Summer visitors to Gower in the years past will have treasured memories of sultry days amidst the golden gorse in the slades, when the oppressive noontide calm was broken only by the monotonous chant of the yellowhammer; memories of cloudless skies and shimmering blue water lapping gently on the stippled sands, of many coloured anemones in crystal clear rock-pools, of seagulls circling lazily over the sun-baked cliffs.
Horatio Tucker, Gower Gleanings
FOR SOME OF the earliest information on the natural history of Gower we have to thank Edward Lhuyd, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, or more accurately his correspondents. Appointed Keeper in 1691, Lhuyd was a polymath who made important contributions to the emerging disciplines of botany, geology, antiquities and philology. He was part of the new order of experimental science, scorning the earlier naturalists ‘who, til this last century contented themselves with bare reading and scribbling paper’. This approach committed him to first-hand observation whenever possible and also, as he was revising the Welsh sections of Camden’s Britannia (1586), to creating a network of correspondents throughout Wales. Despite this antiquarian work he considered himself to be a naturalist, not an archaeologist, and commented that ‘I was obliged to undertake ye Antiquities for ye sake of encouragement, not that I delight in ye study so much as in Nat History’.
Lhuyd’s need for local information was greatest in the south of the country and this is probably the reason for his connections with no fewer than four people within the bounds of the Marcher Lordship of Gower. Although only two of these were in the peninsula – Gower as we know it today – the area features prominently in Lhuyd’s collections for his survey of Wales. The first of these informants was John Williams of Swansea. As with most of his contacts, Williams was a native of the area about which he wrote and was able to write with authority. Although Williams’ Gower correspondence is limited to thirteen letters written between 1693 and 1696 he responded amongst other things to Lhuyd’s enquires about the megalith known as Arthur’s Stone, surveyed the blow-hole at Worms Head, reported on local belief in the curiosities known as maen magal or glain neidr (the latter translating literally as ‘jewel snake’) and supplied Lhuyd with a wide range of these fossils. Unfortunately the two men later became bitter opponents over the question of whether fossils were of organic or inorganic origin.
Lhuyd’s most prolific correspondent, however, was Isaac Hamon. When or how they were introduced is not clear, but they met at least once when Lhuyd reached Swansea in 1697 at the beginning of five years of travels to collect information. Lhuyd had previously visited Gower in the autumn of 1693 and again in 1696, and it is likely that in 1697 Hamon took him to see some of the sites he had described. Hamon’s account of Gower, prepared for Lhuyd, provides a valuable description of the area as it was at the close of the seventeenth century. Covering the 23 parishes of the Lordship of Gower, it represents a substantial part of the known response to Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries (1696), a set of 31 questions dealing with the geography, antiquities and natural history of Wales. Hamon’s knowledge was most detailed and certain within the area where he lived and worked, a radius of some 6 miles (9.7 kilometres) from Bishopston. He made no claim to first-hand knowledge of West Gower – ‘I am not very well acquainted there, therefore I have but hinted some things’ – and because of his honesty he is regarded as an accurate observer.
Hamon set out to describe Gower as he knew it and provides a direct account, almost certainly the first compilation of its kind. The report covers, among other things, the natural character of the peninsula, the distribution of the English language, evidence of early settlement, economic geography and natural features. In covering the last subject he exceeded the questions asked by Lhuyd and provided a list of plants common in Gower instead of just the rarities. His 1697 list of 42 plants is the first Gower flora. The relevant section appears under the heading of ‘The Sea Cost’, where he states:
The South pt of Gowersland (being Swanzey hundd) being in length from Swanzey to Worms head about 12 miles … with store of limestones, & limestone cleeves, wherin are many great holes or caves … here are these sorts of sea hearbes, as scurvie grasse, Sampire & lavar … of Rock herbs, Cetrack, maiden hair, walrue, & in the pishes of Bishopstown, Pennard, & Oystermouth there is plenty of juniper & some buckthorn.
