Exploring Britain
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate
leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me” REBECCA, DAPHNE DU MAURIER
festival dedicated to the writer in the port of Fowey close to where she lived. (This year, it runs from 10-19 of May.) North across the Bristol Channel, one of the most
celebrated Welsh poets of the 20th century, Dylan Thomas, grew up in Swansea, which he called a “lovely, ugly city”. In one of the stories in his autobiographical collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog Thomas and a friend cycle across the Gower Peninsula to Rhossilli Bay. They cross the sands at low tide to Worm’s Head, a spit of land said to resemble a dragon’s head and suffer the fate feared by any walker who does the same thing today. “We did not speak as we climbed. I thought: ‘If we open
our mouths we’ll both say: ‘Too late, it’s too late.’”... We stood on the beginning of the Head and looked down, though both of us could have said, without looking: ‘The sea is in.’” But if you can avoid being stranded on Worm’s Head the Gower is a wonderful place to visit, with some
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superb beaches and magnificent walks offering glorious views out to sea to the south and west. Later in life Thomas lived west of the Gower, at
Laugharne in Carmarthenshire at the Boathouse, on a hillside above the Taf estuary. Here he wrote some of his most famous works, including Under Milkwood, his much-loved ‘play for voices’ about the people of a small coastal town, Llareggub (read it backwards), based on Laugharne. Alongside the Boathouse Thomas’s ‘writing shed’ is preserved much as he left it, complete with a soothing view across the estuary. A wistfulness pervades Thomas’s works, but for
pure nostalgia and sentimentality it would be difficult to match the Waverley novels, by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Scott’s historical melodramas created an enduring romantic and not entirely accurate image of the Highlands and fierce, kilt-clad clansmen.
Clockwise from main: College Court in Gloucester, with the Beatrix Potter shop; fishing boats and the Dylan Thomas Boathouse on the Taf Estuary; Sarehole Mill in Birmingham; Bodinnick in Cornwall, home to Daphne du Maurier
BRITAIN 65
PHOTOS: ©PHIL WILLS/ALAMY/VISITBRITAIN/ADRIAN HOUSTON/JOHN JAMES/ROBERT HARDING PICTURE LIBRARY LTD
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