Laugharne Accommodation

More About Laugharne

The poet Dylan Thomas lived here from 1949 until he died in 1953, and he is why most people come. The Boathouse under the cliff is kept as it was and open to visitors. The shed he wrote in stands on the path above it, with the estuary filling its window. He is buried up the hill at St Martin’s, under a plain white cross.

The castle is a ruin with a garden inside it. The painter J. M. W. Turner put it under a stormy sky around 1831, and that watercolour hangs in Tate Britain in London. The cliff path shows you the whole estuary at once, and it takes half an hour. Pendine and its sands are five miles west, and Carmarthen is twenty minutes north.

Laugharne was planted by the Normans as an English-speaking township inside Welsh Carmarthenshire, with its own castle and its own charter. The charter is the remarkable part. It was granted in 1291 by Sir Guy de Brian, one of the barons the English king allowed to rule the Welsh border much as they liked.

That charter created a corporation, and nobody has ever got round to abolishing it. It is the last medieval corporation still running anywhere in the United Kingdom outside the City of London. It has been holding its own courts for more than seven hundred years.

It is not a museum piece. The corporation still elects a Portreeve every year, which is its own word for a mayor. He wears a chain of gold cockle shells, with one link added by each holder before it is handed on. Every three years the officers walk the boundary of the township, about twenty miles of it.

It still owns land around the town, too, and still lets it out in medieval strips to freemen who pay a small yearly rent. There is nowhere else in Britain where any of that is true, and it goes on quietly in a town of about twelve hundred people.