Naturally outstanding
Our first and arguably finest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Gower is the coast with the most: rocky razzmatazz and woodland calm; serene marshes and blustery hills. Where else can walkers revel in such glorious variety crammed into 73 squares miles?
Our first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is arguably the best.
IT WAS THE year that double yellows first appeared on our streets. Over in the States, some bloke called Elvis was crooning his way to stardom with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Meanwhile on the south coast of Wales, something trebly momentous was afoot. You’ll already know from page 30 onwards how the UK’s first national parks came into being 70 years ago, but they weren’t the only areas of our countryside granted special protection thanks to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. There’s another big anniversary coming up this year. Five years after the Peak District made history, Gower became our first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on May 9th 1956. The AONB was born.
65 years later the peninsula projecting westward from Swansea is one of 46 such areas in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, ranging from the woody Surrey Hills to the broody North Pennines and Antrim’s world-famous Causeway Coast. It’s a roster that also includes the Cotswolds, the Mournes and Wye Valley. They’re more numerous than our national parks, but generally smaller (the diddiest being the Isles of Scilly), and were originally designated with proximity to sprawling towns and cities in mind. It was a civil servant called John Dower who first proposed safeguarding these ‘smaller, less wild’ areas in the aftermath of the Second World War. His 1945 report outlining a vision for Britain’s national parks had also called for ‘other amenity areas’. But in the event a more evocative name was chosen, catchily abbreviated to AONB. In essence they’re much the same as national parks, the key distinction being they don’t have independent authorities to oversee local planning and promote recreation. In Scotland, the equivalent status is National Scenic Area
– all 40 of which sprang up in 1980.
It was largely thanks to the passion of local people that Gower (you should never call it
The Gower) came to be the first of three AONBs dedicated in 1956, narrowly beating Somerset’s Quantock Hills to the honour. News had reached a venerable body called the Gower Society that the first cohort were in the works and they set about lobbying the government. Their efforts paid off , which goes to show just how cherished Gower is.
The distinguished broadcaster and local lad Wynford Vaughan-Thomas called it a ‘rare patch of the Earth’s surface’, summing up beautifully the astonishing variety of walking to be enjoyed in an area measuring 25 miles across and five from top to bottom. Inland it’s a medley of blustery uplands, wooded valleys and patchwork pasture. But it’s on the coast that Gower is at its most dramatic – all of it traced by 38 rollercoaster miles of the Wales Coast Path. Once past the saltmarsh and dune systems on the north shore, it’s sweeping sands, jagged cliffs and secluded coves all the way. ▶
“It’s on the coast that Gower is at its most dramatic – all of it traced by 38 rollercoaster miles of the Wales Coast Path.”
A head start
Peninsulas are like hills. There’s a magnetic quality about them. An aura of irresistibility. We’re drawn to their extremities, to walk as far out or as high up as we can possibly go; to reach the climactic point at which mountain gives way to sky or dry land culminates in sea. It’s why so many first-time visitors to Gower make a beeline for Worms Head.
Rhossili is as far west as you can get by road. It’s a popular spot, but even in summer the crowds thin out considerably the further you stray from the village. Striding westward across the clifftops, Worms Head materialises up ahead; a gnarled limestone serpent in three parts, breaking away from the mainland – an island at high tide. Glancing back over your shoulder, you’re greeted by the equally stirring spectacle of Rhossili Bay. Three miles long, this glistening scythe of sand and the Old Rectory look like they’re about to be engulfed by the green tidal wave of Rhossili Down.
Not a worm in the Wiggly Woo sense, Worms Head gets its name from the Vikings. From their longboats, it resembled a terrifying sea dragon (‘wurme’ in Norse) – all the more dragon-like in rough seas, when a blowhole in the Outer Head snorts jets of seawater. In fair weather you can scramble along its spine right to the end, but you must first pick your way across the rocky ‘causeway’ that fuses it to the mainland at low tide. It’s a rockpooler’s nirvana where clownish flocks of oystercatchers come to forage. Further out there are wheeling kittiwakes, guillemots and razorbills.
If tides won’t allow for a safe crossing, you can spend blissful minutes just ogling Worms Head from the mainland. It’s far from being ‘the very promontory of depression’, as Swansea-born poet Dylan Thomas opined. He’d warm to its wild charms however, returning here again and again.
From the old coastguard lookout above the causeway you can scamper down to the foreshore and watch Neptune’s white horses crashing in, or take the clifftop trail threading east to Mewslade Bay and the sawtooth prow of Thurba Head. Keep one eye on the sky as you go for the jet fighter of the natural world: the peregrine falcon. These formidable predators have evolved to ‘stoop’ at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour, snatching their prey on the wing.
If you’re feeling surefooted, you might tuck right where a diverging path slinks around a rocky ledge and down to the isolated tongue of sand left exposed between tides. It’s easy to imagine shadowy figures hauling contraband ashore here on gloomy nights gone by. The cliffs all around Gower are punctuated by coves, caves and craggy valleys like Mew Slade, which provided ideal landing sites and hidey holes for smugglers in the 18th and 19th centuries. One such local brigand was John Lucus, who reputedly stashed his bootleg brandy in the medieval dovecote built into a rocky cleft along the coast at Culver Hole.
As you turn inland to emerge from the snug folds of Mew Slade, the path back to Rhossili weaves through another relic of Gower’s medieval past – one that’s best appreciated from the peninsula’s highest ground. From the churchyard, it’s a brisk, breeze-assisted climb up to the Beacon on Rhossili
Down – 633 feet above the waves. There’s nowhere better to survey the entire peninsula and drink in an incredible panorama stretching from Exmoor to Pembrokeshire on a clear day. Looking back the way you’ve come, there’s a higgledy-piggledy grid of banks and hedges below. Known as ‘the Vile’ (not that it’s unpleasant – just a word for ‘field’ in the old Gower dialect), it’s a rare surviving example of a strip-farmed medieval field system. The National Trust has worked to restore it in recent years, rotating crops and leaving fallow strips. July sees segments turn butterscotch yellow when the sunflower crop is in bloom, attracting pollinating insects and pouting Instagrammers in droves.
Up on Rhossili Down it’s the prickly clumps of gorse that lend a speckling of lemony colour in early March. The broad, heather-swaddled ridge up ahead is dotted with cairns, but these heaped stones aren’t for showing the way. They’re what’s left of a ritual burial site dating back 5000 years to the Stone Age. By far the most impressive remains are a pair of chambered tombs called Sweyne’s Howes. According to legend it’s the resting place of Sweyne Forkbeard – bloodthirsty King of the Danes and fabled founder of Swansea.
The Beacon gets its name from the signal fire site set on the down’s high point, but it wasn’t the only early warning system installed on the down. Below the crest at the far end are the concrete foundations of a radar station from the Second World War.
Down at Hillend there’s a choice to make. Either reacquaint yourself with the Wales Coast Path and the broadside of Rhossili Down, or make a sandier escape across the beach. Pummelled by southwesterlies, many a ship has foundered on these shores over the centuries – a Norwegian barque called Helvetia being one. It drifted aground in October 1887 and has remained there ever since. Revealed at low tide, you’ll find its barnacleencrusted ribs embedded in the sand as you near Rhossili again. Like the bones of a beached whale with ship nails for teeth, it makes a striking if poignant subject for photography, echoing the leviathan shape of Worms Head. ▶