Insufficiently Welsh (6 page)

This was not for the first time. I once wrote holiday freebies for a daily newspaper. It was many years ago. My children were still small. In Corsica, I needed a bit of real action and decided to take them on a “half-day canyoning expedition”. What on earth made me believe that “half-day” indicated “beginner”?

The first leg involved abseiling down a waterfall, “letting go” some 15 feet above a mountain pool and plunging into the abyss below. My children stared at the prospect in terror. I stood forward. I was “dad”, fearless and forthright.

“Don't worry, darlings,” I said. “It's really very easy”. Never having done it before, I sent my wife over the side to see how difficult it could be. She didn't break her neck, so I tried it myself. It was passable. But I got a ghastly shock when the moment came to release my hold. Mountain pools are very cold. I surfaced. Then, from the waters of a chilly mountain pool, I watched as my nine-year-old son wrestled with a French mountain guide at the top of a cliff, trying to fight off being made to do the same. Fittingly, abseiling was apparently invented by a French mountaineer called Jean Esteril Charlet in 1879. He used it to help him descend Mont Blanc. I hope he broke his neck.

I know abseiling is easy. My advice is not to argue and fret. (Being Epping Welsh, I did that anyway and fussed for the requisite ten minutes). I got myself strapped in: one belt around the middle, two smaller belts around each thigh, taking care to separate my nadgers from the buckles (the last time I forgot that little detail and descended in excruciating pain, to the lasting benefit of prime-time BBC One scheduling).

I locked the various shackles into place and leaned back over the precipice. And off I went. It seems counter-intuitive. “Pretend it's easy,” I told myself. I leaned back, raised my arm and the rope slithered through a metal ring, exactly as it should do, and I began to walk backwards down the cliff face.

It was easy. I even started bouncing down, whizzing the rope through the ring. And you know, since it was impossible to look down, I didn't. The slightly nervous forced smile of my helper became a mere dot above me, and I realised with a titter that I was in fact at the bottom. That wasn't so bad was it? It was over.

“Great,” shouted Christopher from somewhere in the heights above me. “We're just going to bring the camera down and you can do it again.”

–
CAVE BARE
–

The terrible winter had had its rewards. Because of the ghastly weather, all the wild flowers had come out late, but at the same time. It was like a rock garden in Weston-super-Mare. My guide Andrew identified harebell, celandine, crocus, rock rose and an Evian mountain water bottle. Remarkably, litter is seldom a problem in these out-of-the-way areas. It would be nice to say that about the sea's edge. Most flotsam is jetsam these days: thrown away plastic rather than floating wreckage. But choughs and rock hoppers flitted about us and there was no one else to be seen.

This included the camera crew. They had gone the road-route and now Andrew and I lounged on the sharp yellow rock and watched a rescue team practising with a bright orange rib out on the surly waters beyond a great plateau of dangerous-looking stony shallows.

There was nothing “welcoming” about this coast. The incoming tide promised to cover this corrugated shelf of doom with a few feet of raging water, but I would not have liked to pilot a boat in here, which is what made the legends and stories surrounding the cove so unlikely.

Andrew took me over the edge of a jagged escarpment to peer into a cut in the rock. A sliver of sand and a slew of white, worn stone on the floor, now that the tide was out, revealed that the cove was no more than 20 feet wide and wholly exposed to the sea.

“The story is that there was a pirate family working out of this place,” Andrew told me. “There is supposed to be a secret tunnel linking their house to that thing.” He pointed ahead.

The end of the cove was sealed by a four-storey-high stone wall with tiny windows: like a 60-foot tall fortified house built into the cliff face.

“My own guess is that smugglers might have landed booty in the bay around the corner and brought it round here,” he went on. But anyway the original purpose of the building was much more peculiar and interesting.

By now Tudor and the others had arrived, lugging the kit, so we restaged our approach to the place and finally stood looking at a tiny hole at ground level.

