Wales 5: Laugharne to Kidwelly and Ferryside

Valerie assured our hosts at Laugharne that she had booked our room for three nights, not two as they had recorded in their booking system, and so we stayed on. It was only as we drove away from Laugharne, and Valerie received a call from her perplexed son asking why we hadn’t turned up at the cottage she had booked in Kidwelly, that we realised we had lost twenty-four hours –- today was Saturday, not Friday. (I'll attribute this mental lapse to the magic spell of Dylan Thomas rather than a senior moment.) We abandoned our plans to visit the National Botanic Gardens of Wales in the Towy Valley, and drove post haste toward toward Kidwelly. 

Valerie had booked a cottage, through Tanylan Farm holidays, on the coastal road between Ferryside and Kidwelly. Hawton is one of three cottages that form part of a traditional longhouse which has been recently restored. The longhouse was constructed in the early 16^th century to serve both farmer and livestock, and it was later converted to workers’ accommodation. With three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, and a spacious living room and other facilities downstairs, plus a hot tub in the back garden, there was more than enough space for the three adults and one seven-year old that made up our party. 

There was a sandy beach nearby, which we reached by walking through the camping ground, along a sandy track, and under a railway bridge. At regular intervals, little two-carriage trains would rush along the railway line, heading for Carmarthen.

In this rural part of South West Wales, the roads are single track with passing places at intervals against the hedges. We drove to an informal café at a nearby smallholding, and ate white bread sandwiches stuffed with prawns and mayonnaise and coleslaw while watching a menagerie of animals wandering around. We came away with a tray of duck eggs, and cooked scrambled eggs for breakfast next day – the shells were tough to crack, but the contents tasted good.  

The second day, we drove the short distance to the village of Ferryside and parked the car beside the River Towy Yacht Club. The trains were there again – this time at our backs, beyond the yacht club – as they sped around the estuary. I thought to myself that if I had been a children’s author I would have written a story about those trains. 

We ate our picnic lunch sitting on deep concrete steps that led down to a white sandy beach on a long tidal estuary. It was shortly before the turning of the tide, and the water was still flowing in.  

Over on the other side were hills and the outline of a ruined castle. (Google tells me that Wales had some six hundred castles; one hundred of these are still standing, either restored or as ruins.)

After our picnic, we walked along the beach past the rusting ruins of a boat, the Vicky Leigh from Liverpool. There was enough breeze for the seven-year old to fly his kite. 

 On our final evening, after the rest of the party had departed, Valerie and I cooked a light meal together: a mushroom omelette made from duck eggs, tiny boiled potatoes, green salad and a fruit dessert. The two of us used to prepare meals together when we shared a tiny flat in Grafton Gully, Auckland, in 1965 – it was a good feeling to be doing it again.

I needed to be at Cardiff Airport for a 10:30 a.m. flight on the Monday, and we had been warned to allow at least two hours to drive there. Valerie had entered the coordinates into her elderly but tried-and-true TomTom GPS Navigator the night before, and I had the large map book on my lap as a backup. There were bottlenecks on the M4 at the City of Swansea and also at Port Talbot, with its steelworks, but we made reasonable time. After fourteen junctions, TomTom took us off the motorway and on a meandering route on minor roads through small towns. This made me a little nervous, but Valerie said, “Have confidence.” Somewhat to my surprise – I had become completely disoriented – we reached our destination with time to spare.

Wales 4: Laugharne: Dylan Thomas’s birthday walk

On our second day in Laugharne, we returned to the Boathouse tearooms – one of the better eating places in Laugharne – for lunch. Most of the food is prepared in the original kitchen, and they use locally-sourced ingredients where possible. Our cawl (soup) was thick with root vegetables, and accompanied by a generous wedge of Welsh cheese.

Fortified by the soup, we set off on a circular walk that starts nearby (this is not Dylan Thomas’s birthday walk – we had decided to save that for later). The walk took us away from the town, up onto hills, through fields and onto a farm. There was a notice on the farm gate that seemed remarkably polite in the circumstances: “Please keep your dogs on a leash. One of our lambs was recently mauled to death!!” The path passed close to the farmhouse, and I saw a file of plump white geese walking solemnly in file across an arched bridge over a stream.

