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More About Holiday Parks in South Wales

The Gower is the middle stretch, straight out west of Swansea, and it has a beach in nearly every bay along it. Three Cliffs, Oxwich, Port Eynon and Rhossili all face the open sea. The coast path links the whole run of them.

Carmarthen Bay is the quiet end. Pendine runs seven miles in one unbroken stretch, though it doubles as a Ministry of Defence firing range and closes when the range is in use. Cefn Sidan at Pembrey gives you eight miles more, with lifeguards on it through the summer and old shipwrecks showing at the far end.

The beach at Pendine is flat and hard enough to drive on, and in the 1920s that made it a racetrack. Malcolm Campbell took his Sunbeam Blue Bird along it on 25 September 1924 and set a world land speed record of 146.16 miles an hour.

A Welshman took it off him. In April 1926 J. G. Parry-Thomas reached 171.02 miles an hour on the same sand in a car he called Babs. He came back the next spring to win it back from Campbell, crashed at speed on 3 March 1927, and was the first driver ever killed chasing the record.

Babs lay buried in the dunes for forty-two years. In 1969 Owen Wyn Owen, an engineering lecturer at Bangor Technical College, was given permission to dig the car out of the sand. Putting it back together took him the next sixteen years.

Babs is home. You can see it at the Museum of Land Speed in the village, which opens Tuesday to Sunday from March to October and keeps shorter hours over the winter. Mondays in season it is shut, so pick another day.

The sand still belongs to the Ministry of Defence, and the defence firm QinetiQ works it as a firing range. Cones, flags and a public safety notice go out when it is in use, normally on weekdays between eight in the morning and quarter past four. The danger area takes in the wide foreshore that looks like open ground at low tide. Email Pendineinfo@qinetiq.com to check before you set out.

Across the bay, Cefn Sidan runs eight miles inside Pembrey Country Park and still flies a Blue Flag, the award for clean bathing and a properly run beach. RNLI lifeguards cover Cefn Sidan every weekend and, from 4 July, every day through the summer. At the northern end the ribs of old wrecks stick out of the sand.