another. We decided to head to the Gower peninsula on a day when the beauty of summer unexpectedly found us in February. The sun had real warmth to it, burning through the mist by late morning and leaving behind a thick silky haze. On reaching Gower, the winding roads carried us through wide, salt marsh flatlands, watched over by wading birds and wildfowl. We passed horses roaming freely amongst bracken heaths dotted with prehistoric remains. This 15-mile-long thumb of land was designated the UK's first official Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1956, and it was easy to see why. Surrounded by water on three sides, there was a wonderful feeling of isolation.
Worm’s Head
From Bryn Eglur, it took around an hour and twenty to get to the southwestern tip of the peninsula. We parked up at the National Trust car park in Rhossili and set our sights on the coastline, fringed with sweeping bays and precipitous limestone cliffs. Rhossili is home to three miles of golden sand; a wide curving sweep of a bay backed by rolling peaks and dunes. I was drawn to an isolated stark-white house behind the beach, standing beneath the hills in acres of its own space and looking out to sea. I have since read that it is The Old Rectory, once a base for radar workers during the Second World War and now a holiday home run by the National Trust. A blip in the landscape, it solidified the scene in my memory as if it were a painting.
The seams and folds in the cliffs are slapped and thumped by line after line of perfect white-water barrels that run the length of the bay. It was a beautiful day and the foaming white water sparkled like fish skin, spraying fireworks across the rocks. Facing almost due west, the beach is ideal for surfing when the conditions are right, also making it a death-trap for shipping in bygone years. The powerful tides and shifting sands have caused many wrecks and the remains of the Helvetica can still be seen at low tide, thrown ashore during a November storm in 1887. A Norwegian sailor who survived the shipwreck fell in love with a local girl of Rhossili. As the story goes, her father refused permission for them to marry, the sailor left heartbroken and she remained alone for the rest of her long life. This stretch of coast is certainly a place where stories of both romance and tragedy are freely inspired. From the cliff tops, we spotted the outline of the Helvetica’s rusting hull jutting out the sand. I was tempted to take a closer look and add to the sets of footprints leading to the broken skeleton across the bay, but we were clock watching, racing the turn of the tide.
To walk the length of Worm’s Head was the desire that initially enticed me to the Gower. I had first read about it while browsing a second-hand book shop a few years ago. I remember flicking through a dusty old guidebook and stopping at a black and white photograph of a snaking line of land, the shape of a sea monster retreating into the waves. I read on to discover that these rocks are fabled to ward off seafaring evils and said to hold special powers for pilgrims and pagans alike. I don’t know why I didn’t buy the book, but I jotted down ‘Worm’s Head – the sea-serpent’ in my notebook and had sought to visit since.
The southern end of Rhossili Bay points towards the sharp-spined rock mass of the Worm’s Head. It is the extreme tip of Gower for five hours around low tide. The rest of the time it is reclaimed by the sea as a series of islets. During this five-hour window of opportunity (2½ hours either side of low water) the tides permit you to walk out across a causeway, along the narrow crest of the Outer Head and to the furthest point of land. All the romance of inaccessibility!
By the carpark, the National Trust shop at the Rhossili Visitor Centre is housed in one of the former coastguard cottages and a good place to carefully check the tide times. People are regularly rescued after being cut off by the rising waters that have cost many lives. The causeway should never be crossed outside the safety margin as the currents are fierce and the rocks truly treacherous. A young Dylan Thomas is among those to have spent a cold night trapped on Worm’s Head. He described it as ‘the very promontory of depression’. It was a place that both fascinated and haunted the poet, one that he would return to time and time again.
Standing on the cliff tops and looking across the bay to Worm’s Head, I pictured the old Norsemen that first discovered the outcrop, cautiously sailing around its jagged profile. An easy decision it must have been to name their hump-back neck of land. I can’t imagine there were any objections to bestowing ‘Wurm’ – the Norse word for dragon – upon it. The cave-pierced limestone made strong shapes against the sky, with the blunt-face of the Outer Head rearing 200 feet out of the ocean, just beyond the disjointed members of the Low Neck and Inner Head. Even on a map it resembles a mythical beast reaching out to caress the Irish Sea and beckon the curious.
From the car park it took us around twenty minutes walking southwest along the surfaced coastal path to reach the causeway. On the way, intrepid sheep munched the close-cropped turf, precariously grazing on the cliff edges around clumps of burnt orange bracken and brambles. The coconut aroma of low-clumped yellow gorse made it feel even more like summer, with faint wispy trails of cloud streaking through the haze of a petrol blue sky. The track passed fields and hedge banks that are part of a medieval open-field strip system, introduced to farming in Britain by the Normans in the 12th century. We also spotted a series of mounds in the landscape that are the remains of an Iron Age fort positioned at a great vantage point. Watching over the causeway sits a coastguard lookout, built in Victorian times and now manned by volunteers. There was a large notice advising the safe crossing times; no excuse for any strandings beyond this point.