Our stay in Laugharne was during the first week in July. Public schools (“private” to us) had just broken up for their long summer holidays, but state schools still had a fortnight to go. There were a few young children with parents or grandparents, but it was relatively quiet. When we did Dylan Thomas's birthday walk, on our final day in Laugharne, we were the only ones on the path.

Dylan Thomas’s Poem in October is about his birthday walk to the shoulder of St John’s Hill on 27 October 1944, his thirtieth birthday. The poem – made up of seven stanzas, each of ten lines – is about getting older, and his love of Laugharne. 

 The birthday walk is about two miles/ 3.2 kilometres and goes up through Salt Farm. Known locally as “New Walk”, it was originally created in 1856 and enabled townsfolk and cocklers to access by foot their shares of the cockle beds on the marshes when high tides would have prevented them. Along the way were boards with extracts from Poem in October. 

Dylan Thomas Birthday Walk      Photo:Ann Barrie

In one of the extracts, Dylan Thomas pictures himself with his mother “walking through the parables / of sunlight / and the legends of green chapels”. By “green chapels” Thomas means trees. I think that nowadays the trees are considerably thicker and higher than when he did the walk. As he climbs, he describes the view of a “church the size of a snail / with its horns through mist”. Valerie and I were unable to spot the church, but we wondered what Dylan Thomas would have made of the wind turbine on the skyline.

As you walk away from the village, and the castle recedes, you begin to see the form of the river Coran and the river marsh. The marsh areas, which were formed by seasonal and tidal flooding, include rough pasture on higher ground, interspersed with lagoons. 

Dylan Thomas Birthday Walk      Photo:Ann Barrie

Dylan Thomas Birthday Walk      Photo:Ann Barrie

Dylan Thomas Birthday Walk      Photo:Ann Barrie

At the end of the walk we could have chosen to retrace our steps, but we chose instead to walk along a muddy portion of track, then through fields with curious cows, and then to follow the road back to Laugharne. 

Dylan Thomas Birthday Walk      Photo:Ann Barrie

Dylan Thomas’s poem concludes, “O may my heart’s truth / still be sung / on this high hill in a year’s turning.” And the final board on the walk encourages us to “Please try to return to his high hill on your birthday … Take this experience and make it your birthday walk.” Laugharne is too far away for me to make Dylan’s walk my birthday walk, but I think the idea of going for a special walk on one's birthday every year – either alone or with friends – is an excellent one.

Blog by Ann Barrie

Wales 3: Laugharne: peaceful spot; Dylan Thomas’s grave; breakfasts

In 1953, driven by financial pressures, Dylan Thomas undertook his fourth American tour in three years. He collapsed into a coma in his New York hotel and was taken to hospital. Caitlin was rushed to New York, and she brought her husband's body back to Laugharne. 

On our first day in Laugharne, Valerie and I stumbled across a cemetery that we thought might contain Dylan Thomas’s grave. It proved not to be so, but this peaceful place yielded some lovely old verse, and glimpses of the estuary:  

Laugharne, a old cemetery       Photo: Ann Barrie

We later ascertained that Dylan Thomas was buried in the new graveyard at St Martin’s church, and we set off to find this the following day.

Dylan Thomas, reminiscing about his childhood, said, “The lane was always the place to tell your secrets; if you did not have any you invented them.” The lane in the following photo leads to the old graveyard at St Martin’s Church, which we had thought might be a shortcut to the new graveyard. When we reached the bottom of the lane, we found the area fenced off due to work being done in the church grounds, so we had to retrace our steps. Nonetheless, I found the lane evocative. 

Laugharne, Wales        Photo: Ann Barrie

Signposts directed us to Dylan Thomas’s grave. Another visitor arrived shortly after us, and he said, “I’m on a pilgrimage. It’s a pity the grave is so simple.” Valerie, however, felt strongly that Dylan Thomas would not have wanted anything fancy, and I agree. The grave is well maintained, and the lettering is crisp and clean; along the top is a row of coins left by pilgrims to the grave. 

