The wind whipped off Carmarthen Bay as I stood on Pendine Sands, seven miles of flat, firm golden sand that once served as the world’s fastest racetrack. It was here that daredevils pushed the limits of human speed, first on roads too rough for record-breaking, then on this natural runway where the tide renewed the surface every single day. Malcolm Campbell first used this beach in 1924, driving his massive 350-horsepower Sunbeam to 146 mph. His grandson Don Wales showed me a photograph that captured the sheer madness of those early attempts: Campbell at 174 mph, taking one hand off the steering wheel to wipe spray from his windshield, no crash helmet, no seat belts, nothing keeping him in the car but sheer determination.
Don had driven that same Sunbeam at just 50 mph and found it sliding all over the place, which made his grandfather’s courage all the more incredible. But there was a Welsh underdog who kept challenging Campbell’s records. John Parry Thomas, a brilliant engineer, drove a car mysteriously named Babs with a 27-liter V12 aero engine. He smashed Campbell’s records twice on this very beach.
His final attempt in 1927 ended in tragedy when a spectator walked through the timing beam, forcing him to redo his run. The car flipped, and Parry Thomas was killed instantly. His crew buried Babs in the sand, where it remained until 1969 when a university lecturer dug it up and spent sixteen years restoring it. The car still runs today.
Just down the coast at Tenby, I stood before a hidden cave beneath Pembroke Castle, where a desperate escape unfolded five centuries ago. In 1471, during the bloody Wars of the Roses, a fourteen-year-old boy named Henry Tudor fled for his life. His Lancastrian family had just been crushed at the Battle of Tewkesbury, and the Yorkists were hunting down every remaining threat. His uncle Jasper Tudor whisked him through this secret cave to the river, then to Tenby, where the mayor smuggled them through a network of underground tunnels to a waiting boat bound for France.
I crawled through those same tunnels myself, tiny and damp and cold, imagining the terror of that teenage boy leaving everything behind. Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, had married at twelve, been widowed at thirteen, and given birth at fourteen. While her son spent fourteen years in exile in Brittany, she played the long game back in England, conspiring tirelessly to bring him home and place him on the throne. Her plotting paid off.
In 1485, Henry landed with a small army, killed Richard III at Bosworth, and became King Henry VII, founding the Tudor dynasty that would rule England for 118 years. Shakespeare, the Reformation, the Spanish Armada, all came from that desperate escape of a frightened boy. Further east, on the estuary at Clansteffan, I discovered a completely different Welsh beach tradition that stretches back two thousand years. Cockling, the gathering of small heart-shaped mollusks from the sand flats, was traditionally women’s work while their husbands mined coal below ground.
I walked nearly a mile across the exposed sea floor to meet Ashley Jones, a fifth-generation cockler whose ninety-year-old grandmother worked the sands until she was seventy-six. She showed me the ancient technique: using a rake to scrape away the top layer of sand, then swishing the cockles through a riddle to separate the small ones. I gave it a go myself and managed to gather a handful, though Ashley laughed and told me I’d need to repeat the process about a thousand times a day to make a living at it. These days, most of the cockles go to Spain, where there’s a huge appetite for shellfish.
The traditional methods haven’t changed in millennia, with workers still using the same tools their ancestors used. Ashley admitted he doesn’t even like cockles anymore, having spent twenty years handling, cooking, and selling them. About seventy miles east, at Lavernock Point, I found the birthplace of the digital age. In 1897, a young Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi arrived as a self-described exile, his own government having dismissed his ideas as fantasies.
He set up an experiment here with a transmitter on Flat Holm Island, three miles out in the Bristol Channel, and a receiver on the beach at Lavernock. For two days, nothing worked. Then on May 13th, they extended the aerial and suddenly received the signal. I recreated that historic moment with members of the Barry Amateur Radio Society.
They set up a replica of Marconi’s primitive equipment, a piece of tin hung from a pole connected to a coherer, and transmitted Morse code across the channel. I tried to decipher the message letter by letter, struggling with the dots and dashes, until suddenly it came together: “Are you ready? ” Then a second message: “Send us news. ” The thrill of decoding those words, even with modern technology all around me, gave me a tiny taste of the wonder Marconi must have felt that day, knowing he had just changed the world forever.
Finally, I arrived at Rhossili Beach, a three-mile stretch of sand so beautiful a national newspaper called it the supermodel of British beaches. This was the territory of Dylan Thomas, Swansea’s legendary poet, who loved the sea more than the countryside. I met his granddaughter Hannah and great-grandson Charlie, who shared how central these beaches were to his work. His short story “Extraordinary Little Cough” was set here, based on his own teenage camping trips to this very spot, where school bullies challenged one boy to run the length of the beach.
Dylan Thomas wrote everything that mattered by the sea, needing its sounds and smells to create his greatest work. In the town of Laugharne, his wife Caitlin transformed a cold boat house into a home, and insisted on putting windows in his writing shed, knowing how crucial the view of the estuary would be to his creativity. She set up his workspace every morning with boiled sweets, cigarettes, and tidied papers, understanding that writing was his entire world. Standing in that writing shed, looking at his neat manuscripts and sweet jars, feeling his presence in that brilliant space, it was moving to remember that this was where he found inspiration for “Under Milk Wood,” the radio drama that made him a legend.
His fateful journey to New York in 1953, where he died of pneumonia at just thirty-nine, turned this talented poet into an icon. Throughout my journey across the beaches of South Wales, I’d encountered adventurers who pushed the boundaries of speed, a boy who fled into exile and founded a dynasty, hardworking women who kept traditional industries alive, a visionary inventor who created the modern world, and a poet who articulated the soul of this remarkable nation. But it was the women who stood out most, whether it was Margaret Beaufort plotting to make her son king, Caitlin Thomas supporting her husband’s genius, or those extraordinary cockle pickers who supported their families while their men worked underground.
The everyday hardworking women of Wales were my heroines.
