In search of Gower Gold: recollections of a journey on foot
Rhys Underdown remembers a tall tale of a long journey through the Gower, where the past bleeds into the present.
Blackhole Gut. It is a comically appropriate name for the churning mass of grey water spitting up at us from what seemed like a hundred feet below. Hugging the cliff face with our hiking bags, we consulted our map. Yes, barely distinguishable in the sodden crease of disintegrating paper was the unmistakeable inlet named ‘Blackhole Gut’, into whose dark mouth we were staring, half a mile closer to the coastline than the path we thought we had been following. Comically appropriate it might seem to me now, at the time the name confirmed our fear that we had found ourselves in a deep corner of the hungriest part of Gower’s belly.
We were hopelessly lost. Delirious after two days of walking around the Gower coastal path, we had become distracted, overly confident in my knowledge of the area, and lured into a false sense of security by the ever-watchful Worm’s Head, a distant outcrop of rock which we thought was our guide. Instead, it had drawn us away from the safety of the National Trust-approved route, and onto a path which in fact led to the precipice of a cliff, beyond which was a stomach-turning drop into the sea. To understand how we got there, however, we’ll have to choose a different beginning.
Back in September 2018, my friend Dom, a keen walker, suggested we arrange a hike before returning to our last year of university. I, with a keenness to show off the rugged beauty of the Gower around which I had grown up, convinced him to journey down from his native Chesterfield. This also seemed like a good opportunity for me to stake my claim in the ongoing battle for Which Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Is The Most Outstandingly Beautiful between the Gower and the Pennines. Our relationship, in addition to a mutual love of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, had in large part been forged during impassioned debates about Welsh independence, of which I was a fierce defender and he a relentless devil’s advocate.
Wales and Welshness, to me, a Welsh student living away in an English university, had become central facets of my identity, and I realise now that in some ways the Gower Peninsula served as the most tangible focal point of this identity. My mam’s family hail from Llanmadoc, a tiny village on the northwestern tip of the Gower, and despite myself having grown up in nearby Swansea, much of my childhood was spent there, and much of my imaginative and creative life kindled there. It came to represent to me so much of what I feel about Wales: its sense of myth, its strangeness, its magic are implicit in the very landscape and people who live there. My own Welsh identity and attachment to the physical land of the Gower were, and remain, integral to each other. On some level, then, my bringing Dom to this place was a way of attempting to communicate something about Wales and my relationship to it, perhaps more effectively and coherently than I ever could over pints in the student bar, no matter how impassioned these attempts may have been.
With all this considered, being stranded at the top of Blackhole Gut, with seemingly no way back or forward, seems to me to be a useful image to convey the conflicts and confusion inherent in constructing identities. To put it another way, my memory of my trip around the Gower with my friend, and the reason it has become such a formative part of my makeup, tells me much about the power of places, landscapes and the environment to allow us to tell stories about ourselves, as well as allowing them to tell stories of their own. Of course, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this at the time; rather, my memories have incubated over the past five years to inform the reflections I’m relaying below.
The first day started off bright and warm. After picking Dom up from Swansea train station, we soon found ourselves walking among the holidaymakers on Caswell Bay, enjoying the last breaths of late summer. The thick smell of gorse, purple and humming in the heat, hit us as we climbed the first of many paths up to the headland. The bramble bushes boasted deep, jealous greens, heavy with blackberries, wild flowers blushing their scents at our shins. The expanse of sea across to Devon faced us as we reached the top, and the din of those on the beach fell away, hushed by the thickets of bramble, gorse and cliff between us.
The rhythm of boot on stone and grass played a central part in the first hours of walking. You have to get into a rhythm. I was no seasoned walker, but I knew that this rhythm — not only of the feet, legs and arms, but also of speech and conversation — is important in any journey on foot. We were entering our third and final year of university, and there was much to catch up and gossip about. We were anticipating with excitement the prospects of our unknown futures.