It was a rough scramble and stumble across the thread of land tying Worm’s Head to the mainland. It took us at least half an hour to negotiate, partly due to the jagged terrain and partly because there was so much to look at on the way: a succession of ridges run out of the ground like breakwaters to the sea, a litany of strata and faults in the rocks, wave cut platforms and contrasting patches of white boulders, rounded like dinosaur eggs and pummelled smooth by the waves. These unsettled, contorted and outlandish shapes make it seem as though you are on the surface of another planet. It struck me that we were walking across the seabed; a landscape that was not land but beyond it.
Translucent pools teeming with creatures made for some incredible rock-pooling along the causeway. We navigated around pavements of mussels and barnacles to spot anemones, shrimps, whelks and tiny pug-faced fish in the deep basins. Crabs seemed to run from every stone we guardedly turned, finding cover under scattered spiders of seaweed. I could have stayed all day studying the rocks, the pools and their creatures, but time was slipping away and so we pressed on.
We passed a rusty ship’s anchor to climb the grassy slopes of the Inner Head. From this point we had the promontory almost to ourselves. We were welcomed by sea thrift nodding in the breeze and our feet were cushioned by the softest grass that would be wonderful to camp on. The flock of marooned sheep that grazed upon it all seemed to agree, lazing happily in dotted clusters. The air around us was cracked only by the cries of the birds that circled above. Worm’s Head is known for its nesting seabirds in summer when the cliffs are thick with squabbling razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes, fulmars, puffins, gulls and gannets. As described by Dylan Thomas, ‘at the end of the humped and serpentine body, more gulls than I had ever seen before cried over their new dead and the droppings of ages’. (It’s important to note that in order to protect the nesting birds, no access to the Outer Head here is permitted between March and August.)
Scrambling on, we crossed sloping outcrops coated in lichens, like maps of clustered islets themselves. The cliffs all around were stained and pitted by the sea, snapped and layered into jagged points that ward off the faint hearted. We reached a smaller causeway where lines of rock stand up like teeth, vertical posts marching into the sea, as though a great claw has scratched the surface. The arch of the Devil’s Bridge came into sight; the impressive remains of a collapsed sea cave that one day too will succumb to the waves. Pierced through the body of the beast, the wave-cut arch forms its eye.
We crossed the bridge onto the towering nape of the Outer Head where the views stretch out even more. We weren’t lucky enough to spot dolphins that can often be seen offshore, or to spy the blow hole spouting water fifty feet into the air in rough weather. However, I felt complete consolation in the wildness to be found here, soaking it all up in the bright daze of the afternoon. What a moving place it would be to bivvy for the night like Dylan Thomas, with a cave for shelter at the far end of the peninsula.
Before leaving the Outer Head, I plucked a few delicate stems of cow parsley from the edge of the cliffs that had been dried brittle by the salty sea breeze. They managed to survive the journey home and now rest here in a clay pot, awakening memories of a sea-serpent’s land. A land that takes some getting to but repays the effort as a unique repository of shipwreck atmosphere. I’m sure that anyone who’s ever ventured to Worm’s Head will tell you what an elemental place it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a howling gale or the sun is shining on a turquoise tide, the views are sensational.
Culver Hole
Most of our day in Gower was spent exploring Worm’s Head but I was set on finding the curious Culver Hole before we left. Hidden in a rocky cleft near Port Eynon, the ancient cave is one of Gower's most storied, and only accessible at low tide. We parked in the beach carpark by the caravan site at Port Eynon and walked the coastal path to the west of the bay passing the 18th-century ruins of a salt house. From here it was a steep track up and over the headland via an old quarry.
There aren’t any obvious signs to find Culver Hole. After some time, we eventually spied a faint trail dropping down from the main coastal path that looked as though it could join up with the coordinates I had written down (51.5389, -4.2142). The track is precarious with a precipitous decline to get to the recess. We soon realised it was worth the scramble when Culver Hole came into sight, resembling something straight out of a film set. It is a tall and narrow cleft which, during its long and mysterious history, has been bricked up with a 60ft wall of mortared limestone rubble that seal and protect a number of floors and stairways behind, now ruined towards the top. The structure is quite literally squeezed in the seam of the cliffs above a narrow gully, pierced with various mismatched windows dotted down its front. Even though I had seen photographs it came as a surprise to see such an obviously man-made structure tucked so neatly into the landscape.
We navigated our way down to the bottom of the gully, our feet thudding onto the pebbles with anticipation at the prospect of taking a closer look. There was a small opening at the foot of the cleft that is often blocked after stormy weather by the shifting shingle. Luckily there was just enough room to crawl under. Crossing the cold pebbles on our hands and knees we burrowed inside. The air cooled instantly with a sharp stillness and I pulled myself up and stood in a puddle of sunlight that fell through the darkness from a small round window. Looking up, I spotted at least four different levels above with the remains of an internal staircase linking them together. There was a thick rope in place to traverse them, but it was wet, slippery and frustratingly too difficult for me to climb.
