‘It’s like kissing the sea’
Oysters used to be grown up and down the Welsh coast until a combination of environmental factors and overfishing changed the industry. But one marine biologist is hoping to bring them back, as Laura Clements discovers...
THE first time I met Dr Andy Woolmer, he was standing outside a pub on the shore about as far west as one can go in Wales shucking oysters into a bucket ready to be griddled over red hot coals. I was at the inaugural oyster festival at the Old Point House, an old smuggler’s haunt in Angle on the Pembrokeshire coast.
Oysters were going five for a tenner, or four of them if I wanted them hot. A larger-than-life character, Andy stood with his feet planted and arms crossed in front of his blue over trousers and thick woollen jumper and boomed at me I should try my first ones at least raw and unadorned before I graduated to the myriad of flavours on offer including seaweed gin, paprika and parmesan and Barti rum and orange.
He should know – Andy hand picked every single oyster from his oyster beds just across the bay from where we’re stood. He pointed out into the far distance towards the giant chimneys of Valero: “See that white buoy?” he said. “That’s the farm.” That’s where Atlantic Edge Oysters was born.
Four days later I’m stood the other side of the bay looking back at the Old Point House.
Andy and his accomplice, Jake Davies, have arrived in a big truck and say they’ll get the quad bike out from their compound. I can start walking if I like, Andy suggested, pointing about 800m into the distance towards rows of crude trestles on the edge of the water. It’s low tide he says, so we’ve got an hour or so.
And so I set off across the muddy tidal flats, pools of cold water reflecting a changeable November sky that’s blue one minute and then a steely grey the next. Every so often my feet sink into barely-visible holes left by bait diggers earlier in the day. I’m glad I bought my wellies.
For all the glamour and luxury that surround oysters, farming them is hardly glamorous at all, said Andy once he and Jake arrive on their Honda. There’s undoubtedly a certain mystique surrounding the shellfish – typically presented as a delicacy at all the fancy restaurants.
Atlantic Edge oysters are served at the Old Point House as well as Paternoster Farm, Matt Powell’s Annwn, Stackpole Inn, Saundersfoot’s Coast, Rock and Oyster (a recent stop off for Marco Pierre White) and even further afield including the prestigious oyster bar – Bentley’s – in London. In fact, the bulk of the 3,500 oysters harvested every week at Angle end up on London tables, Andy said.
Yet, it wasn’t always so. Oysters used to be seen as an abundant food source which was relatively cheap to get our hands on. Millions of oysters went to London by train while plenty were scoffed in local pubs, washed down with pints of oyster stout. At its peak in the late 19th century, oyster fisheries employed hundreds of people in Wales and hundreds of boats left small ports along the south Wales coast landing over nine million oysters every year.
In Pembrokeshire, the Cleddau Estuary and the fishing villages of Angle, Lawrenny and Llangwm were the centre of oyster fishing. While, across Carmarthen Bay, oyster beds stretched from Porthcawl and along the Gower coast. Mumbles became the oyster capital.
But then the industry declined – a perfect storm of overfishing, pollution and disease destroying them to all but extinction. The native oyster became a rare delicacy, superseded by the imported Pacific oyster – or rock oyster.
Andy – a former postman turned marine biologist – wants to bring some of that heritage back to the Welsh coastline.
Stood in the middle of the Angle mudflats, he takes a couple of the oysters from the baskets strapped onto the trestles and sets about shucking them. With a deft move, he opens up the knobbly shell to reveal a beautifully white oyster sitting in its briny liquid, delicate gills around the edge and a glistening muscle in the middle. The inside of the shell has a lustrous sheen reflecting all the colours of the estuary.
“You have to chew them,” Andy said as he flicked one into his mouth straight from the shell with his knife. There’s no need to purify these as they come straight out of class A waters – that’s to say super clean and fresh – which is why they stand out from oysters grown on the east coast of England.
Andy explains why these are the very best oysters in all the land: “The unique marine environment of the Cleddau estuary where nutrient-rich Atlantic waters mix with freshwater flowing down from the Preseli Mountains through salt marshes and seagrass beds imparts a distinct set of characteristics or ‘merroir’ to the oysters.”
It’s a new word on me, but Andy assures me that just like wine, so too do oysters develop their own unique merroir (terroir’s maritime adaptation) reflecting the geological and ecological environment of their growing region.
