It wasn’t all that long ago when an anorak was simply an anorak. It was either thin, or quilted; collared or hooded. It had a zip and pockets and possibly, if you were feeling flush, a fleecy lining. So when you headed out into the wind and the rain for a walk, there was nothing in the way of dithering over clothing choices. You simply zipped up that unremarkable anorak and got on with it.
In a more consumer-led age, it’s naive to imagine that we could ever return to such blissful simplicity. Every form of hobby or recreational activity now comes with a dizzying array of kit. Runners will know only too well the tyranny of choice: the absurd array of trainers, shorts and T-shirts, each making their own mountebank claims for improving speed and reducing chafing and for ‘wicking’ sweat. And these days, the walker is now presented with warehouses full of specialised gear, from special ‘thermic’ trousers to the very latest in water bottle ergonomics. If you are a serious walker, you are very much made to feel that you have to wear the precision-designed uniform. Or that somehow, if you don’t, you won’t be doing it right.
This is why I have decided on this occasion to visit a part of the world which is very slightly set back from the trendiest weekend rambling routes; a place where one might expect to find a more old-fashioned kind of walker, not dressed head to toe in black Neoprene. In fact, there is a pleasing feeling of déjà vu in the prospect before me. I am high up, on firm, sprung turf, looking out over the silver sheen of the sea. It is not so much a feeling I have been here before as a sense that I am in an earlier time – perhaps the 1950s. It is the seaside, but the very wholesome face of the seaside. This is the far tip of the Gower peninsula in south Wales. The light, for this deep autumnal time of year, is bright and warm; even in November, the sun takes that little bit longer to set on the people of the west. As it happens, I am quite wrong about fashion. There are a few other walkers stumping around – older than me, yes, but in clothes that are defiantly up to date. These people are in light waterproof trousers, and in fleeces that are not too thick and not too thin. Some fleeces are even sleeveless, allowing for even greater flexibility in matters of temperature and comfort. Such clothes are tribal badges. They can even have an element of fetishism about them. One old friend of mine used to swear by his Rohan blouson and trousers, and by the way that they could be scrunched up into a ball the size of a tin can. He was ceaselessly impressed with this tin can aspect.
However, out here on this dramatic promontory, with darker clouds inking themselves on to the sky in the distance, I have rejected such utilitarian comfiness. Indeed, for reasons to do with a certain sense of angry resistance – I never cared for the way these new-fangled fleeces gradually invaded all the woolly jumper shops – I am dressed absurdly in overcoat, cardigan and jeans. This is the opposite of Baden-Powell. Be Unprepared. All the more so considering that I am standing upon one of the most reliably soaking places in the British Isles.
Nearly sixty years ago, the Gower peninsula – this narrow jut of verdant, bountiful land, poking into the wild Atlantic sea just beyond the city of Swansea – was granted a great honour. In 1956, it was the first place in the country to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. AONBs were intended as cousins to the new National Parks, in that these areas too would be accorded certain levels of planning protection, and given help with conservation and improvements. So Glamorgan County Council, in cahoots with The Gower Society, started pressing the National Parks Commission, clearly rather harder than other areas managed. Incidentally, the phrase ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ can now pull one up a little; is such a subjective judgement best reached by anonymous committee? Isn’t it even a little impertinent? Whatever the case, in 1956, other such Areas-To-Be must have looked on with envy.
The Gower peninsula conforms to a very particular and traditional sense of beauty, I think, in that this is a landscape of remoteness, combined with a sort of Celtic primitivism (this comes in the form of numerous Neolithic burial mounds, as opposed to the local people, I hasten to add). The peninsula coast is also burrowed through with caves, some of which held deep religious and sacred significance. Gaze out from one at a vast, reddening sun dipping over a sea of inkiest blue, and you will understand why. These gentle valleys, high patches of gorsey, ferny moorland, apparently ancient woodland, combined with tiny smatterings of little villages, ruins of small medieval castles and rich salt marshes teeming with life, all conform to that post-nineteenth century sense of an urban escape. This was a place where the soul, as well as the body, might be recreated. It has certainly been good enough for local-girl-turned-Hollywood-actress, Catherine Zeta Jones, to keep a home there; and to visit faithfully and regularly with husband Michael Douglas and family. Another famous fan, though rather longer ago, was John Wesley. Not to mention, centuries back, a significant chunk of the population of north Devon, who took to their boats, sailed over the Bristol Channel, and decided to stay.
