Coast Walking (Wales): Gowerton to Llanmadoc 2 July 2015

We continued west along the B4295, which runs just above the saltmarsh and has a paved verge. At the end of the long settlement of Pen-clawdd a close view of the estuary revealed the only seashore birds of the day – apart from the usual gulls - oystercatcher and shelduck. The road continues into Crofty, where we left on a side road and a path to the edge of the saltmarsh by a rubbish tip and sewage farm, the air less than salubrious. The path continued along the saltmarsh top to the end of Crofty, where we gained a paved way, but still along the saltmarsh and sometimes flooded at high tide. This was now the very wide Llanrhidian Marsh (National Trust), an excellent site for saltmarsh flora, including continuous stretches of marsh mallow, sea milkwort, sea wormwood, parsley water-dropwort, rock sea-lavender, seablite, glasswort, and frog rush. Above the brackish marsh were ragged robin and southern marsh orchids. At Wernffrwd we encountered a seafood factory with huge piles of cockle shells by the path. Bulldozers going out across the marsh were presumably going to dredge for shellfish. This was an excellent walk, though the vegetation remained the same for several miles until we had to come up to the village of Llanrhidian itself (where there was river water-crowfoot in a stream and the pub seemed to be closed despite it being noon), after which the path continued either through a belt of woodland along the coast or just below it through pasture, and we lost touch with the saltmarsh. This added woodland species like wood melick and wood anemone to our list, but with light rain now falling and the proximity to farm animals, horse-flies became a pest whenever we stopped to take a photo or examine a plant. The pasture was particularly boring. There was a brief interlude through the lesser village of Landimore before the same woodland walk was resumed. We descended to the saltmarsh shore once again, although here the variety of vegetation was very restricted, apparently because of over-grazing. This continued until the inlet below Llanmadoc, where there was again some marsh mallow, lots of sea wormwood and common sea-lavender. After rounding the inlet we came to a portion of coast path which uses an old sea-wall to cross the marsh northwards to Whiteford Nature Reserve, which was closed because of a storm breach of the wall not so far repaired. We in any case had decided to use the westward path keeping above the saltmarsh through another belt of woodland, which comes out at the end of the road at Cwm Ivy. We could then take the road back up into Llanmadoc to phone for a taxi. (There are buses but their routes and timetables are difficult to interpret.)

In the village we found a shop which provided welcome cream teas with good filter coffee. The village had lost its original shop, but residents had organised funding and ran a community shop instead. This was in a new purpose-built building, was a spacious airy place to relax and was continuously used by locals and visitors. Here we signed a petition for the repair of the broken sea-wall, which the residents feared the local authority was leaving deliberately unrepaired, even though it would mean the loss of a protected right of way and part of the coast walk, which saves quite a distance for those continuing beyond Llanmadoc.