Explore beauty o Poetry in its be
The slightly rumpled jacket slung across a chair back makes it look as though the owner has just popped out for a bit – possibly to the pub for a pint. A propensity for booze was what, they say, eventually brought Dylan Thomas’ life to an abrupt end, when he was just 39.
So, it’s easy to imagine the moody, emotional Welsh poet sitting here, looking out across the estuary of the Taf River from his “writing shed”, which was originally a motor car garage.
The place is in Laugharne (pronounced Larne) on the south coast of Carmarthenshire and was described by Thomas as a “timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town”.
He wrote that, while some people were born in Laugharne and never saw a reason to leave, “some, like myself, just came, one day, for the day, and never left; got off the bus, and forgot to get on again”.
Even on a crisp winter’s day – with blue sky above (yes, these days do occur in the UK in winter) – the charm which beguiled Thomas is evident. The ruins of Laugharne Castle tower above the waters of the estuary and The Boathouse, which is below the writing shed and where Thomas lived with his wife and three children.
The twisting roads speak to another, less rushed time.
My daughter has brought us here to show us what is, she says, one of her favourite parts of Wales.
When she first came to rural Wales four years ago, she worked as a vet in the nearby town of St Clears and got to know well the gorgeous coast of
Carmarthenshire and adjacent Pembrokeshire.
It is, I’ll admit, a surprise for me, dismantling as it does some of the pre-conceptions I have in mind about this country.
My wife’s father was born into a mining family in a small village outside Swansea, but after getting an engineering degree, he fled the grimy world of post-World War II Britain to build roads in Africa.
Like Thomas, he never got back on the bus and ended his days on the continent he grew to love.
As newlyweds in the 1980s, my wife and I stayed with her aunt in a mining village in the valleys. And, frankly, it was depressing, as the coal industry was then winding down and the memories of the brutal suppression of striking miners by Margaret Thatcher’s government were still raw.
You could almost feel the poverty in the cramped mining villages, although the northern part of the country was magnificently strewn with mountains and rivers.
A second visit to Wales in 2009, also in winter, didn’t disabuse me of my belief that Wales was still covered by the pall of mining and suffering.
Yet, something on that visit struck a chord with my daughter and when she decided to move to the UK, she chose Wales for its wild beauty.
As we drive along the narrow roads, which are flanked by stone walls (more like lanes, my daughter says), rounding a corner offers yet another magnetic vista, of rolling hills, seaside villages and farms.
At Pendine, I stop to marvel at the long, shallow beach (Pendine