Beyond Barry Island
From designing lifeboats, to trailblazing open sea radio and unearthing dinosaur footprints, travel author Phoebe Smith finds there’s so much more to Glamorgan’s coast than Gavin and Stacey…
Mention Barry Island to most people and they’ll likely know two things about it: Gavin and Stacey. Ever since we saw these two say “I love you” on its waterfront in the hit 2007 BBC show, the Welsh seaside resort has become synonymous with amusement arcades, Marco’s Cafe and Nessa shouting: “What’s occurring?”.
Before I visited the resort, 10 miles south-west of Cardiff, that was all I knew about it too, yet here I was, looking at a collection of dinosaur footprints. I was in the Vale of Glamorgan – the county that’s home to Barry Island – for a weekend’s exploration to discover more of this beautiful section of the South Wales coast. My first stop was Bendricks Beach, which appears to have been something of a gathering hotspot in the late Triassic period some 220 million years ago.
In front of me were several large triple-pronged prints of theropod dinosaurs along with a few footsteps of a tetrasaurus, all imprinted into the red rocks as though they’d just run off to sea minutes earlier. And this was only the start.
The following morning I headed 20 miles (and around 350 million years) to the west, to Ogmore-by-Sea.
Sat alongside the Ewenny River, this village marks the start of the 14-mile Glamorgan Heritage Coast. Replete