We made good progress through Brandy Cove to the “comfortable, wild” Pwlldu, as Dylan Thomas called it. An apt assessment it is. Pwlldu is tucked away but still easily accessible on foot; it looks Mediterranean in a certain light, the water a shocking blue. Its pebbled beach makes a sound like applause as the spent waves drag themselves over its stony belly, back out to sea. Today, the stones clapped for us alone as we crossed the beach and made for the next peak.
The sea was the first thing that especially impressed Dom; the Pennines, with their sweeping vales and sheer vastness, had a power and a majesty of their own, but the grandeur of the sea and our view of it from the high headlands of Pennard, Southgate and Three Cliffs was enough to shock him into reluctant appreciation. The sea that morning was calm and still, but no matter how still the sea is, there is always a brilliant sense of motion to it, a kind of electrified wriggling, a sideways, cyclical sliding within the stillness, as if a horde of greyed serpents were moving endlessly towards the sand.
But it was when we rounded the tight corner of Oxwich Point that we felt that the sea was beginning to behave playfully with us. A thick covering of trees lined the path here and formed a kind of tunnel overhead. This almost entirely drowned out the sound of the sea and blocked the light above us so that, when there was a gap in the tree line, the sound and sight of crashing tide, which was now much closer than we had remembered it, made it feel like it was hiding from us and leaping out, colluding with the vines and trees, playing peekaboo.
Coupled with our exhaustion, the wider landscape continued to take on a personality. Not that it was the hardest or longest of walks, but after spending hours relating the natural world around you to the paper diagrams on a map, you become dependent on the accuracy and honesty of the landscape, and any sign, real or otherwise, that it is behaving other than expected, produces a stress and a delirium which can challenge an unseasoned walker like myself, especially one who professed to know the place like the back of his hand.
We reached Port Eynon at about 7pm, our spirits lifted as we spotted some greasy chip paper from the laps of two people sat on a bench overlooking the bay. We quickened our pace and bought butties overflowing with chips and doused in vinegar. Our chips piled, we sat on a bench overlooking the sea, scouring the map for a place to stay. We hadn’t booked anywhere, but managed to steal a night’s camping near the chippy. My diary closes the final day like this:
It had begun to rain as we settled down in the tent – a thick fog descended and the wind roared. We felt truly and wonderfully alone, sipping whiskey and listening to Bob Dylan with the sea wind and rain roaring at our tent.
We awoke early to a high and rising tide and even thicker fog. The sea itself, which was only a couple of hundred metres from the campsite, was barely visible. There was an intensity to it, and I remember at the time being reminded of a passage in the Mabinogi, where a mist suddenly descends and every living thing in the world disappears. The characters are left wandering through the mist, believing themselves to be the only creatures alive.
The seagulls also started behaving differently. In Swansea town their ever-present squawking and scavenging made them a constant and annoying presence. But here, whole flocks of them would sweep unheard, disappearing into the mist as wave froth dissipates into the sea, gathering in large colonies on the distant jutting rocks. This is where it first occurred to me that my experience of the Gower was really limited to the roads and the car, far from the wildness of its real, hidden coast. I had never approached anything on foot in this way.
There are two main roads through the Gower, which splinter at Swansea Common. One heads north towards Llanmorlais, Llanrhidian and Llanmadoc, and the other south towards Port Eynon, Oxwich and Rhossili. Both, but especially the southern road, have high, towering hedges, which obstruct the view of passing scenery. To get to Oxwich, for instance, you have to turn off the road, which slopes through trees past Penrice castle and brings you out onto the dunes, and only then do you see the sea. Dylan Thomas noticed this too. In his story ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’, about two young boys playing truant and camping out on Worm’s Head, Raymond Price, passing through Swansea Common, says “down there is Oxwich, but you can’t see it”.
The same is true of Rhossili, Llangennith, Llanmadoc – any of the places along the Gower coast, or at least the places I know well. At most, you gather tantalising glimpses of the sea for some of the drive from Swansea, and then suddenly it is there all before you. It is therefore difficult to get a sense of approaching these places. The transition from the teasing greenery of the winding lanes, to the abrupt beauty of the coast, is startling and powerful.