“Let's go in, then,” Andrew said.

It wasn't immediately obvious how we did that.

He pointed to the dark hole at the bottom of the stone wall.

“We climb under there,” he said. “There used to be a rope approach down the cliff, but, with the tide out, this is the easiest way,” and he lay down on the pebbles and the stinking seaweed and crawled through on his belly.

I followed, heaving myself in through a gap about a foot high, and slithering upwards in the dark. “Am I now crawling over a nest of man-eating crabs?” I asked.

“No. But if I press the rock here, the cave at the back opens and a secret tunnel emerges.”

There were shafts of light breaking through, somewhere high above us. The stink was bad, but it was an organic sea-stink. Beneath my feet the floor was slithery, with bladderwrack of some kind, and above our head something flapped around a bit. But there were no Indiana Jones surprises. My eyes gradually took in the back of the cave and the man-made chimney stretching above.

“It was originally built as a dovecote, sometime in the Middle Ages,” Andrew said. We arched our necks and, by the dim light from the “windows”, saw nest hollows high up in the structure. There were also the remains of stone stair treads on some of the outer walls.

“They came down here and took eggs and presumably pigeons,” Andrew murmured.

Pigeons are rock-dwelling birds. They emigrated to cities because they found a ready source of throwaway provender and nesting holes in drainpipes and culverts that were warmer than their rocks. This strange building was somewhere at the cusp of their social evolution into the Mary Poppins nuisances that they are today. Was it quicker to use the cliff face to build this secretive bird redoubt? I suppose so. The stone was to hand and half the wall was already there. Even now, a few birds flapped in and out in the gloom high above our heads. This was a unique dovecote, but it was not going to provide me with any food for my rugby hero. I got down on my hands and knees to slither out and paused, up to my wrists in the damp black tendrils.

“What about this seaweed? Can you eat it?”

“Not that stuff,” said Andrew. “There is other edible seaweed along this coast. Some of it even gets exported to Japan. But that is bladderwrack.”

I could see what he meant. The stuff in my hands, amongst the jumping sand fleas, looked a little too chewy for my purposes.

–
COCKLES OF MY HEART
–

Gower was full of surprises. In the north-east corner, out on the border with Llanelli, the cosy villages, hugging the lanes, gave way to a rougher cast of accommodation. The houses got greyer and more utilitarian, the streets meaner. The region became flat. This was Penclawdd, one of the largest villages on the Gower. A high sea wall ran along the road. Beyond that were the sort of saltings and swatchways I associate with Essex and a featureless English east coast shore. Gower's reassuring hills were still there, behind my back, but, ahead, a shallow strand stretched away.

We turned off the road and drove towards a big factory shed. Glyn was waiting for us with a wheezy laugh. He led me through his kingdom, into his offices to meet a welter of people, popping out of doors and shaking my hand, while he thrust a tin into the other. “This is what happens to our cockles,” he said.

I looked at a flat sardine shape covered in Spanish. “We bring them ashore here, Griff, and we wash them down and then they get sent to Boston in Lincolnshire.”

I was intrigued.

“It's the main distribution and cleaning centre for the UK and most of the cockles that we collect get sent to Spain. Thirty million of these cans are exported every year.” Glyn had been down to Spain many times. “We can sit there in a restaurant the entire afternoon and the food and wine keep coming. But that's what the Spanish like, you see. You know tapas. Well they love cockles as tapas. They have them on the bar, like we might have crisps.”

We got into his Land Rover and drove back towards the village, turning left along a rough damp road.

“You've come at the right time, because the tide is out.”

His team worked a piecework rate, way out on the sands. There was little to see as we drove out there. During World War Two several gun batteries were established to both the east and west of Penclawdd. Gun-barrels were calibrated and shells were fired across the salt marsh; it was that empty. We negotiated the gullies that ran across the bay, carrying Welsh rain out to the sea, digging deep, muddy culverts in the landscape. Suddenly we were rolling and yawing down a steep incline and into thick mud, changing gears and spraying and slipping sideways though black and grey gloop.

