Wales Coast Path
Wales Coast Path, day 38: Dale from Marloes
We’re back at Musselwick Sands, this time exposed by the lower tide, and we’re joined by J for the day, on a tour of the Marloes peninsula. Still the cold wind blows, ostensibly from the west, though it’s actually turned a corner on its way here, and comes from the Arctic. The path pushes westwards […]
Wales Coast Path, day 39: Marloes from Broad Haven
This is another two-car day. I attempt to park Car 1 in Marloes outside the Lobster Pot pub. The landlord, a middle aged man with a surly look, raps on a window, then unlocks the door and shouts across to me that this is not a public car park. I explain that we’re customers, or […]
Wales Coast Path, day 40: Broad Haven from Solva
Lower Solva. A bright, cloudless morning, but with a cold, insistent northerly wind. This is where we left off two years ago, and seems the right point to resume our Pembrokeshire journey. The path leads up the Gribin, a long narrow ridge that nudges the river down on its passage from village to sea. On […]
Wales Coast Path, day 37: Dale to Dale
We’re in Dale for another week on the Pembrokeshire path, almost exactly two years after our first coastal campaign further north. Our cottage overlooks the Gann inlet, with a distant view of the Rhoscrowther oil refinery on the other side of Milford Haven. Its semiglobes, pipes and towers shine like the Emerald City at night; […]
Wales Coast Path, day 25: St Clears to Laugharne
A cloudless, still mid-April morning in a miraculous week of constant sun. We’re in St Clears, four of us, for a short and gentle stroll down afon Tâf to the sea at Laugharne, castle to castle. The castle at the southern end of St Clears is a toy one just off the road – a […]
Wales Coast Path, day 23: Carmarthen to Llansteffan
Carmarthen town: a sunny morning at the end of a spell of hot spring weather. The three of us walk from the car park, along King Street and down Quay Street, with its blue plaques commemorating the eccentric historian George Eyre Evans and the young Egyptologist Ernest Harold Jones. Two hundred years ago Quay Street […]
Wales Coast Path, day 22: Ferryside to Carmarthen
We join J. at Swansea station, on the two-carriage train to Carmarthen. A British Transport Police officer paces our carriage. Maybe coastal walkers, with their clumpy boots and aggressive waterproofs, rank only just below Cardiff City fans on the BTP Travelling Troublemakers Index. But we reach Ferryside, a request stop, without challenge. It’s a cool, […]
Wales Coast Path, day 18: Llanrhidian to Loughor
Llanrhidian: a cold, clear, sunny morning. We park the car opposite the church and the ‘Welcome to Gower Inn’. Both are closed, but C. and I can welcome J. to Gower without the help of beer or devotion, and the three of us set off eastwards along the lane at the bottom of the village, […]
Wales Coast Path, day 21: Kidwelly to Ferryside
Early February, a glum cold morning. Like three dormice at the mouth of their hole, twitching their whiskers and sniffing the winter air, we emerge from our car on the edge of Kidwelly for a modest early year ramble. C. wears industrial strength gloves, J. a woolly hat advertising an Irish stout. It’s not half […]
Wales Coast Path, day 20: Burry Port to Kidwelly
A cold, still morning in Burry Port. The sun, they say, will shine all day. The four of us are the only people in the car park without dogs to share our walk. Feeling inadequate, we hurry on to the path, joining it at the point where the huge Carmarthen Bay Power Station once stood. […]