Of field herbs (especially in the said 3 pishes) Agrimony, wild carret, mullein, Dandelyon, Pelamountain, mallows, Burdock, Tutsan, Eybright, Bettony, Elecampane, Foxfingers, yellow and blue Kay-roses, Rames or Ramsey, Centry, Yarrow, Adders tongue, vervain, St John’s wort, Canker wort, Devilles bit, Ragwort, mugwort, Breakestone-psley, Larks bill, plantane, Pimpnell, Fumitory, Burnet, Botchwort.
of hearbs in some waterie places, as water cresses, Rosa solis, Lungwort, Liver wort.
A list of these plants together with the likely current scientific and common names is given in Appendix 1. Among the plants for which Hamon used colloquial names are the cowslip Primula veris and cultivated polyanthus, ‘yellow and blue Kay-roses’, and ramsons Allium ursinum, ‘Rames or Ramsey’. ‘Larks bill’ is probably larkspur Consolida ajacis, while ‘Breakestone-psley’ is probably parsley piert Aphanes arvensis.
The Flora of Glamorgan notes that after Lhuyd’s visit ‘a long night seems to have settled on botanising in the county’ and that until the end of the eighteenth century very few other botanists visited the area. Resident botanists at this period seem to have been nonexistent.
The travels and tours, which were such a feature of life for educated people in the eighteenth century, did not include Gower, or for the most part even Wales. The government secret agent and author Daniel Defoe made it to Swansea in 1722, but avoided the peninsula. Only two of the tourists, Henry Wigstead and Henry Skrine, son of the celebrated Richard Skrine of Cobham in Surrey, ventured from Swansea into Gower. Wigstead himself got no further than Caswell Bay, which he noted, was ‘the finest sandy beach I ever saw’. Skrine ventured further, although he found Gower ‘in general a rocky and uninteresting district except where the sea views enliven it’, and a ‘bleak peninsula’. Between 1739 and 1790 John Wesley visited Oxwich frequently on his preaching tours through Wales (Fig. 7), and recorded that ‘Gower is a large tract of land, bounded by [Glamorgan] on the north-east, the sea on the south-west and rivers on the other sides. Here all the people talk English and are in general the most plain, loving people in Wales’ (Davies, 1996). After 1800, with the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in Europe inhibiting the grand European tour, the number of tourists who came to seek wild and romantic scenery in Wales increased and the natural history of Gower began to be recorded more fully.
The most notable resident scholar in Glamorgan during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was Edward Williams (1746–1826). Williams, better known by his bardic name of Iolo Morganwg, spent most of his life as a stonemason, living in the Vale of Glamorgan, but travelled widely throughout the county, including Gower. He had many interests but his reputation was unfortunately tainted by numerous literary and historical forgeries that he produced with the intention of enhancing the history and culture of his native county. Because of his forgeries, the prevailing view until recently has been that anything written by him must be ignored. This interpretation is now being challenged and there is every reason to suggest that Williams was in fact Wales’s greatest Romantic scholar. Included amongst the 88 volumes of literary manuscripts in the National Library of Wales there is a vast collection of notes on Glamorgan. A preliminary analysis of the archaeological information contained in these has shown not only that he produced field records of quality and accuracy, but also that his work was far superior to that of the contemporaries who ridiculed him. The same high standards apply to his notes on agriculture, botany and topography, although they have never been properly analysed. It is likely that there are many references to the natural history of the peninsula contained within these, but to find them would be a major academic undertaking.
FIG 7. The ‘Wesley’ cottage in Oxwich, frequently used by John Wesley on his preaching tours in the eighteenth century. (Jonathan Mullard)
The Romantic Revival epitomised by Williams was accompanied by an increasing interest in botany and a new era began, that of the production of a variety of local lists and floras. The first such list to include Gower plants, although his main interest was the study of shells, was produced by Dr William Turton for the first edition of the Swansea Guide, produced in 1802 by the Reverend John Oldisworth, Master of the Free Grammar School. Unfortunately, while Turton’s collection of shells, including some from the peninsula, was well regarded and is now at the United States National Museum in Washington, his botanical records were not always accurate. The guide also included a checklist of birds by John Lucas of Stouthall, which includes a remarkable 146 species. This list, however, requires careful interpretation and many of the names such as ‘black and white gull’, ‘greater tern’ and ‘Welsh sandpiper’, a ‘new’ species ‘recently discovered by G. Montague, Esq. F.L.S.’ will not be recognised by today’s naturalists. A revised volume of the Swansea Guide was published in 1823.