Laugharne, Dylan Thomas's grave     Photo: Ann Barrie

Caitlin Thomas moved to Italy a few years after her husband died, and she died in Catania, Sicily, at the age of eighty. She is buried next to her husband in the new graveyard of St Martin's church, and is commemorated on the other side of the cross:

Laugharne, Caitlin Thomas's grave     Photo: Ann Barrie

Valerie and I ended that day with light meal of cottage pie – savoury minced meat with a crispy mashed potato topping – at Brown’s Hotel. This was Dylan Thomas’s favourite pub, and he would drink here every evening, with Caitlin accompanying him. (“If I had not, I would have lost him,” she said.) Dating from the 1750s, Brown’s Hotel has been redecorated, and is atmospheric with Dylan Thomas memorabilia scattered around. The girl who served us had a lovely singsong accent.

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Our hosts at the Boathouse, who were new to the B&B business, gave us excellent breakfasts. He was from Essex, a lover of fresh produce, and he would describe to us each day the seasonal fruits he had put into the fruit salad – nectarines, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, melon, cape gooseberries. He was in charge of the cooking department too, and he managed my poached eggs by removing the pot of simmering water from the stove, then swirling the water just before he dropped in the eggs. His hash browns tasted healthy and good, and he shared his secret: after squeezing all the water out of the grated potato, and adding egg and finely chopped onion, he would bake the hash browns in the oven.

Blog by Ann Barrie

Wales 2: Laugharne: Dylan Thomas and the Boat House

Dylan Thomas spent the last four years of his life, 1949-1953, living with his wife and children in the Boat House at Laugharne. In his book Quite early one morning he wrote: “I have been living now for fifteen years or more in this timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town … nowhere like it anywhere at all.”

The Boat House, Laugharne                 Photo: Ann Barrie

The Boat House is a place of pilgrimage for many people, and I was pleased that Valerie and I visited first thing in the morning, while it was still quiet. For three hours we wandered through the furnished rooms, enjoying the memorabilia, reading newspaper accounts, listening to recordings and studying the photos on the walls. One photo shows Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlan in the ferry (rowboat) that used to run between Laugharne and the Llangain Peninsula; they look windblown and relaxed; in the boat with them is a woman, stylishly dressed.  Another photo shows assembled friends and family, including Thomas's mother, Florence, at the Pelican Hotel the day of his funeral in 1953.

Playing continuously was a recording of Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood, his famous radio drama set in Laugharne, which he wrote in 1953. Thomas spoke with a rich voice honed by elocution lessons in his youth; he did not have a Welsh accent. We studied Under Milk Wood at high school, and senior pupils performed it to an audience. I vividly recall the beautiful face and dark hair of a girl one year older than me, who spoke a soliloquy wearing a long, white nightdress.

In one of the letters on display, written before his marriage, Dylan Thomas told Caitlan Macnamara how much he loved her, and he begged her, “Write to me soon and tell me you really mean what you said about loving me too. If you don’t, I shall cut my throat or go to the pictures.” He and Caitlan married in the Penzance Registry Office in 1937. He had numerous affairs with other women.

A video, playing on a continuous loop, gave  an insight into his childhood in Swansea. I am not familiar with Swansea, and I imagined it to be industrial, but the young Dylan Thomas had a large wooded park at the end of his street where his imagination was allowed to run free. The video also gave clues to what made Dylan Thomas a literary man: his father had a first class honours degree from the University College of Wales, and Dylan Thomas grew up in a house full of books; also, he had the opportunity, as a youth, to associate with intellectuals in Swansea.

The video made the point that Dylan Thomas’s environment had to be specific, and, most important, it had to include Wales. In this teens he enjoyed living a Bohemian life in London, but he always returned to Wales.  Although he was found unfit for military service, World War II forced him away, again and again, from Wales – he became a professional radio broadcaster in 1943, as this provided an income. (His financial woes are well documented.)

Although the Boathouse appears a reasonable size, it would have been hard for Dylan Thomas to find a quiet spot in which to work. He did his writing in a shed converted from a small garage. As you see from the following photo, the room is set up with Thomas’s jacket thrown over a chair, and pictures from magazines on the wall. His daughter, Aeronwy Thomas, in her memoir My Father’s Places, explains that it was Caitlan who pinned these pictures to the wall, and Dylan did not pay them much attention. Caitlan would usher him to the shed every afternoon and guard his writing time. 