This accounts for the area’s historically English feel, despite it being clasped deep within the bosom of proud Cymru. Up until the nineteenth century, the peninsula was divided neatly between English-speakers in the south, and Welsh-speakers in the north. In 1933, the nascent National Trust was even swifter than the Gower Society to spot the picturesque possibilities of the peninsula, and since then it has been stealthily colonising the place, piece by piece, path by path. The result is that it is something of a walker’s paradise. Access is pretty free and easy in most parts.
Indeed, you can tell by the different ages and styles of the walking signposts all over this landscape – ranging from old green painted metal, to modern eco-friendly stencilled timber – just how long ramblers have been welcome. It is claimed that the area gets some three million visitors a year, mainly in the form of holidaymakers searching out those beaches of pale gold, and more recently, the surfing fraternity on its quest for those waves of silver. Despite all this, the Gower peninsula is still a curiously overlooked sliver of land. And I am here on an extremely windy day to test out my wider theory – one that goes to the very roots of walking – that one doesn’t actually need special clothes in which to go rambling.
What to wear when one goes walking has exercised many. In the eighteenth century, the Reverend Gilpin relayed how he favoured a long coat with many pockets for his perambulations on the Welsh mountains. The pockets were there to carry emergency supplies of food and drink. The coat was not built for comfort. Nor indeed were the fashions that came later. Even in the nineteenth century, thick tweed was clearly the thing, and for working class walking groups, it was sometimes found that ‘Sunday best’ was most suitable, as it put the emphasis on warmth, as well as practicality. Exposure to the elements is not quite the ordeal that it used to be for walkers.
Those Kinder Scout daredevils back in the 1930s, for instance; photographs show the men cheerfully attired in thick jackets and fairisle jumpers, all uncomfortably water absorbent. Any rain shower must have added several stone to their weight. Also, in the 1930s, when the fashion for rambling moved deeper into the middle classes, pamphlets and books and posters were illustrated with pictures of men and women wearing semi military honey-coloured walking gear: shirt or blouse, shorts, long socks, shoes looking rather like brogues, and for the lady, a jaunty scarlet neck scarf. In one famous illustration, an advertisement for the Ramblers’ Association itself, a man and a woman are striding up a green slope, looking upwards, with smiles at the prospect of the hill to come. Behind them lie perfect fields and a charming village. There is something redolent of totalitarian 1930s propaganda in this image; interestingly, it was during this prewar period, as newsreel footage of physically fit young Germans was shown in British cinemas, that the British government used such imagery to cajole its own young people into improving their fitness. With an increasingly resurgent and bellicose Germany in the process of rearming, ministers in Whitehall were concerned that young people did not have enough basic fitness for even the most undemanding of military routines. So it was that good long hikes, along with other types of recreation such as PT and climbing, were quietly encouraged through films and posters.
It was also around the 1930s that walkers began to hear the first unkind jeers from non-walkers; the tittering both about the pastime itself and particularly the clothes worn to enjoy it. For women at that time, there was one immediately pressing sartorial issue: shorts were considered by some to be revolutionary, and by others to be absolutely disgraceful. One woman rambler recalled ‘In those days, girls did not wear shorts, and we had several people stop their cars and take snaps of us. We also had abuse hurled at us for being hussies and showing our knees.’ Knees and the like, for either sex, were soon the subject of scorn and satire. In October 1934, there was a letter written to The Times that was to spark off some furious debate. It was about walkers and their aesthetic sense. ‘Why do our lean-limbed young men and shapely damsels make themselves so ugly in potato colour and khaki while merely taking a walk?’ The question was posed by one W. Russell Flint, a member of the Royal Academy, who clearly had delicate sensibilities.
