Port Eynon Accommodation

More About Port Eynon

The beach will take most of your time, and rightly. Lifeguards patrol it for around nine weeks from early July, and it is rated excellent for bathing water quality. The rock pools under the point keep children busy for a whole afternoon.

When the beach has had enough of you, the coast path goes both ways from the car park. Rhossili lies three miles west along some of the finest cliff walking in Wales, with Worm’s Head on a tidal causeway beyond it. Oxwich and Three Cliffs are a few minutes east by road.

This was a fishing and limestone village, and for a while a salt works. The ruins out on the point are the Salt House. Seawater was boiled down there to make salt for curing the catch, and the coast path runs straight past the walls.

Along the cliff sits Culver Hole, a wall of masonry sealing a natural cleft in the rock, reachable only at low tide and only with care. It comes with a fine smuggling legend and a better story than that. “Culver“ is old English for pigeon, and the structure is almost certainly a medieval dovecote.

The smuggling tale appears to have been invented in the 1830s by a clergyman conducting a family lawsuit over who owned the place. A pigeon loft made the weaker claim in court. The legend has outlived the lawsuit by nearly two hundred years.

Further west along the cliff at Paviland, in 1823, William Buckland dug a skeleton out of a cave and found it stained with red ochre. It is the oldest known ceremonial burial in western Europe, about thirty-three thousand years old, and a young man rather than the “Red Lady“ he was named.

The Salt House asks nothing of the tide. It sits beside the National Trust path on Port Eynon Point, about fifteen minutes from the car park, with the whole bay behind you. Beyond it the path climbs west towards Rhossili.

The village keeps a shop and somewhere to eat and little else, which is exactly the appeal. Dogs are welcome on this beach all year, so you can bring one without planning the holiday around a ban.

Nights here are properly dark, because every street light on Gower throws its light downwards. Walk two minutes up from the car park and the sky opens right up. Stargazers use Rhossili Down, the ridge behind the next bay west, for the same reason.