Book Direct | Caravan Parks & Camping in Swansea & Gower

More About Caravan Parks on the Gower Peninsula

The west end is where most people head. Rhossili Bay is three miles of beach below the bare green hill of Rhossili Down, and Worm's Head sits at the south end. That is a tidal island, and the causeway to it floods twice a day. Walk north up the same beach and you reach Llangennith, where the Atlantic swell comes in.

The south coast is gentler. At Oxwich the sand is a few steps from the car park, and Port Eynon has a shop, a beach and cliffs at either end. Three Cliffs has no road to it: you walk in from Southgate in about twenty minutes, or up from Parkmill through the woods. On the north side the land flattens into salt marsh at Llanrhidian.

Surfing reached Gower in the early 1960s, and at first it was all at Langland and Caswell, the two bays nearest Swansea. In 1967 an Australian surfing champion called Keith Paul turned up at Langland in silver shorts and surfed the shore break in a way the locals had never seen. The following year the Gower Surf Club ran its first contest at Llangennith.

Llangennith took over because it faces the open Atlantic. It picks up a swell on days when the sheltered bays round towards Swansea are flat. The Welsh Surfing Federation was set up in 1973 to run the sport in Wales. One of the men surfing Llangennith from the beginning, Pete Jones, went on to take the Welsh, British and European titles.

Sheep have gone out onto the marshes at Llanrhidian, Landimore, Penclawdd and Crofty since medieval times, walking back ahead of the tide. In August 2021 Gower Salt Marsh Lamb became the first product in the country to win the new UK protected origin mark. It works the way Champagne does: only lamb raised on these marshes can use the name.

PJ's Surf Shop sits at the top of the beach at Llangennith and still belongs to Pete Jones. The Welsh Surfing Federation Surf School teaches on the same sand, and the King's Head is the pub across the road from it. You can hire a board and be in the sea inside an hour, but there is no lifeguard at Llangennith or Rhossili at any time of year.

Away from the surf, the walking is the other reason to come. The coast path runs the whole way round the peninsula, and the stretch from Rhossili south along the cliffs to Mewslade Bay is the best of it. Rhossili, Port Eynon, Langland and Caswell are all rated excellent for bathing water quality.

Gower Salt Marsh Lamb comes onto menus round the peninsula from midsummer through to Christmas. The Pritchard family raise it at Weobley Castle Farm above the marsh at Llanrhidian, and sell it from the farm shop there. Weobley Castle is a small fortified manor house in the same yard, open all year, and you get in through the farm.