At the higher levels, the wall is punctured with around thirty tiers of small rectangular holes. I have read that these are integral to the structure, built as nesting boxes to home hundreds of medieval pigeons. Culver Hole is believed to have been built in the 13th or 14th century as a sort of dovecote. The word ‘culver’ in fact derives from the Old English ‘culufre’, meaning pigeon or dove. In the Middle Ages pigeons became an important source of food, providing meat and fresh eggs during hard times. Large dovecotes thus became quite commonplace within the higher classes. Old documents from 1396 refer to a nearby castle that has since been lost to time. Its exact location is unknown but thought to have been upon the headland behind the cave. Being a dovecote on this scale, Culver Hole may have been built for the lord of the forgotten castle, rumoured to have been a Welsh Prince. I thought of Carreg Cennen castle that we had visited the day before in the hills of the Brecon Beacons. A cavernous structure there links the castle to a water cistern beneath, which was also secondarily used as a dovecote.
It has been argued that Culver Hole may have had different or additional purposes with lost upper access levels; perhaps a tower house to have served some storage, defence or escape function should the castle be besieged. Legends tell that the prince was defeated in battle leading to the demise of his lost castle. Turning his back on royal duties, he subsequently lived out the rest of his life in Culver Hole as a solitary hermit.
From inside the craggy cave, it seemed like a perfect place to hideaway, very much invisible from anywhere but sea. The inhospitable rocks act as great forms of both camouflage and defence, making it tricky to get to unless you know where you’re going. Right outside the cave, the shingle slit of a cove looked just wide enough for boats to depart from. As such, Culver Hole holds a bounty of smuggling stories that feel impossible to dismiss after spending some time there. It is rumoured to have been used for many years as a place for smugglers to hide their hoard, with links to John Lucas; a renowned name in Welsh pirate folklore who is said to have lived nearby in the salt house on the opposite side of the cliffs. There’s even tell of a secret tunnel big enough to ride a horse through, used to shuttle goods from the cave to the salt house. Originally extracting salt from the sea, it is thought that the business was run as a cover for illicit deals.
Being so awash with stories, I couldn’t help but search every accessible nook for clues to the cave’s secrets. I had read that many of Gower’s limestone caves were occupied by people at the end of the last ice age and subsequently pondered the whereabouts of any undiscovered relics that Culver Hole could by hiding. Of course, I came away with no answers, but during my search imagined the sheer delight of a local vicar who, in 1850, excavated the cave and discovered the large skull of a mammoth, and felt his frustration on realising it was too big to squeeze out of the rock-cut opening. The vicar came away with various other animal bones but reburied his prized find back in its cavernous resting place. Excavations of later years have thrown up the bounty of roman pottery and in 1989 the fragments of an antler were found trapped in an alcove of the west upper chamber, but nothing of the mammoth's remains have surfaced since.
I was content to be enclosed by the solid arms of rock inside Culver Hole, as though at the bottom of a fathomless wishing well. I remember the impulse I had to press my cheek against the wall and feel its chill, thinking of the elusive mammoth skull that could be peering at me through the divide. I thought of the waves soon returning, seething against the historical structure that has managed to stand up to them for so long. The stories with which we fill caves expose our deep-rooted need to explore the unknown and leave our mark behind. Whatever their intention, whoever was responsible for building Culver Hole has done exactly that. This natural cave theatrically adapted by man, works both with and against the constraints of such an inaccessible location above the waterline. Looking out across the vast and rocky reef shore, I pushed myself back through the narrow opening and into the fading daylight. The emerging thoughts of smugglers, skulls, pirates, princes and even pigeons cluttered my mind until late into the night.
King Arthur Hotel, Reynoldston
Our final stop of the day was at the King Arthur Hotel at Reynoldston, a village almost in the very centre of Gower that nestles under the ancient ridge of Cefn Bryn. An early Neolithic tomb named Arthur's Stone can be found on the ridgeway and legend says it was made from a pebble from King Arthur's boot, which magically grew in size as it sped across the sky, having been thrown by the king from Carmarthenshire!
The King Arthur is a large and traditional country inn on the edge of the village green where sheep, cattle and ponies freely graze. Thought to have been built originally in 1870, the building was enlarged in the 1920s, with further renovations in the early 1990s that thankfully rescued it from dilapidation. I was struck by the idyll of the country scene that played out here as we arrived. People congregated at picnic tables on the village green and sheep grazed alongside them, all sharing the same patch of grass to catch the last of the day's sun.
Now a family-run hotel, The King Arthur has two bars and a dining room open to non-residents. The dining room and bar towards the back of its long entrance hall seemed nice enough, but we chose to settle in the relaxed main bar; clearly the heart of the hotel. All the details expected of an old pub could be found inside: reclaimed timbers, wooden barrels, jugs and jars, old sports photographs, a couple of taxidermy fish suspended in glass boxes, and in particular the two open log fires, both ablaze. A glance at the menu and across to the plates of nearby diners confirmed that the home cooked food on offer catered for all, including seasonal game and locally caught fish. We cosied up by the flames from the larger hearth with its original stone work and toasted the delights of our day in Gower with ale and a bowl of chips.