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More About Swansea and Gower

The peninsula is limestone, and that is why it looks the way it does. The south side is a run of bays bitten out of the cliff — Caswell, Oxwich, Port Eynon, and Rhossili at the end. The north side is a different country: the Loughor estuary, Llanrhidian marsh and sheep out on the saltings.

Swansea sits at the top of the bay, and the two halves meet at Mumbles. It is an odd and useful arrangement: Wales’s second city at one end, and open cliff twenty minutes from the middle of it. The M4 runs in along the top, so this is the quickest open coast to reach from Cardiff or the English border.

Between Port Eynon and Rhossili there is a cave in the cliff called Goat's Hole. In 1823 an Oxford geology professor named William Buckland dug it out and found a skeleton stained deep red.

Buckland got both of his conclusions wrong. He decided the bones were Roman, and he decided they were a woman's, because ornaments had been buried alongside. The name stuck. It is still called the Red Lady of Paviland.

It is a young man, and about thirty-three thousand years old. Somebody laid him out beside a mammoth skull, covered him in red ochre and put ivory rods and periwinkle shells in with him. That is not a body disposed of. That is a funeral.

The cave is still in the cliff and the coast path runs along the top of it. His bones are not: they sit in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Rhossili beach is three miles of sand a short way west along the same coast.

The south side of the peninsula is where most people go. Oxwich shelves gently and you can park close to the sand. Three Cliffs Bay has no road to it at all, so you walk in from Southgate or Parkmill and take a picnic with you.

Swansea itself is the practical end of all this. The market opens Monday to Saturday and sells cockles off the estuary. The National Waterfront Museum on the marina lets you in for nothing, and the seafront runs five miles out to Mumbles.

Each September the Gower Walking Festival puts more than thirty guided walks across the peninsula. Behind Rhossili you can walk the Vile, a stretch of medieval strip fields that never got merged into bigger ones.