In general terms, in those pre-Second World War years, hearty walking gear of the shorts and neckerchief variety was obviously only suitable for the warmer months. What about the rest of the year? It was almost as soon as walking had gained a fashionable currency, in the early-nineteenth century, that the business of specially tailoring clothing for miserable weather was addressed. One Charles Mackintosh had patented his first waterproof coat as long ago as the 1820s. This first version, unfortunately, had a tendency to melt when worn in exceptionally warm weather. It was improved with vulcanised rubber in the 1840s. Even then, it was always just a little too hot and cumbersome for the purposes of stout long-distance walks. Even so, the prototypes and the principle were there. The old hazards of getting caught in terrific cold downpours – as illustrated in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, when characters are exposed to terrible weather and either a) get ill or b) die – were mitigated a little. Nonetheless, right the way up to the end of the Second World War, the average walker would be kitted out simply with heavy woollens, and some good stout boots. The technology that came in the 1940s and 50s was to change all that in a revolutionary way.
The revolution was plastic. Even up until the 1950s, a real Mackintosh – of the bright yellow or shiny black variety still favoured by some fishermen – was a reassuringly heavy beast, as were oilskins. The new science brought forth much more flexible garments – ones that could be scrunched up into a bag when not needed. They were called pac-a-macs; how fun and sophisticated that must have sounded at first and how very swiftly those three syllables became a byword for a certain sort of naff hardiness.
Next came the cagoule. We might at a pinch argue that – apart from the car – this is the one single thing that made long-distance walking a much more realistic prospect for millions. For without the dragging weight of heavy rain gear – which could be intolerably hot on even vaguely warm days, and a savage nuisance if it didn’t actually rain at all – there was a new sense of liberation. Unfortunately, with liberation came what many saw as ugliness. For any fan of brightly coloured cagoules, there were just as many people who thought them both revolting, and beneath contempt. Faced with the cagoule, the upper-middle classes subtly fought back with their appropriation of the dark green Barbour waxed jacket. Here at last was an upper-crust anorak – a garment that combined rain-worthiness with quiet dignity. They have rather slyly returned recently, along with their quilted cousin the Husky, but this time to the high streets not the hills. But back in the 1960s and 70s, the rustling cagoule became a sort of metonym for an especially unloved form of walker, blotting landscapes effortlessly, simply by moving across them dressed in fluorescent blue and purple.
One glaring example of this prejudice is found in the 1969 film comedy Carry On Camping. While the majority of the protaganists, from Sid James to Barbara Windsor, make their way to the Paradise Campsite via car or coach, it is left to regular eccentric Charles Hawtrey to represent the walking interest. His character, Charlie Muggins, is dressed in distressingly brief beige shorts (revealing pipe-cleaner legs) and a freakishly large yellow pac-a-mac. He clanks along with various tin mugs and little pots attached to his knapsack. Through the fields this misfit wanders; and when he is walking along the road, he is jeered by Betty Marsden.
‘Get off the road, get off the road!’ she shouts. Given that her own character is on a tandem bicycle with Terry Scott, we can see precisely how low on the scale screenwriter Talbot Rothwell considers Hawtrey’s rambler. Even by the standards of Carry On grotesques, Charlie Muggins is almost anarchic in his refusal to conform to social norms; an object of distrust even to Terry Scott.
