Mumbles Accommodation

More About Mumbles

Walk the promenade from Swansea round the bay, five level miles of it, and you will see why half the city owns a bicycle. Look round Oystermouth Castle above the village, take the children rock-pooling under Bracelet Bay, and get an ice cream on the front while you are at it.

Then go west. Langland and Caswell are round the headland, and beyond them the whole Gower opens up. Three Cliffs, Rhossili and Worm’s Head are all out that way. Only Langland, Caswell and Port Eynon are lifeguarded. The causeway to Worm’s Head cuts people off every year, so check at the Coastwatch lookout, in the first place in Britain ever named an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Mumbles was an oyster village. A fleet of skiffs worked the beds off this shore and the trade fed Swansea for generations, until over-fishing and disease finished it in the early nineteen hundreds.

Its other claim is larger. The Oystermouth Railway was authorised in 1804 to haul limestone into Swansea. On 25 March 1807 a man named Benjamin French paid the company twenty pounds for the right to carry passengers along it for a year.

That made this the first fare-paying passenger railway service anywhere in the world. Horses gave way to steam, and steam to electric tramcars, the biggest ever put on rails in Britain. The Mumbles Train ran until 1960, when it was closed and scrapped to almost universal regret.

The Cascarini family have been making ice cream in Swansea since 1922, when Joe Cascarini worked up his vanilla at the café on St Helen’s Road. They opened the Mumbles parlour in 1984.

Four generations on you can still get the same recipe at the counter, and the queue along the front on a warm Sunday is part of the furniture. Most of the shops along here are independent rather than chains.

Oystermouth Castle stands on the rise above the village and opens daily through the season, weekends only in October. A glass bridge crosses the ruin thirty feet up, and free guided tours run several mornings a week from spring to the end of September.

The seafront is the point of the place. You can walk it in either direction: back round the bay towards the city, or on round the headland to Langland and Caswell. Lifeguards patrol those two from early May to mid-September, and both are rated excellent for bathing water quality.

Dogs are barred from those two beaches from the first of May to the thirtieth of September, so if you have one with you, keep going west. The road out to Rhossili starts here, and you can walk onto emptier sand the further along it you go.