Laugharne Hotels & B&Bs

More About B&Bs, Guest Houses and Hotels in Laugharne

King Street runs up from the estuary with the shops and the pubs along it. Corran Books, halfway along, is the sort of place you go into for ten minutes and lose an hour. There is a butcher and a couple of cafés either side of it.

St Clears is four miles inland where the main road passes. It is five miles west to the beach at Pendine, twenty minutes north to Carmarthen, and about forty minutes on to the Pembrokeshire coast.

Under Milk Wood is a play for voices about a day in a Welsh seaside town, and it is the most performed thing any Welsh writer has ever produced. Dylan Thomas finished it in 1953, weeks before he died, and it was first broadcast the following January.

The town in it is called Llareggub. Read that backwards and you have the joke, which the BBC missed for years. Thomas denied it stood for any one place, and Laugharne and New Quay up the coast are still arguing about it.

What is not in dispute is where he wrote most of it. He came to Laugharne in 1949 and stayed at the Boathouse under the cliff until his death. He worked in a shed on the path above the house, with the estuary in front of him.

He drank at Brown's on the corner of King Street, and his wife Caitlin used to leave messages for him behind the bar. Brown’s closed in 2008 and sat empty, and it was bought, restored and reopened as a hotel in 2012. It is trading again on King Street, and the festival marquee still goes up behind it.

All of it is still there and all of it is walkable. The Boathouse is a museum and the writing shed is kept as he left it, crumpled paper and all. The grave is a short climb further on, in the churchyard at the top of the town.

Since 2006 the town has held a festival called the Laugharne Weekend, over three days in March. Writers, musicians and comedians perform in the castle, the hall, the church and a marquee behind Brown's. The whole town takes part in it.

Tickets go quickly and so does every bed in the town, months in advance. The rest of the year Laugharne is still very quiet indeed, which is more or less why people come.

Beyond the walking there is the estuary itself. The Tâf empties twice a day into a mile of marsh and channel, the wading birds come down onto it, and you can hear them from the middle of the town.