Julie Brominicks
Wales has seaside superstars like Pembrokeshire and Gower, and it also has hidden delights which only the locals know about. And now you...
Introduces us to a beautiful section of coast only the locals seem to know about. Just the kind of discovery we love to make.
SCOURED AND STACKED like castle walls, a phalanx of honey-coloured cliffs guards the coast. Below them curve overlaying platforms of wave-cut rock, cracked into paving by movements of the earth. Loose stones collect in the cracks so that seen from the cliff-tops, the shore resembles a Zen garden raked into swirls. Unlike the Carboniferous Age pinnacles and caves of Pembrokeshire or the Pre-Cambrian whorls of North Anglesey, the Glamorgan Heritage Coast consists of uplifted Jurassic and Triassic Age rock which is rare in Wales, giving it a singular and spectacular appeal. I’m setting out for a point 14 miles west, treading the whole of the Heritage Coast from Aberthaw to Porthcawl. You could walk it all in one long, lovely summer day, but I’m taking two. It gives time to relish the path as it surfs along the undulating cliff plateau, rich in dramatic views and surprisingly remote for a shore 10 miles from Cardiff. A place of wild heights and solitude.
Aberthaw Power Station grumbles above the former coal-port of Limpert Bay, where valerian now grows on the shingle ridge. Much of the fuel burnt here today comes from Russia but the station was built to serve the coalfields just inland, formed in the Carboniferous Age. They form a backdrop to your walk, indicated by a low line of distant hills running along the horizon.
Turning inland towards Gileston, goldfinches billow across the farm-track. On either side, fields of wheat are blown by the breeze into oceans of rippling green waves. Pigeons and a small plane race across the sky, but already the landscape seems quiet. This region was largely unsettled for centuries, save for the Iron Age Celtic Silure tribes who lived in a smattering of forts, the Romans who built and then abandoned a villa or two, and the early Christians who established religious sites at Llantwit Major and Merthyr Mawr. The Vikings, who traded (and raided) their way along the coast didn’t settle, and despite its proximity to the coal-belt, this part of the coast is still peaceful.
“Tresilian Bay is terraced with storm banks. Fossils lie under my feet as I cross it; one large and one white ammonite. They feel like sugar to touch, against the smoother blue stone.”
The path loops back to the sea via long curving fields edged with speedwell, skirts a beach of blue stones, and ducks between hedges to Summerhouse Point. Here the ramparts of an Iron Age promontory fort are buried in a wooded tangle of ivy, epiphytes and ferns. Then onwards along low cliffs of argillaceous limestones, shales and marls. The underpinning limestone nourishes the crops and the jumble of wayside vegetation which includes sea cabbage, hemp agrimony, sheep’s fescue, rockrose, wild thyme, viper’s bugloss and dog violets, a-flutter, on warm calm days, with hummingbird hawkmoths and clouded yellow butterflies.
Gaps in the hedge reveal glimpses of boats. Clover headlands grant views across the Bristol Channel to the Somerset and Devon coasts, and behind to Aberthaw and its hill of glittering coal. The stone buildings of Llantwit Major lie ahead, snug between trees then lost to sight below the rise of a field. But always it is the cliffs that command attention, rising like walls of golden bricks from shores of dark rock ridged and swirled into furrows where water shimmers and glints.
Via a thick holly hedge I arrive in the Cwm Colhuw Nature Reserve, home to the rare small blue butterfly and where horses graze with wind in their manes, and stonechats cling to the fence. With Llantwit Major just a mile away, the beach here is popular with walkers and windsurfers – out in the bay their white sails race at speed. Some of the cliffs have recently collapsed, exposing fresh rock the colour of yellow insulation foam.
The rock – known as lias – was created in early Jurassic times 180 million years ago. Containing fossils of corals, giant brachiopods, gastropods and occasionally the bones of an ichthyosaur, it was formed at the bottom of a warm shallow sea near the equator. Shells and sea creatures compacted to form limestone which was subsequently layered with mud that became mudstone – or shale – and the process was repeated again and again. Shale erodes more quickly than limestone, leaving it unstable, so as the cliffs topple, they leave a shore platform of rock.
Back on the top of the bluff, travellers’ joy festoons a thorn thicket and yellow lichen mantles the stone walls and stiles. Sheep graze. The path dips and rises. Tresilian Bay is terraced with storm banks. Fossils lie under my feet as I cross it; one large and one white ammonite. They feel like sugar to touch, against the smoother blue stone.
St Donat’s Bay is wedged between headlands. The fortified entrance of what was once a castle is now the gateway to Atlantic College, and students sit on the slipway in the sun. Back on the cliffs, Nash Lighthouse winks an orange light on the next promontory. When I reach it, the tower, now automated, glistens white against the deep blue sky. Black funnels protrude from the roof of the adjacent building – foghorns, which are kept in working order and sounded twice a month.
The path plunges into Cwm Marcross, thick with gorse, hawthorn and long-tailed tits, and rises again along the plateau with large boulders strewn on the rocky paving below the cliffs, as if tossed onto a board-game by giants. Choughs somersault into the huge sky and golden rays run spotlights across the cliffs, illuminating one and then another.
I arrive at Cwm Nash as the sun is sliding towards the horizon, bathing the cliffs in syrupy light. A stream tumbles over slabs of rock to form pools in which rock pipits drink. Here, the lias gives temporarily to yellow tufa, a porous sedimentary limestone eroding in chunks and revealing as it does, the bones of the Cistercian monks who were buried here in the Middle Ages. Up the valley is Monknash, a good place to spend the night, at an excellent pub and a rather bijou campsite.
By morning, the breeze has dropped. Lapwing calls accompany me back to the coast, where the lights of ships still glow at sea. The path rises to high rough-grazed fields. Skylarks sing overhead and far below me Traeth Mawr and Traeth Bach, huge empty expanses of hard sand, are bordered by a storm bank.
Soon, the plateau is cleft again by glacial valleys; Cwm Mawr and Cwm Bach. In them the sound of the sea is replaced by one of birdcall, and the smell of salt by the scent of fox. Here, spindle trees grow among blackthorns. Sylvan and squirrel-scurried, thick with ferns, warm, earthy and vegetation-rich, it is almost possible to imagine a coastal landscape before it was deforested.
Scrub spills down the coastal hills now and little spits extend from each promontory. The headland of Trwyn y Witch is underpinned by pillow mounds rather than lias, formed by cooling lava on an ocean floor. Thick with periwinkles, hazels and field maples, you emerge from them onto a rolling hill, rising to a summit where an Iron Age fort and the ruins of an 18th-century mansion are being lost to the grass. A symphony of birdsong swells from the woods just inland and just ahead is Dunraven, or Southerndown Beach.
From here the rock is Triassic, with alluvial fans that are visible at low tide, but lost by the sea to me now. The path continues in upfolds and downfolds,
rising with the road towards Ogmore-By-Sea, then veering away to plummet down a sheep-grazed slope, criss-crossed with stone walls, to the sea. Weed and sticks lie on the shingly beach and brown waves smack black rocks, exhilarating in their spray and proximity after the recent heights.
Nearing its end, the Glamorgan Heritage Coast changes in character from rock to sand, and becomes busier as you turn inland to cross the River Ogmore and circumnavigate the Merthyr Mawr dunes. But Porthcawl, a former coal port and collier’s resort is not an inappropriate place to finish a walk spectacular in a geology all of its own, and one that is embraced by the coal-fields.