But this feeling is entirely reversed by the process of travelling on foot. It is all approach, and a sense of never fully arriving anywhere. Driving by car, confined to the road, it can only ever be two directions, one way in, one way out. On foot, however, the landscape can choose how it reveals itself, and that, by virtue of the shifting tides and changing environment, could be infinite in its variety. I think this explains the magnetic grip that Worm’s Head had on me that day, as we approached it on foot.
The thing is, I had been highly anticipating the first sighting of Worm’s Head. It was the dramatic climax of the trip, the embodiment of what I felt to be Gower’s mythic power. Worm’s Head is an impressive outcrop of rock on the south-western corner of the peninsula, moulded strangely by converging tides over thousands of years to form a shape like an enormous sea serpent. If the Gower is the focal point of my sense of Welshness, then Worm’s Head is the focal point of my fascination with the Gower itself. It is Gower’s pièce de résistance, and somewhere I would take any visiting friend. By car, that is.
And today, the prospect of seeing the Worm was injected with particular significance by the mist. It was on a similarly misty day that raiding Vikings in the eighth century had thought the huge protruding rock to be a giant sea monster, frozen in defence – or attack. They named it the wurm, the Old Norse word for ‘dragon’ or ‘serpent’. The name stuck. Perhaps it had genuinely terrified them, or perhaps it was more of an observation. Either way, it cuts a distinctive enough shape to have warranted naming at all.
But nothing could have prepared me for the moment I first saw the Worm on that day. No matter how keenly we had anticipated its emergence from the mist, it was already there. My diary documents the experience like this:
I had known it was coming, and I’d expected it any moment, but no amount of foreknowledge could have prepared me for that initial sighting. I knew what it was, but for the first moment I was seeing it for the first time. I was filled with an awful wonder, joy, terror, surprise, all in one exclamatory moment. And then we pointed and yelled and cheered with a strange chaotic triumph, “as if we both were blind” as Dylan Thomas said of it, or something similar.
However, this process kept repeating itself each time we followed the path inland and back out again. “We walked on with Worm’s Head always in sight”, my diary reads, but actually it would have been dipping in and out of sight, only seeming as if it was always within our sight, because it felt like it was always watching us. Each journey inland was then accompanied by an increasingly steep ascension and decline, so that it took us longer each time to venture in and back out again, our exhaustion deepening.
The Worm seemed to be nearing us at a quicker and quicker rate. Measuring time now involved how far away the Worm looked. Our gaze and sense of direction followed it, and nothing but it. Each time we ventured inland, following the path, we would be itching to get back out in sight of the Worm. It held an allure that consumed our conversations and imaginations. We wanted to be in its gaze as much as we wanted it to be in ours. It enraptured us to the point that we wanted to stay as close to the coast’s edge as possible, as far from the road as we could be. And that is how we ended up stuck on a cliff, looking down into Blackhole Gut – or, as it is otherwise (perhaps even more aptly) known ‘Devil’s Cwm’.
It is at this point that my diary refers to the walking becoming “increasingly difficult and dangerous,” and involved:
Scaling routes along very narrow paths, with barely a foot’s width of gorse separating [us from] large drops, sometimes as much as thirty feet high. The roots below our feet were tangled and torn, easily tripping and falling off the edge.
Scrambling along the fingernails of the coast in this way was thrilling, and the adrenaline of the unexpected danger we were suddenly in carried us through. We chose to disregard the obvious danger we could see with our eyes and feel with our feet, and carry on, trusting the Worm, trusting the National Trust path, which, it later turned out, we had long since departed from:
We later realised that we’d left the National Trust path for some miles, and were following an unmapped and unregulated route. On the side of a fairly sheer cliff face we found this, when the ‘path’ we’d followed led straight down into a hundred-foot drop.