These days, walking gear is hi-tec, hi-spec and almost fetishistic in terms of the accessories and specialised terms and equipment. Something like the ‘Lite-Speed’ jacket is a kaleidoscope of special features: ‘Scotchlight’ reflective dots create ‘a 360-degree reflective effect’ and ‘Pertex microlight fabrics’ give all round ‘wind-proofness’ and ‘high breathability’. Similarly, a walker’s trousers these days have come a long way from hearty tweed and wool. ‘Terra Thermic Pants’, for instance, offer a ‘zoned, warm and wicking lining.’ They also boast a ‘Tactel shell with double layers’, ‘DryActiv Suede micro-fleece/mesh lining in strategic points’, ‘webbing belt’, and ‘zipped mesh lined’ pockets. Many modern trousers also make a brave claim for having eliminated rustling noises. That, in all seriousness, would be a selling point for me; there are few things more aggravating on a perfectly quiet hill than the noise of one’s own legs, encased in synthetic fibres, fissling like crisp packets.
Parenthetically, another relatively recent rambling development – and one that I confess I find a little puzzling – has been the arrival of the Walking Pole. On long hill-walks, their use is clear enough; these slender, multicoloured shoulder-height wands are obviously descendants of the shepherd’s crook. It is when I see them being used on undemanding Home Counties footpaths that I begin to wonder about the true, full benefit. But many walkers, including my stepmother, love them; friends of mine say that they help improve pace, as well as posture. There’s no slouching with the poles.
There is one other consistent historical point about walkers’ clothing though, right up to the present day, with its fashion for tight lycra leggings: and that is the curious sexlessness of the uniform. Whether it was the man or the woman in khaki; or, today, the man and the woman in layers of close-fitting, dark coloured synthetic fibres – it’s not what you might call an elegant or alluring look. None the less, it is one of those things that presses at the back of the minds of non-walkers – that walkers simply look strangely, determinedly androgynous.
Is the clothing really that important though? Obviously it is for anyone setting out to clamber around Glencoe or the Cairngorms, when one is always at risk of fog or of serious temperature drops. But a normal walk? In rather steadier climes? Serious ramblers will tell you that they are not simply wearing these clothes as a uniform, or as some form of identifying symbol. They will tell you that the pleasure of walking can actually be sluiced away if the clothes are wrong.
There is a soggy personal flashback that I cannot shake off: I recall, about twelve years ago, a trip to the Isle of Skye (some way north of Arran, but still very much in that west coast rainbelt) with a friend. It was summer, and the weather had been, rather unusually, consistently fine. On the morning we set out from a village on the north tip of the island to walk along a vast empty beach of dark stone, there was no reason to suppose that the sun high in the sky would be disappearing. So I wore (oh, the idiocy!) a corduroy jacket and tweedy trousers. A mile further on, and my friend and I were on that beach. To our backs, a pale grey cliff; before us, the expanse of dark pebbles, and then the khaki ocean, flecked with white. The sky was darkening very suddenly, and the wind was picking up. We could see the rainstorm out at sea, a thick curtain of black, being drawn across the water. There was not enough time for us to make it the mile back to the village.
The rainstorm swept in. It did so with a violence that almost took our breath away. It was impossible to see more than three yards ahead. The downpour teemed like deafening applause and fast rivulets of water, akin to mountain streams, ran down the back of my shirt. It is impossible to convey just how stupid I felt without that waterproof. So will I be feeling stupid and soaked again today, out here in the extremities of Wales? Should the clouds gather, I am rather counting on the overcoat to mitigate some of the moistness. The cord jacket under that will be a secondary barrier, so with any luck the shirt will get damp but not bedraggled. The fact is that no matter what good sense tells you, there are days when you simply don’t want to wear uniform. And those fleeces and Gore-tex jackets and waterproof trousers – no matter how snug and practical – are both too samey and too stridently purposeful. These clothes say, I think: I am here to walk, and nothing else. My coat and scarf, conversely, say in this howling wind that I am a bit daft.
Rhossili is a tiny village right at the foremost tip of the Gower peninsula. It is a sort of Land’s End, but without any of the commercialised horror. There is a pleasant little hotel, some crisply whitewashed houses, a discreet lifeguards’ lookout, and a twee little National Trust shop, there for the supply of emergency mug coasters and novelty tea towels. In the summer, this particular place is a surfers’ paradise. In November, not so much so, although stand atop this cliff and far below, a lone surfer – a speck on the vast grey beach that sweeps away – is trooping some quarter of a mile out to sea at low tide. That’s the spirit!
