Day 66: Stackpole, Laugharne and Port Talbot

My theme of soldiers and the military is still alive and well in Wales. My host Will is ex Marine and his partner Fran is currently contracted to teach diving to the military. There is a large base here.

Did I suggest in my last blog that this was a peaceful place? It is not. It is like living in a war zone and I don’t say that lightly. Fighter planes keep screaming overhead – not just ours but French, Dutch and other NATO countries too. They have been going for an hour already and its only 9.30am. 

Castle Martin is a weapons, tanks and targeted bombing training range that is active for 44 weeks of the year. It is one of the few places in Europe where they can practise sea to land and land to sea target training.

This morning I went to visit the Stackpole Estate Walled garden which has been leased to Mencap by the National Trust so that adults with learning difficulties can learn gardening skills in a safe environment.

I sat in the cafe chatting to a retired driving instructor who was there for a cup of tea, as another fighter plane flew over us, effectively preventing us from hearing one another until it had passed.

“It only takes the French twenty minutes to get back to France from here”  he told me.

 “How do you all cope with that noise?

“No choice,” he replied. “We get used to it, planes and the machine gun fire and the bombing. And we do get August off.” And he laughed. 

I doubt I would get used to it if I lived here, but then again I remember my mother living in Horley under the Gatwick airport flight path and she didn’t seem to hear that.

The garden was growing well. Mostly fruit and vegetables that they sell in the shop. 

A flurry of very excited infant school children clutching plastic punnets arrived to pick their own strawberries as I was leaving.

Will had told me that there was little point my travelling along the coast for much of the Pembrokeshire national park as I would not be able to see anything. Instead he suggested that I take the country route and visit Laugharne the home of Dylan Thomas.

The roads were traffic free and over hill and down in the valley. As enjoyable a journey as yesterday.

For at least an hour I saw just two tractors and I was only stopped once by the council, ‘shaving’ back the hedgerows on the very narrow roads.

The boathouse at Laugharne was where Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet lived with his wife and children for the last four years of his life.

I could totally see why he so loved to live in this spot as a writer. On the river Taf it was calm and quiet, and very beautiful. My mum was a bit of a writer, she referred to her poems as doggerel rhyme, but they were better than that really. In her latter years, while living in the care home, she wrote a murder mystery party. I scattered some of her ashes over the wall onto the beach by Dylan Thomas’s house.

This building near the boat house was actually the garage...

But he used it as a writing room away from the distractions of family and from where he could slip away to the village pub! One of his most famous poems Under Milk Wood was written here, probably about the residents of the village. A trust looks after it now www.dylanthomasboathouse.com

I had a nice lunch in the cafe and the curator of the house told me Carmarthen library would let me use their WIFI and my own computer. They had no health and safety qualms so I went there to post my blogs and photos before getting back on the road and heading for Cardiff.

Port Talbot outside Cardiff has been in the news a lot recently as it is the current home of Tata Steel and you can see how industrialised the area is for miles along that bit of the coastline.

For most of today I had been travelling on virtually empty roads, but as I approached Cardiff that changed and suddenly out of nowhere there were hundreds of cars, bonnet to bumper. Anyone might have thought that someone had let them all off work early to watch a crucial football match or something.

Oh – they have! Tonight Wales meet Portugal in the semi final of the European Cup 2016.

I arrived in Cardiff and my new hosts, retired head teachers Frank and Anne Rees, suggested that since the whole country would be glued to their TV sets it would be a good opportunity for me to get in a bit of early sightseeing of the capital city of Wales. There would be nothing on the roads.

I tried.

They were mistaken. I got nowhere near. The entire city was out in force, wearing red, waving red and everywhere I looked police were closing roads, the parks were becoming car parks and the excited crowds were all heading into the centre of the city to share the moment.

I went back, had a bowl of soup and watched it on my laptop.

Didn’t they do well even if they did not win? Better by far than England at any rate. Don’t you think that the teams should be paid on results? I think the English team should forfeit that weeks wages to the NHS.