This was Blackhole Gut. But, of course, after a few heart-stopping minutes of scrambling up the cliff face, trying not to imagine how easy it would be to slide down onto the bed of jagged rocks and gurgling dark water below us, we found the path easily enough, a few hundred metres inland. The chaos of the coastline was hardly discernible even from that short distance, and although we were grateful to have experienced it, we were relieved to see other walkers and have the crashing fury of the sea dimmed in our ears.
The walk into Rhossili was long. Like Oxwich, the end was in sight for a long while, and so it felt closer than it really was. The inlets, which had been getting steeper and deeper as we headed westward, had now opened up into monstrous gorges and cliffs, which my diary describes as “the violent remains of glaciers, torn from the rock and carved like giants’ kneecaps. 100ft from top to bottom, sheer and green.” In my memory of it there was mist, but my diary notes that the sky had cleared by this point. Mist has a way of clinging on to things, even memory.
After some food at the Worm’s Head Hotel — the intensity of the Worm figure now tamed by the quaint, safe, warm pub, with Dylan Thomas quotes adorning the walls — we carried on, the Worm in our rear view mirror, not forgotten but boring its eyes into the backs of our heads. It was about midday, just passed. We planned our way out: over Rhossili Downs to Sveyn’s Howes, an ancient burial chamber, then into Llangennith and over the next hill into Llanmadoc, where we would spend our next night. The landscape was now broadening, the monstrous gorges and giants’ kneecaps flattened into long plains. It was as if the body of the coastline was stretching out and reclining, tired from being hunched and contorted.
By the time we reached Llangennith, as the Peninsula begins to round northward, we were exhausted again, and stopped off at the churchyard for a break. St Cennydd’s church, which I had passed so many times but never been inside, turned out to be a trove of historical and mythical treasure. My diary describes the “many incredible relics” housed there, including a ninth-century Celtic-style coffin-shaped stone, “thought to be a fragment either of a cross-base or the coffin lid of Cennydd himself,” my diary explains. But the most significant thing we encountered was what we gleaned from the church’s information booklets — simple historical accounts of the church’s founding and the mythical origin story of the real historical figure of St Cennydd — which, slightly unnervingly, closely reflected our own experiences and observations of the previous two days.
The account was written in the tenth century, and describes the birth of the baby Cennydd, who is born deformed as a result of incestuous relations between the Breton King Dihoc and his own daughter, and placed in a cradle and hidden in the reeds of the River Llwchwr, away from the wrathful King Arthur, who happens to be on his way to Loughour for a big feast. Cennydd travels, Moses-like, into the estuary and washes up on the rocks of Worm’s Head, where he is raised by the seagulls and an angel with a bell-shaped breast. He performs various miracles and is then allegedly cured of his deformity by St David himself in 545 AD, then becoming a hermit and living on nearby Burry Holmes, the pre-Norman remains of a settlement there still present.
What was especially notable about the account we read, however, was the behaviour of the gulls. This tenth-century chronicler had made similar observations to us, noting how they would watch quietly and how whole flocks would behave as one: in the story, when a childless farmer discovers the infant Cennydd and brings him ashore to care for him himself, the gulls attack his farm, driving his cattle into the sea in vengeance, reclaiming Cennydd as they did so. There was an undeniable grace about them but yes, their silence and way of moving together gave them a sinister aspect.
Sat reading in this quiet church made me wonder about the real Cennydd buried beneath us, and of the lives of the people who noted their observations of the surrounding landscape, who were buried around us. How this community – one that had been ravaged by terrifying Viking raids, various plagues and crop failures and floods, and was living in the shadow of this strange, giant sea-serpent frozen in rock – felt about the place they lived. The act of writing down such a story attests to the incredible imaginative grip that Worm’s Head and this area had on the community that lived there over a thousand years ago. It reflects the Worm’s ability – and indeed, that of landscape in general – to function as a narrative tool that the locals could use to tell the story of their origins. It’s a manifestation of this universal human impulse to draw narratives from our surroundings, so that we may better understand them.