The main attraction for walkers here is the Worm’s Head – a jutting rectangle of dark rock fringed with a haircut of green grass. The promontory is the size of several office blocks, poking out of the sea, and attached to the mainland by means of a limestone natural causeway. From the top of the cliff, it looks like a road made of coal and around it, silver in the autumn light, are the in-rushing waves. The Head itself, when seen from a proper distance, looks like a giant dark submarine surfacing from the sea. The poet Dylan Thomas, who lived just a few miles and across some estuarial water from here, was especially enthusiastic about this place when he was a boy:
There was monstrous thick grass that made us spring-heeled, and we laughed and bounced on it, scaring the sheep who ran up and down the battered sides like goats … even on the calmest day, a wind blew along the Worm. At the end of the humped and serpentine body, more gulls than I had ever seen before cried over their new dead and the droppings of ages.1
These days, there is a small stone-built hut up here on the top of the cliff that overlooks the limestone Worm and the causeway, and there are men in there who are constantly looking down during daylight hours in case of trouble. You may, when the tide is far out, venture down and along the black causeway onto the block of Worm’s Head itself; but you are required to come back when the tide is coming in. One local, of a certain vintage, tells me that it was quite different when he was a boy. Many years ago, he and a group of friends once ventured out on to the rock. Then the tide came in, and they were stuck there for 12 hours, right the way through a warm summer’s night. Nor were they any the worse for the adventure, until they got home, and their panic-crazed parents confronted them. Haven’t mobile phones taken the fun out of everything? Moreover, the lifting of stranded walkers off the Worm’s Head via coastguard helicopter is a costly business.
My elderly correspondent was not alone in having this adventure, and I slightly wonder if his own exciting account might not have been coloured a little by a very similar adventure experienced by Dylan Thomas when he was a boy:
I stayed on that Worm from dusk to midnight, sitting on that top grass, frightened to go further in because of the rats and because of things that I am ashamed to be frightened of. Then the tips of the reef began to poke out of the water and, perilously, I climbed along them to the shore.
There is that touch of Enid Blyton about this rock; from the dancing, prancing porpoises sometimes to be seen capering in the waters around, to the flumped figures of grey seals, spread out across the black rocks, to the curious blowhole. Throw sand at this hole, and it will be blown away in the opposite direction, as if the rock had just exhaled sharply; it is to do with tides and air currents beneath the rock. Until the 1960s, there was a vast herring gull colony here; it was gradually depleted by visitors, many of whom helped themselves to eggs. In 1948, a local wrote complaining to Glamorgan County Council:
As tenant of Worm’s Head, I am writing to you to ask if anything can be down to protect the wild birds on the Head. I understand there is a bye-law passed for that purpose but not put in force. At present people from town come down and rob the nests by the hundreds and I want to see it stopped.2
And lo, it was, and with remarkable success. Indeed, thanks to the tightening of laws concerning such things, the Worm’s Head is now a colony to many other species, including kittiwakes, fulmars and guillemots. With the occasional human interlopers now being rather more sensitive about such matters, these beautiful birds are able to go about their business without fear of molestation. To balance this abundance of flying fauna, there is also an extraordinary range of flora, including pink sea-campion, knotweed, spear thistle, fern-grass, ribwort plantain and golden samphire, all clinging on, flowers shaken violently from side to side by the aggressive winds blowing off the Bristol Channel.