Dylan Thomas's writing shed, Laugharne    Photo: Ann Barrie

Dylan Thomas's writing shed, Laugharne    Photo: Ann Barrie

Before leaving the Boat House we enjoyed a cup of coffee in the tearooms. Here is a photo of the Welsh language menu (the first entries translate to Beverages – Teas – pot of tea per person; and under Coffees the first entry is Regular coffee). The Welsh language is compulsory for all children at primary school; I admire the single-mindedness of the Welsh in doing this, and in promoting their language in general. 

Menu at the Boat House tearooms, Laugharne   Photo: Ann Barrie

 We drank our coffee outdoors, overlooking the giant Tafe estuary which was calm and flat, and very quiet with only the sounds of gulls. We heard a series of distant booms and saw a cloud of smoke on Pendine Sands; the curator told us the Defence Department owns Pendine Sands and do exercises in the area; it is possible to walk there, but part of the beach is closed off from Monday to Friday.

As we departed, I asked the curator how many visitors come to the Boat House each year. He said 20,000, which is a manageable number for a small building.

Blog by Ann Barrie

Wales 1: Arrival in Laugharne ; Dylan Thomas

My friend Valerie, from high school days, has lived in England for years, and we have often holidayed together. When I told her I would be in the UK in July 2017, she suggested we go to Laugharne, a village in South West Wales that is strongly associated with Dylan Thomas. I was delighted at the coincidence, as I was studying one of Thomas's poems at the time, the beautiful villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night, and I had myself written a villanelle.

Valerie and I drove along the motorways from Sevenoaks, Kent: the M25, the M3, then a bypass road for twenty-five miles, and then onto the M4. The roads were busy, as always in England, but the traffic flowed; Valerie is well used to driving in these conditions. At lunch time, we stopped at a services area and bought takeaway espressos, plus hot milk, from Starbucks; then we sat on the grass under some spindly trees and picnicked on egg and salad rolls, tomatoes, tiny sweet mincemeat tarts and Jazz apples ... The M4 took us over the graceful Second Severn Crossing into Wales; then we travelled on the A40 and the A4066 into Carmarthenshire and the village of Laugharne.

Laugharne lies on the shores of Carmarthan Bay on the huge estuary of the River Tâf. There are notices in the car park near the estuary warning people that high tides that can wash over cars parked there. To your left as you face the sea, is Laugharne Castle, dramatic in its profile. There were large black rooks perched on the ramparts of the ruined castle – they are often attracted to ruins. This photo of Laugharne Castle was taken the evening of our arrival; the dappled sky above is what the French would call un ciel pommelé. 

Laugharne Castle   Photo: Ann Barrie

Our Bed and Breakfast was in Gosport Street, in an eighteenth century building that once formed part of a hotel. You can see it behind Dylan Thomas’s right shoulder in this photo. 

Laugharne      Photo: Ann Barrie

Our hosts greeted us with a pot of tea, and generous slices of bara brith, a Welsh fruit loaf.

                Bara brith                                    Photo: Ann Barrie                                        

Valerie and I shared a large rectangular room, very comfortable, with creamy white plaster walls. It had been renovated with rustic touches. Two-thirds the way along the room, toward the ensuite at the back, was an exposed load-bearing beam – one side of the beam was supported by a column of old Welsh bricks; the other side by newer bricks. The front of the room had a small bay window that looked onto the footpath – to the left of our view, diagonally cross the street, was a small green area surrounded by a low stone wall, with well-tended gardens, garden seats, and an interpretive board ...

Laugharne and estuary of River Tâf            Photo: Ann Barrie

... and beyond this, mesmerising, was the castle. The next photo was taken in the late afternoon. The broad sweep of lawn between the castle and the marsh, is a popular place for walking; there are benches, too, so you can soak up the sun and the view.

Laugharne Castle                                       Photo: Ann Barrie

A note on windows that look onto the footpath: When I have walked past such windows in Mexico, France and other countries, enjoying the architecture and lace curtains, I have sometimes inadvertently peeped in on people, got a glimpse of their lives. The same happens to me at my own house in Wellington. The downstairs living room looks onto a footpath and road (there is a narrow courtyard and fence between), and beyond this is the dramatic Cook’s Strait; we have a picture window in order to take advantage of this view. I have found that people walking past respect our privacy and restrict themselves to quick glances in our direction – I never feel that my living room is a fishbowl.

This is the first in a series of five blogs.

Blog by Ann Barrie