Discovering Pembrey's former harbour

A return to cloudless skies and gentle warmth today, and after breakfast a walk southwards on the beach as far as Pembrey's 19th century harbour wall. A vast expanse of fine sandy beach with a tide formed fringe of multi-coloured textured pebbles below the sand dunes. I was disturbed to see how much litter had been dropped, in the dunes more than the beach. As Clare had a free degradable plastic bag from the Co-op, I was able to start collecting rubbish. Most of it came from one campfire picnic site. Altogether I collected eighteen cans, seven plastic bottles, two plastic disposable lighters and large fragments of a couple of broken bottles, in twenty minutes. I parked the bag in a place I could remember and took it to the nearest bin a quarter of a mile away, when we returned.

Just off the beach edge there's an enormous bank of sand, deposited there in recent decades due to coastal erosion. Shallow waters separate beach from sand bank. The tide comes in stealthily at speed making a return to shore difficult and dangerous. Warning signs are posted everywhere but rescue emergencies still occur. Just as well Burry Port has its of lifeboat station nearby.

Why there should be a huge flat tidal plain area about a quarter of a mile square in dimensions adjacent to the old port wall, with a tidal watercourse snaking across it, was a puzzle. We returned to the harbour in Burry Port, and had a sandwich lunch in the delightful and traditional Harbour View tea room. It was very well appointed with paintings and art photography pictures on the walls. The toilet walls with decorated with a framed compendium of photos taken by our host on her youthful travels in North America and Australia. A lovely homely touch.

After a siesta back at the house, Clare went down to Burry Port harbour, and I returned by a different route to explore the Pembrey Harbour entrance, to try and identify what purpose was served by the remains of nineteenth century maritime trade. I found a history board which stated that the quarter mile flat area next to Pembrey's port wall was a tidal pond with gates, built early in the 19th century. Its waters were fed though channels in the harbour wall to flush encroaching estuary silt from the harbour mouth to keep it free for navigation. 

The tidal gates, lighthouse and buildings on the harbour wall are long gone. The flushing pond is now a tidal water meadow. The watercourse snaking over it seems to have been created by a freshwater stream entering at the pond's inland extremity. The pond's semi saline waters help create a localised eco-system. It must be very interesting for any environmentalist to study.

On returning to the house along the edge of the dunes, a skylark rose from cover and ascended thirty anf then fifty feet, singing loudly. I got a couple of photos of the bird singing loudly. They weren't much good, as my Olympus long zoom lens was at the limit of its reach, but it's a moment I'll treasure anyway.

I cooked supper for us, then enjoyed looking at uploaded photos, confirming as far as possible without recourse to the written historical record what I'd deduced from observation. What a stimulating day!

 

Llwchwr Estuary sojourn

Woke up to a lovely warm and sunny morning. After breakfast I made a call to the bereaved daughter of the woman whose funeral I'm doing in ten days time, to introduce myself and arrange to meet her and her sibling when we get back on Friday. Then an unhurried start for St German's, so it didn't matter that I had red traffic lights at every junction. The church was filled with bright sunlight and the Eucharist was filled with pregnant pauses to savour every moment. Heavenly indeed, and during the sermon I sang the opening verse of Irving Berlin's 'Dancing cheek to cheek, as it speaks of heavenly intimacy, something the St German's congregation knows about.

I had to dash home afterwards for as punctual a lunch as is possible, as the car needed packing. I was also anxious to complete next Thursday's Morning Prayer upload, as I'd only got half way through recording and editing it a few days ago, and not found time to complete it. While Clare had a siesta, I completed the recording and editing in twenty minutes and then did the video slideshow, but ran out of time to upload it to YouTube, so I had to leave it and cross my fingers that the broadband in our holiday house will be up to scratch. In the end we left just after three, half an hour later than planned, but the journey time, including a traffic queue due to roadworks outside Burry Port was only an hour and a half, so no need for a stop on the way there.

Our holiday home hosts are Brian and Jill. Brian met us and gave us a full briefing about the house, which is set in a quiet cul-de-sac near the police station a few hundred yards from the main street and Burry Port railway station. It's a three bedroom mid twentieth century terraced house recently restored in immaculate condition and very well equipped indeed. I needn't have worried about connectivity. There's EE superfast broadband downloading at over 100mbs and uploading at 20mbs. First task, to attach all four of our digital devices to the router's wifi - always a fiddly process, which I rarely get right first time round with a ten digit passcode jumble of numbers and letters to type in properly.

Then a fifteen minute walk down to the harbour to look around and take in the landscape. Gentle rolling wooded hills and valleys behind the coastal plain, the Llwchwr Estuary to the north and east of us, and to the south, the west flank of the Gower peninsula with Cefn Bryn rising and falling away gently down towards Rhossili beach, which its hidden behind the headland from here, but what you can see beyond it on the horizon is Worm's Head and reached by a tidal causeway from it Ynys Weryn, aka Devil's Bridge.

The local RNLI HQ out by the harbour was hosting a barbecue, and people were out on neighbouring beaches enjoying the sun while they could. The tide was turning and starting to come in. There comes a critical moment after which people can get stranded offshore or the sea covers all the sand right up to the sea defences. Then a warning klaxon sounds. Teenagers on bikes, scooters or skateboards were larking about on the jetty, playing music from their phones on portable bluetooth speakers, all enjoying a lovely warm afternoon.

Just outside the harbour there's a commemorative plaque to aviator Amelia Earhart's plane landing in the Llwchwr Estuary near Burry Port on 18th June 1928, a first transatlantic flight direct from Newfoundland, by a woman, even if she was one of three pilots on board. Their destination was a public reception at Southampton but the pilots lost their way due to cloud cover and landed their float plane on water to find out where they were. A fisherman rowed out in a coracle to greet them, but when they asked their way they couldn't understand his Carmarthenshire English accent!

By the time we got back to the main street, the chippie were closed, likewise the restaurants and we didn't fancy trying the pubs, so when we got back I cooked some veggies to go with smoked mackerel warmed up in a pan with hot water. All this an a complementary mini bottle of Chilean Merlot went down a treat. As the sun was setting I went for a walk to check out where other shops were located and found a pharmacy, a Chinese, an Indian and Balti takeway, all three open. As I walked back to the house a saw several couples walking back tipsy from one of the busy pubs, but no rowdy youth. Maybe it's different in high season, but quiet streets were reminiscent of village life on Sundays long gone.