Perhaps the factors which determine how well we can ‘know’ a place include how or whether we can involve it in the stories we tell about ourselves. And this tenth-century chronicler was doing just that: conjuring his own tale, or at least documenting narratives that had been passed down orally, so that the strangeness of the landscape could feel more familiar, less threatening, less hostile. I can’t also help but wonder what King Arthur made of Loughour.
As I consider writing about this final section of the trip, of the journey down into Llanmadoc and our final night there, I notice I am slightly stumped. Re-entering such genuinely familiar territory, as we descended Llanmadoc Hill into the village, felt like emerging from a dream, and trying to mythologise this would feel dishonest, like trying to keep dying embers alight. I know this place too well to be able to make it appear anything other than what it is.
We camped up in one of my grandad’s fields, overlooking the Llwchwr Estuary; I showed Dom the church I was Christened in, St Madoc’s, and pointed out where my relatives lived, where my mam was born. We drank heartily in the pub which gave her her first job, the Britannia Inn, revelling in the Gower Gold it served. The pub was empty apart from a table of elderly people who had just finished their choir rehearsal. We asked them if they would mind taking a picture of us, and they excitedly handed our phone to a man named Graham, who, it seemed, was especially tech-savvy. Ironically, however, despite Llanmadoc being so familiar to me, the effects of several pints of Gower Gold and an absence of street lights meant that it took several attempts to locate the correct field.
I dreamt of St Cennydd that night, whisked along the river below me, the gulls flying overhead and Viking ships sailing in the distance. We awoke, my head sore and feet blistered, Dom apparently fine. We were to leave the coastal path and head inland, cutting through to Cefn Bryn. My nan would pick us up in Reynoldston, at the King Arthur pub, where we had our final pints of Gower Gold. We ate lunch by Maen Ceti, or Arthur’s Stone, the 4,500 year old neolithic burial chamber on Cefn Bryn. My diary informs me that we spoke of “Irish and Welsh folklore,” “the idea of otherworlds and Annwn”, and “Glyndŵr’s Revolt and Owain Law Goch”, but I don’t remember the contents of those conversations, and, in truth, the magic of the previous days already seemed distant, our experiences already intangible myths of their own.
We ended the trip with a night out in Swansea, playing pool in the Uplands till the early hours and blasting Bob Dylan on the jukebox. We went our separate ways and flew through our final year of university, and indeed the subsequent five years since, enjoying other adventures along the way – though none quite as unique as this one.
I have never retraced my steps along the Gower coastal path. I moved to London two years ago, and Dom, his appetite for adventure apparently not quenched by our journey around the Gower, now teaches English on the Galapagos Islands. But I have returned to that moment on Blackhole Gut, stranded on the cliff, and indeed many other moments on that trip, countless times since. I sometimes want to return to it physically, but I have the feeling that I would probably never be able to find that exact spot again if I were to try. Like the sea, the land has its ways of telling you that it wields great power over you, and never the other way around.
As I finish writing this piece, I am making another journey, from London to Swansea. I am just pulling into Port Talbot Parkway. It is winter, 2024, and the furnaces of Port Talbot steelworks recently fanned their final flames. One day, though it seems inconceivable now, the steelworks, which have been a feature of the South Wales landscape for generations, will be gone. It feels a bit like trying to picture the Gower without Worm’s Head. They both have similar ways of watching you as you pass by.
Seeing the hills of the Swansea Valley approaching in the far distance, I realise that I don’t, and can never really, know Wales in the way I thought I did. In the same way, when I was fearing for my life on Blackhole Gut, I was wrong to expect that I could know Gower in the way I was attempting to. Because each time you think you get it, the light changes, the moment’s gone. Life happens and you’re lost again, your perspective shifted, and you have to readjust your eyes.
Rhys Underdown (he/him) is a 27-year-old bilingual writer and musician from Swansea, now based in London. His writing explores his relationship with Wales and Welshness, particularly through the landscapes and mythologies of the Gower and drawing on the inherent tension of living outside Wales. All images are by the author.
This story is itself Gower Gold! I don't believe the part about finding a campsite in the Gower for under one million pounds a night, though. 😋