Everywhere there is wind. This is a land of wind. It cannot be escaped. Even as the November sun shines heroically, the wind whines in one’s ear. There is nothing close to silence here. The wind doesn’t drop; and the distant sea roars and murmurs. Go in the other direction from the coastal path that sweeps around for about ten miles to the Mumbles – all springy turf and sheep with dirty bottoms – and you have a wider variety of Gower peninsula walking options. The first is a vertiginous concrete staircase leading down from the hotel, and down the cliff to the silver sand below, and to what must be one of the most spectacular beaches in Britain. Rising up from this vast, empty, lonely beach is a hill of russet and dirty green, a blend of fern and gorse; dark rock and red soil. Thousands upon thousands of years ago, the sandy hummocks at the base of this hill would have been at the water’s edge. The tide has drawn out inexorably – due to geology, and post-glacial rebound. In broad terms, the west of the country has been rising out of the water, while the east has slowly been dunked in. On this very blowy November day, with the clouds haring off to the west out over the ocean, I have this enormous beach to myself save for one other distant walker. The silver sand is mesmeric in itself, there are Lawrence of Arabia style ripples of it in the swift wind, snaking and writhing across the darker wet sand beneath. Here, the wind is so absurdly insistent, that even the sound of the sea is muted.
About a mile along and it is now time to glance back, like Lot’s Wife, and gasp at the prospect of the Worm’s Head promontory. It is lit from behind by the thin aluminium light of an autumn sun, the dark bulk of the little island surrounded by a glowing corona of sea mist. Little wonder that this area is filled with sacred Neolithic burial sites. On an afternoon like this, you might gaze at such a view and feel, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, that you are looking out towards islands yet dreamier than our own. As I am currently also dressed rather like Chesterton, I am feeling smug about my cosy clothing arrangements, except the scarf which – no matter how firmly knotted and tucked into the overcoat – seems determined to fly away with that gale.
This view of the Worm’s Head was voted by Country Life magazine as one of Britain’s top favourites. Sometimes the boxing and labelling of beauty is maddening. And also – by stamping the words ‘chocolate box’ so firmly on a place – these sorts of meaningless surveys subtly empty the landscape of its truer meaning. To look upon a prospect like this is not simply a question of widening the eyes and saying ‘oooh’. There are other, emotional responses. Especially on a day such as this, when the lemony sun is low, the wind is whistling, and you find yourself quite alone.
We often forget just how eerie wide, lonely beaches can be. Because of the vast prospects – of churning sea, and of sand, and dunes – the sense of isolation is intensified when you are completely alone. It is a primordial world where neither man nor animal counts for anything. M. R. James saw this unsettling potential in the grey Suffolk coastline. In ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, the trouble starts for the hero on a pebbled beach in the twilight as he is followed by a distant dim silhouette. There is further supernatural upset on the lonely beach at Seaburgh in ‘A Warning To The Curious’, where the unfortunate anti-hero has his head stoved in by a vengeful force conjured by an Anglo-Saxon king.
In happier terms, what we have at Rhossili is a rather socially superior stretch of shoreline, one that has resisted being vulgarised. This is hardcore coast. Not the namby-pamby sort to lie around on, but one to be walked along with every breath drawing in lungfuls of insanely rich, fresh air. Coming off the beach, one finds the start of the marshland that gradually creeps around the estuarial side of the peninsula, and a road to the village of Llangennith. For the walker, paths branch off in all directions. Up another gorsey hill is a trail that leads to a view of the estuary, and out on to Dylan Thomas territory, and all the boggy marshy ground beneath. Other paths scoot off in the direction of rich pasture, and of tail-swaying horses. Ramblers are not short of options; yet this landscape seems a little short of ramblers today. There is not a brightly coloured anorak anywhere to be seen.