In July of the same year that Oldisworth produced his guide, Gower was visited by Edward Donovan, the celebrated author of British Zoology, an enormous work published in 20 volumes. He recorded his visit in a two-volume account of his travels in South Wales entitled Descriptive Excursions Through South Wales and Monmouthshire in the Year 1804 and Four Preceding Summers, with a certain amount of understatement:
Before we left Swansea, this tract of country was represented to us as an inhospitable region, black, barren, and rocky; thin of inhabitants and destitute of accommodation for the stranger. A statement we have since observed to be not perfectly correct in every particular, although in a certain meaning true … Upon the lofty rocky verge of the shore to the left, the fogs arising from the sea rolled heavily; the air was cold, and the rains beating violently in our faces from the westward in the space of an hour after we first set out, had nearly drenched us to the skin. Under these circumstances we evidently surveyed the country to a lamentable disadvantage.
Despite the evidently appalling weather Donovan and his party did get to Pennard castle, and he goes on to record that he collected specimens of yellow whitlowgrass Draba aizoides. In the second volume there are also a number of references to marine molluscs at Oystermouth and Oxwich.
One of the rarest plants in the British flora, small restharrow Ononis reclinata, was discovered by Daniel Sharpe ‘on rocks at Port-Eynon’ in 1828. Sharpe was a very able and observant geologist, who was President of the Geological Society in 1856, but died in London, as the result of an accident, in the same year. It seems likely that the site that he discovered, at the age of 22, would have been the one immediately west of, and above, Culver Hole cave on the seaward face of Port-Eynon Point. The original specimen was sent to Joseph Woods, the famous architect and botanist, and was incorporated into his herbarium. Small restharrow still exists in four localities, between Port-Eynon Point and Worms Head, the two western locations only being discovered recently. It is difficult to find, though, as the number of plants and the period in which they flower varies noticeably from year to year.
John Gutch, who lived in Swansea for a number of years in the early nineteenth century, maintained Swansea’s first reliable weather records and published two local lists of plants, the first in the pamphlet The Medical Topography, Statistics, Climatology and Natural History of Swansea. In it Gutch remarks, ‘I am well aware that the foregoing list is comparatively of no value without the insertion of the various habitats.’ This defect was rectified in his second list, entitled simply A list of plants met with in the neighbourhood of Swansea, Glamorganshire, which was published in the first volume of The Phytologist in 1841. Gutch’s list of some 550 plants is of great interest, containing as it does references to stinking iris Iris foetidissima, a familiar plant of the limestone coast, hoary rock-rose Helianthemum oelandicum and sea campion Silene uniflora.
By this time natural history had become the favoured activity of a number of the local gentry, in particular the landowner Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778–1855) (Fig. 8). Dillwyn had come from London to live in Swansea in 1802 when he was 24 to manage the Cambrian Pottery on the banks of the River Tawe, and was an enthusiastic naturalist. Indeed he managed to link his two interests by specialising in natural-history designs on pottery. He became an important figure in the county, being High Sheriff in 1818 and a Member of Parliament from 1832 to 1841. In 1805, with Dawson Turner, he produced a Botanist’s Guide Through England and Wales, but is particularly remembered for producing one of the first systematic works on algae, British Confervae, in 1809. Using only simple lenses that gave small magnifications, he described and illustrated a large number of marine and freshwater species, many of them collected in Gower. Dillwyn followed this in 1829 with Memoranda Relating to Coleopterus Insects Found in the Neighbourhood of Swansea and in 1840 he privately printed his Contributions Towards a History of Swansea, which included a list of the rarer flowering plants that had been found within 20 miles (32 kilometres) of the town. The list was apparently compiled in great haste and 300 copies were printed for sale at a bazaar in aid of Swansea Infirmary. As Carter (1952) noted, ‘Perhaps this is the only occasion upon which a Flora has been compiled with such a charitable end in view.’