Twice a day in Angle, tidal waters pour into the bay bringing in clean and nutrient-rich Atlantic seawater mixing with the sweet waters flowing down the estuary. Andy closes his eyes as he slowly chews another oyster and conjures up words to describe the experience.
There’s a “citrus grassiness” and a “delicate clean merroir of brine, fresh cucumber with citrus and grassy tones”. There’s also a complex mineral quality on the palate with a “satisfying unctuous brine taste”, he assures me.
Andy suddenly opens his eyes and turns to Jake: “These are actually very good,” he said. He turns back to me and adds that Atlantic Edge is the only oyster farm to be awarded a Great Taste Award in 2022.
The judges were similarly rapturous: “Wow! Fresh briny, seaside loveliness,” one said. Another declared them to have: “A cucumber delicacy that is just stunning. Air filled sunshine on the palate. Divine, clear water.”
Andy just loves the sea – and in particular oysters – he said with a big grin like a child’s spread across his face.
“I just can’t put my finger on it,” he said wistfully.
His love of the sea was nurtured growing up in Brighton in the 1970s, where he learned to surf and sail dinghies. At the time, he had no idea he could make a living from the sea. He left school at 16 and, following in his father’s footsteps, worked for years as a postman.
It was only after travelling the world for a while and coming back jobless that Andy visited a careers advisor and mentioned his passion for the sea. She suggested an access scheme that fast-tracked people through A-levels and into university.
And so Andy found himself studying marine biology at Swansea University. There, he painstakingly picked out the tiny creatures living on the gnarled roots of those giant seaweeds. That led to a PHD studying the seabed of Carmarthen Bay where similar microscopic creatures are devoured by flocks of threatened ducks called scoters. Later he worked on boats in the North Sea.
He quickly realised his natural aptitude for getting on well with fishermen and an understanding of what the conservationists wanted too. He went freelance, setting up his consultancy Salacia Marine, named after the wife of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. Slowly but surely, the allure of oysters pulled him in and
prove whether or not oyster restoration could work.
Originally, he wanted to use the money to purchase small oysters – the size of a 50-pence piece – and rear them in Swansea Bay. But natives are so rare he couldn’t find enough babies to buy. The plan changed to bringing in mature oysters from Loch Ryan in Scotland – one of the last few healthy, wild populations of native oysters – to see if they would spawn, send baby oysters into the bay to kickstart Welsh oyster fisheries after a hundred-year hiatus.
Andy’s can-do attitude is evident in the way he speaks. There’s not a huge amount of money in oyster farming, he said. His enterprise has to pay for itself and afford him a living, but this is as much a labour of love as it is a business. He doesn’t want to rely on grant money and it’s the commercial sale of the rock oysters which part-funds his restoration work. He is particularly proud of how he saved nearly four million oysters after reading a tweet in 2021.
Andy had read a tweet by the Morecambe Bay Oysters’ hatchery in Cumbria explaining it had produced four million small oysters, which were rapidly outgrowing their home at the hatchery but had no place to go. Andy replied offering his oyster bed off Mumbles in Swansea Bay and its sister farm at Atlantic Edge Oysters in Angle Bay, Pembrokeshire.
A quick phonecall established a plan of action and several batches were released over the summer and autumn months.
“Between us we have restocked the Mumbles beds with 1.6 million native oysters since 2021,” Andy said.
His work is the biggest native oyster restocking or restoration attempt ever in the UK. But it’s not just the sheer scale of his undertaking which is noteworthy. What sets this oyster restoration initiative apart from others under way across the UK and Europe is that it is an entirely privately resourced undertaking.
In Europe, Pacific oyster production in Ireland, France and Spain far outstrips that in the UK. France alone produces about 100 times more than Britain.
Andy doesn’t want to see mass farming in Wales, however. Stood in the mud in Angle, there are 15 lines of trestles stretching away from us. There are around 100,000 native oysters here and a further 250,000 rock oysters, Andy said. Andy only comes out here on the lowest spring tides – otherwise the baskets filled with oysters at their various life stages stay here unattended, filtering the Atlantic water to their heart’s content and getting bigger by the day.
There are two types of oysters here – the native oyster and the rock oyster, which is the one you’ll likely be served up at restaurants. The baby natives, just a few months old, are just bigger than a thumbnail, while at the other end of the scale, the mature rock oysters are fist-sized and ready to eat. Andy and Jake pick a couple of dozen of the best ones to take back to the Stackpole Inn that afternoon.