“This used to be the old road for donkey carts, you see,” Glyn went on. “My family have been digging cockles for centuries. A lot of it was done by the women in the old days.” The practice of cockle picking is very much the same as it was in the past, expect now the donkeys have been replaced by all-terrain vehicles.

We were out of the mud and on to a relatively hard sand-mix, still pressing on, as if crossing a wet desert landscape and following barely discernible tracks left by other vehicles towards a few misty dots on the horizon. Cockle picking in Penclawdd dates back to Roman times.

“We take on different areas. There are places that we know.” He gave a wheezy cackle. “But we mark out areas and then we move on as we exhaust them.”

It was a continual rotation process. The diggers got about six hours' hard digging in before the tide came racing up the bay faster than a man could run, and now we could see them, a caravan encampment of pick-up trucks with bent figures, shovelling and scratching at the ground. There were men and women, wearing solid gumboots, well wrapped against the damp weather, and seemingly casually scattered over an acre or so.

Tommy swung himself upwards from his bent position and greeted me. I was going to have a go. So he fixed me up with gloves and handed me my equipment: a sieve and a pronged hand rake, like a bent trident on a short handle. Glyn ushered me over to a patch of mud a few yards on. He leaned down to show me. “See there, that squirting, that's them.” The water lay in shallow puddles and there were tiny jets shooting up from the surface. “They are only just below the top, so they can feed, so you don't want to go too deep.”

It was simple enough. I was aided by a tiny pump that worked from a car battery. It fed a hose leading from one of the deeper puddles. Water was used to keep the surface tractable. Each of the prongs on the scratching rake had a wide flat arrowhead. Glyn bent himself down from his considerable height and raked steadily and furiously, scooping great wodges of what seemed like a mix of mud and stones into his sieve. He applied the end of his hose to wash off the sediment and reveal the cockles.

“These are small ones,” he said, handing me the sieve and rake. “Try over there.”

I bent down. I raked and gathered. I scooped handfuls of lumpy mud soup into my sieve and raked more. I filled it until I could barely lift it. My back was protesting. After a few minutes I had to ease the pain and creaked upwards, reaching for the hose. I doused the mud, which ran away through the wide mesh of the sieve, but as it did so, so did the cockles. Most of them dropped through.

“Shake them out,” said Glyn. So I shook the sieve and hosed in some more water.

The rest of the cockles fell away. I shook hard and washed some more and finally ended up with exactly nine small round shellfish. I didn't want to rattle the sieve again in case they found a way through my mesh.

Glyn peered at my tiny haul. “That's great. Of course, a few years ago we wouldn't have kept tiny ones like that, but we are allowed to now that stocks are good and we can use them.”

“Do you eat them yourself?” I asked him as we bounced through the gullies on the way back.

“Well, let's put it this way,” he said. “When I was boy if I went to my granny's on a Sunday and I didn't eat them, then I starved.”

There are more than 200 species of cockle (even more if you include fossils) with some bizarre names, including the “dog cockle” and the “blood cockle” found in Malaysia, but I wasn't a huge fan. Here was a memory of Welsh childhood. My father loved them. If he could eat custard ice cream (no full cream dairy Vermont cow stuff for Elwyn) and a polystyrene cup of whelks or mussels from a seaside stall, he was on holiday. The nursery food at our table was an echo of his own seaside idyll in Llangrannog.

As a seven year old, I ate anything going too. But the rubbery, grey “little chickens” (as my sister and I called them after the yellow beak-like part of the mollusc) boiled to death and doused in sour vinegar, were like secondhand chewing gum. Perhaps they were better preserved in their tins. According to Glyn, the Spanish now gobbled up ninety percent of the British catch. I decided I would find out if they improved by being cooked in the French fashion with a little wine and onions - “cockles
marinière
”.