In 1848 the British Association held its annual meeting in Swansea and Dillwyn, who was Chair of the Natural History Section, privately published his Materials for a Fauna and Flora of Swansea. The botanical section of this was an expansion of his 1840 list and included localities for 267 species of flowering plants, ferns and stoneworts. Gower plants recorded in the book include stinking hellebore Helleborus foetidus from Parkmill, where it still grows, and herb-paris Paris quadrifolia, which is recorded from a number of woods including Nicholaston. Also included was a list of 93 bird species, and this relatively small total reflects the limitations of his contacts and their interests. Interestingly the book also contains a short list of beetles collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the celebrated naturalist, evolutionist, geographer and anthropologist, who at that time was engaged in helping his brother survey the ground for the new railway line through the Neath valley. It is not clear if any of the beetles collected were from Gower.
FIG 8. Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778–1855), an inspiring local naturalist who encouraged and supported many others. (Swansea Museum)
Dillwyn was a close friend of scientists such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy and introduced Joseph Banks and other eminent naturalists to the attractions of Gower and the Swansea area. Banks was the British explorer and naturalist who, as long-time President of the Royal Society, London, became known for his promotion of science. In particular Dillwyn had a special interest in geology and went on geological expeditions whenever possible, often stopping in Oxford with his very good friend William Buckland. Buckland was also a frequent visitor to Swansea, staying with Dillwyn, and with other colleagues he excavated a number of Gower caves, including most famously the rich deposits in Goat’s Hole (Paviland Cave). There is no doubt that Dillwyn took part in these excavations.
He also seems to have inspired other local landowners in various ways, as this note on the nightingale Luscinia megarhynchos indicates:
My late friend, Thomas Penrice, Esq., completely failed in an attempt to introduce this lovely songster, by bringing several cages of them from Norfolk, and turning them out in his woods at Kilvrough, which are warmly situated by the sea-side, about eight miles to the westward of Swansea.
A pair did, however, eventually breed at Hillend in 1944, but while nightingales were annual summer visitors to the Vale of Glamorgan during the nineteenth century, Gower was close to the northern and western limits of its distribution in Britain. The species is now confined mostly to southeast England and there have been no further records for the peninsula.
Dillwyn communicated his enthusiasm for natural history to his sons, notably John Dillwyn-Llewelyn (Fig. 9), who inherited an interest in botany and became a pioneer of the new photographic techniques, taking many photographs of Gower, especially the coast. He was a relative by marriage of the pioneer photographer Henry Fox Talbot. Dillwyn’s other son, Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, a ‘competent geologist’, married a daughter of the noted geologist Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche, founder of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. De la Beche’s explorations in Gower resulted in some of the earliest geological surveys.
Seemingly not content with all this activity, Dillwyn was also President of the Royal Institution of South Wales from its foundation in 1835 until he died in 1855 and acted as mentor for an ever-widening circle of naturalists who explored Gower and the Swansea area in some detail. In particular, Dillwyn encouraged John Gwyn Jeffreys to collect shells along the Gower coastline. Jeffreys later became extremely well known with the publication between 1862 and 1869 of the five volumes of British Conchology, a landmark publication that is still consulted today for its precise descriptions of shells. Jeffreys was born in Swansea where he followed the family tradition and worked as a solicitor until 1856 when he was called to the bar, after which he lived in London for the rest of his life. He was introduced to natural history at Swansea Grammar School through a Naturalists’ Society organised by Llewellyn John, a noted field naturalist.
During the nineteenth century the number of naturalists who lived in the Swansea area, or visited Gower and recorded their finds, increased substantially. It is not possible to list them all here; indeed their exploits and finds would form a book in themselves. The more notable personalities include Charles Babington, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, who arrived at Mumbles in August 1839 having crossed from Devon ‘by the mail steamer at 5pm arriving at the Mumbles Lighthouse at about 9pm. As the tide was low we had to land at the Mumbles and walk to Swansea a distance of five miles’. On 6 August he wrote in his diary, ‘Called on Mr Flower, who was in lodgings, and he went with me to Pennard Castle where we saw plenty of the Draba aizoides on the walls and rocks near the castle and Sinapis cheiranthus [wallflower cabbage Coincya monensis ssp. recurvata] on the steep side of the sandhills.’