You notice, when you enter a village like Llangennith, the way that the people there quietly and quickly size you up. The fact that I am not wearing a brightly coloured anorak or a fleece clearly presents a fleeting anomaly, a flicker of puzzlement. I don’t conform to the understood image of walkers. As I say, the look in the eye is there for the merest fraction of a second; but of course this is how we all read the shorthand of one another’s clothes. The road out of Llangennith winds up another invigorating hill, at the summit of which we say hello once more to the wind. Now you are out on the sort of moorland that one associates with Exmoor; complete with stunted, arachnoid trees, their spines bent over under the wind, their limbs almost horizontal and stiff. Yet my very old overcoat – the lining is going and little threads of it trail out from beneath the hem – and my Marks and Spencer cardigan, are bearing up extremely well. Indeed, slightly too well, for there are points when I find myself a little clammy and moist. Once more, as I walk along the side of the road towards the village of Llanrhidian, both fellow walkers and drivers seem unable to place me, and seem uncertain when they pass. Who is this fellow in a dark overcoat with a knapsack on his back?
A colourful rambler is instantly placeable, and takes his position very firmly in the modern post-agricultural landscape. Like a farm labourer, we know the rambler’s business exactly, and are therefore at ease around him. Given current levels of crime in the countryside generally – from burglary to animal rustling – the appearance of any stranger in less easily identifiable clothing is an understandable trigger for suspicion. In social terms, the mores of appropriate walking clothing – and the sorts of garments that were considered acceptable – were drolly considered 100 years ago by A. H. Sidgwick in an essay entitled ‘Walking Equipment’.
The subject bristles with controversial points … the structure and fortification of boots; the requisite number of pairs of socks; the rival claims of long trousers and short trousers, with the subvariants of short trousers buckling at the knees, short trousers with box-cloth continuations, and short trousers with homogeneous continuations; the configuration of coats; the shape of hats (if any); the functions of waistcoats; the necessity of ties.3
When it is put like that, I feel almost naked. Even Sidgwick was keenly aware of the importance of a certain sort of ‘uniformity’ – even if it carried a suspicious flavour of ‘political allegory’ – and the fact is that by not dressing the part, I am somehow proclaiming that I am not really a proper walker. It would be like playing golf in tasteful clothes.
I am still striding along on the unseasonably lovely November Gower day. And as I reach Llanrhidian, the sun, now low, is still psychologically warming. To my faint vexation, I have rather missed out on the extraordinary range of Neolithic tombs that this sliver of land has to offer. There is the famous example of Goat’s Hole cave at Paviland where, in 1823, the Reverend William Buckland came across a most valuable find. First erroneously described as ‘The Red Lady’, this was the skeleton of a man that had been buried with all manner of ornamental seashells and items of jewellery. The skeleton was red because it had been covered in ochre. The astounding thing about this find was its age: it is estimated that the man to whom the red skeleton belonged was placed in the cave some 28,000 years ago – just before, in fact, the area was overrun with ice sheets.
Because of tides, the cave can only be visited at restricted times now; but there is no shortage of other barrows, including two on Rhossili Down, and, in the south-east of the area, at Penmaen Burrows and Parc le Breos. The stones that mark these places are mini Stonehenges, yet somehow more sombre and, curiously, more credible. They stand, undisturbed, on a land that has subtly transformed around them through the ages. Other stones have been disturbed, though, centuries ago, by farming activities, and the memory of them lives on in place names like Stone Park.
In the last thirty years or so, South Wales has performed the most dazzling turn around – negotiating the end of its industrial usefulness with grace, while presenting itself fresh not as a land of slag-heaps and open-cast mines, but of rare butterflies, of clean unspoilt beaches, of green hilly walks leading to unexpected treasures such as ruined castles.
Despite the low temperature – and despite the fact that in walking terms, I was really quite the dandy boulevardier – I have to say that there was one specific drawback which would make me think more practically in the future: sweat. Even in November, a scramble up a sand dune, a yomp across a beach, a turn on the high moorland or just going up and down hills produced quite a gloss, which like the rainwater on Skye, I could feel trickling down my back. Sweat on a November day? There’s little to grumble about there. And the landscape of the Gower peninsula is as uniformly beguiling as people have always said. But what about those parts of the country that people don’t enthuse about? What kind of walking is there to be had in places that have acquired reputations for being ugly, lowering or even, in extreme cases, oddly menacing?