FIG 9. John Dillwyn-Llewelyn and his photographic equipment. (Swansea Museum)
The famous diarist the Reverend Francis Kilvert visited Gower in April 1872, staying with friends at Ilston Rectory, and noted that it was the ‘cleanest coast I ever saw – no seaweed, no pebbles, hardly a shell – not a speck for miles along the shining sand, and scarcely even any scent of the sea’. He did notice, however, that ‘the rocks were covered with millions of barnacles, mussels, limpets and sea snails, and there were sea anemones in the little pools above the rocks’. On the coast path between Langland and Caswell Bay he records that ‘a flock of strange and beautiful black and white birds flew along the rock faces below us towards the lighthouse piping mournfully. They were I suppose some kind of gull but they seemed to me like the spirits of the shipwrecked folk seeking and mourning for their bodies.’ Kilvert was well aware of the dangers of the Gower coast. The 300-ton steamship Hazard, wrecked when it struck the rocks at Port-Eynon on 11 January, a few months before his visit, is only one of nearly 360 vessels recorded as lost in the area and there are probably many others. The birds Kilvert noted were without doubt oystercatchers Haematopus ostralegus, a highly vocal bird with loud piping calls which often flies low along the shoreline, exactly as Kilvert describes (Fig. 10). Their courtship display is one of the noisiest of any British bird and has been called the ‘piping display’. It consists of several birds walking around in an agitated manner uttering a chorus usually described as ‘kleep-kleep-kleep’. In flight the note, as Kilvert found, is a shorter ‘pic-pic’.
FIG 10. Oystercatchers off the Gower shore, as recorded by the Reverend Francis Kilvert. (Harold Grenfell)
Probably the most prolific painter of the local scene was Edward Duncan, who spent almost every summer between 1865 and his death in 1882 in Gower. His paintings and sketches provide an unrivalled record of the peninsula at this time and were produced in prodigious numbers (Fig. 11). In March 1885, for example, Christie’s auction house held a three-day sale of his ‘remaining works’ and another sale two years later lists nearly 2,000 sketches and paintings. Among the hundreds of watercolour paintings exhibited in London during his lifetime were ‘The Bury Holmes, Rhossili Bay’, ‘The Worms Head, South Wales’, ‘Worm’s Head, Rhossili Bay’ and ‘Oyster dredgers off Mumbles’. In the last three years of his life the Royal Watercolour Society exhibited ‘Oyster boats leaving with the turn of the tide’, ‘On the shore at Porteynon’ and ‘A Gower cottage, Llanrhidian’. Many of these are now in the great national collections.
The Swansea Scientific Society (Fig. 12) was set up about 1890 and its reports, included in those of the Royal Institution of South Wales, contain many short papers on Gower, which are mainly reports of papers read at field meetings of the Society by the Reverend J. Jackett between 1891 and 1897. They are of a popular nature and include ‘On the wild flowers of the district’ (Sand dunes at Port-Eynon), ‘Notes on the botany of Clyne and Killay districts’ and ‘The botany of Gower’.
FIG 11. Detail of ‘Rhossili Bay’ by Edward Duncan, a prolific and nationally known nineteenth-century painter of the Gower scene. (Peter R. Douglas-Jones)
the author for Figures
FIG 12. A field meeting of the Swansea Scientific Society in the 1890s, probably at Oxwich. Note the horse-bus and the thatched roofs of the cottages. (Swansea Museum)
the author for Figures
There is a record of a large party going by horse-drawn brake to Rhossili in June 1890. In 1893 Colonel Morgan, a leading member of the Scientific Society, led a team which excavated a prehistoric tomb on Penmaen Burrows. Numerous women were involved and as early as 1889 there were 18 female members.
By the early twentieth century the focus of the Society had moved away from natural history, but there was still felt to be a need for an organisation devoted to natural history. In June 1906 therefore a group of local naturalists formed the Swansea Field Naturalists’ Society, its area of interest being defined as the 15 mile radius from Swansea castle. As a separate organisation it lasted for 14 years until in 1920 the Scientific Society asked to merge with the Naturalists as ‘they had been hit much worse by the war’, that is, most of their members had been killed in the First World War and they were no longer a viable organisation. Despite some initial resistance from the naturalists the two organisations merged and became the Swansea Scientific and Field Naturalists’ Society. The Society organised itself into four branches, botany, zoology, geology and archaeology, the latter in deference to the remaining members of the Scientific Society. By 1925 Gower had been fairly well covered by both organisations and a large amount of information on the natural history of Gower resides in the proceedings of the two organisations. A thorough analysis of the contents of their journals is long overdue.
A Flora of Glamorganshire by H. J. Riddelsdell appeared in 1907 as an 88-page supplement to the Journal of Botany. He divided the county into nine districts, including Gower, basing his division on the drainage areas of the principal rivers rather than geological divisions. Riddelsdell continued to contribute many records to the journal after the publication of his county flora, including, in 1911, a paper on the flora of Worms Head. By coincidence there were actually two floras of Glamorgan published in 1907, the second by A. H. Trow, Professor of Botany at Cardiff. Perhaps a combined effort would have been more effective. The two men certainly knew each other, as Riddelsdell was one of the chief recorders for the volume edited by Trow, contributing 482 records, many of them from Gower.
Our knowledge of the Gower insect fauna at this time would have been very poor if it were not for the contribution of one man, Henry Mortimer Hallett, who began to study the aculeates (bees, wasps and ants) of Glamorgan (and, to a lesser extent, Monmouthshire) in 1909. For the next 26 years, until he moved to Herefordshire in 1935, he collected extensively in east Glamorgan and made frequent collecting trips to the west of the county. His vice-county compilation of Glamorgan in 1928 provides an invaluable insight into the state of the aculeate fauna of South Wales in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, he did not publish his review of the Welsh fauna, The Hymenoptera Aculeata of Wales, before his death in 1958, although he donated the manuscript to the National Museum of Wales, where it may be consulted in the Department of Zoology.
A substantial advance in bird recording was made in 1889 when the Reverend Digby S. W. Nicholl’s notes on the birds of Glamorgan were published. This was the first attempt at a countywide avifauna for Glamorgan; it was inspired by one published earlier for Somerset and included 218 species. In the same year Harry Rowland Wakefield came to Swansea as Chief Science Demonstrator for the Swansea School Board. A founder member of the Scientific and Field Naturalists’ Society, he became life president in 1931. He was a keen naturalist with a particular interest in beetles and molluscs, recording in particular 1,083 species of beetle, many of these in Gower. Other conchologists active in the area included John le Brockton Tomlin (1864–1954), who accumulated one of the world’s major collections of shells, leaving over 200,000 specimens to the National Museum of Wales. He was also interested in beetles and left a collection of 82,000 of these as well. Collecting specimens on this scale can no longer be condoned, but the collections now form an important reference source. Conservation was not, however, an issue in those days. Tomlin was also a close friend of Wakefield and they had many joint excursions to find beetles in Gower.
In 1948 J. E. Lousley, the outstanding field botanist of his generation, visited the Gower cliffs with Miss E. Vachell and Mr D. McClintock for the purpose of checking the section on Gower for his New Naturalist volume Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone (1950). In the book he notes that:
For many years I expected that someone would find Hair-leaved Goldilocks, Crinitaria linosyris in Gower. It grows in Somerset and North Wales on the Carboniferous Limestone and there are plenty of suitable habitats on this coast. My expectation has proved to be well justified … There were only a few plants, but they grew in a wild place far from houses in limestone turf and are undoubtedly native.
Now known as goldilocks aster Aster linosyris (Fig. 13), its presence in Gower, as Lousley surmised, is ‘geographically and ecologically unsurprising’ (Wade et al., 1994). The plant is very rare, however, being known from only eight sites between Port-Eynon and Mewslade Bay. The largest population occupies an area of about 40 square metres in low gorse Ulex europaeus. Lousley also records that he had ‘seen Stinking Hellebore near Park Mill and Gladdon and Caper Spurge (Euphorbia lathyris) at Nicholaston’.
FIG 13. Goldilocks aster, the ‘hair-leaved goldilocks’ sought by J. E. Lousley. (David Painter)
Another notable, but local, botanist in the first half of the twentieth century was John Arthur Webb, a Swansea schoolmaster, who during school holidays and after his retirement travelled widely throughout Wales recording and collecting specimens, which he sent to the National Museum of Wales. The first specimens arrived in 1921 and the last in 1956 when he was over 70 years old. In collaboration with Arthur Wade of the Museum, Webb wrote a number of manuscript floras including a partial copy for Gower that was discovered in the library of Swansea University in the mid-1990s. The first and only published part of this Gower flora was produced as a supplement to the Proceedings of the Swansea Scientific and Field Naturalists’ Society in 1956. Following the launch of the Gower Society Journal in 1948 Webb contributed numerous articles, including some very useful pieces on the development of natural history in Gower, which have been used as guidance in this chapter.
One more important publication, The Natural History of Gower by Mary Gillham, was published in 1977. Gillham, who came to Cardiff in 1961 to work for the Extramural Department of University College Cardiff, was a founder member of what was then the Glamorgan Naturalists’ Trust. Having previously written a number of travel books on Antarctica and New Zealand, she was asked to edit a book on the natural history of Glamorgan. Despite making contact with numerous researchers there were no contributions forthcoming, so she was asked to write the book herself. Given her previous research background on seabird islands Gillham started at the western end of the county with Gower, ‘the gem as far as I was concerned’. In the end so much information was collected that there was enough material for a book on the peninsula alone. Following the publication of the Gower volume she has single-handedly worked her way eastwards through the former county, producing another nine local publications, including a number for the Glamorgan Heritage Coast, and has finally completed the series, and the original aspiration, with a book on Cardiff and the Taff corridor.
Bird recording in Gower was greatly improved by the formation of the Gower Ornithological Society in 1956 and the publication of checked and authenticated bird records by successive records secretaries. One of the earliest secretaries was Robert (Bob) Howells, who has to be one the most dedicated of the present-day Gower naturalists (Fig. 14). Although it is difficult, and certainly controversial, to single out any contemporary naturalist for attention, Howells has painstakingly counted the birds off Blackpill and in the inlet and estuary for over a third of a century; in a magazine article in 1991 he calculated that he had seen 5 million wildfowl, 17 million waders and 4 million gulls. On one day in 1989 he counted 13,000 dunlin Calidris alpina. Howells has braved all weathers, including the deep snow of the 1962/3 winter, in order to carry out his surveys. This dedication has enabled him to produce a comprehensive account of the species using the area, and because of his work it is now known to be the most important estuary in Wales for birds. A full list of current naturalists would also include, amongst many others, Harold Grenfell and Derek Thomas for their work on birds, Quentin Kay, who has added thousands of new plant records for Gower, Tom McOwat for his studies of bats and Barry Stewart for his research on moths. Perhaps one day their history and exploits will be covered in more detail.
FIG 14. Robert (Bob) Howells, perhaps one of the most dedicated of present-day Gower naturalists, birdwatching at Llanrhidian. (Harold Grenfell)
Since people have been exploring Gower for well over 300 years it may seem that there is nothing new for the present-day naturalist to discover. This is not the case, however: as this book makes clear, changes in plant and animal distribution are continuous. Even in botany there are discoveries, the latest as recently as 1987 when western clover Trifolium occidentale, a new record for Wales, was found by Jo Dunn, an Oxfordshire botanist, growing in the clifftop red fescue Festuca rubra turf near Tears Point. Later searches showed that the clover grew not only on the Point but also on similar south-facing cliffs between Fall Bay and Mewslade. It is not an easy plant to find and might yet turn up elsewhere. One of the best times to search is during April, as it flowers earlier than white clover Trifolium repens. The plant is largely restricted to exposed sites liable to soaking by salt-laden winds, often growing around rock outcrops or on stabilised sand. Rock and sand, indeed, form the basis of the Gower landscape. Before returning to the flora and fauna, therefore, it is important to understand their origins and the features that they have created.
