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Behind the city the ground climbs quickly. The Uplands is a proper Swansea neighbourhood of bay windows and corner shops, and the poet Dylan Thomas was born in one of its houses on Cwmdonkin Drive. Past it the lanes run up into farm country where the loudest thing is sheep.

Out west, Llangennith faces the open Atlantic and has the most consistent surf on the peninsula. A green hill called Rhossili Down rises behind the beach and you can walk the ridge of it. The sand runs three miles north from Rhossili to Burry Holms at the far end.

The flat sand on the north side of the Gower has been worked for cockles for a very long time, and it was women who did the work. They walked out to the beds at Penclawdd with donkeys and raked the cockles up by hand.

They sorted the catch on the sand through a riddle, which is a coarse sieve. Around 1910 some two hundred and fifty women worked those flats. They loaded the sacks onto the donkeys and walked eight miles into Swansea to sell them.

It was a hard living and it ran in families, mother to daughter, and for generations it was the money those villages lived on. The beds at Penclawdd and Crofty are worked to this day, though with tractors now rather than donkeys.

Clyne, on the road between the city and Mumbles, belonged to Admiral Algernon Walker-Heneage-Vivian, known locally as the Admiral. He paid for plant-hunting expeditions abroad, and many of the rhododendrons at Clyne still carry the number the hunter pencilled on them out in the field.

Swansea market still sells those cockles off a stall, with laverbread beside them. Laverbread is seaweed boiled down for hours to a dark purée. Fried with bacon it is a great deal better than it sounds. The market opens Monday to Saturday, eight until five.

Clyne Gardens costs nothing to walk into and the grounds are open at any hour. Fifty acres of it sit between the city and Mumbles, holding the national collection of rhododendron species. May is when the whole hillside goes off at once, with free music in the gardens every Sunday that month.

Dylan Thomas's birthplace at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive opens most Wednesdays and Sundays, and you need to book ahead. They will not take you on the door. Tickets start at eighteen pounds and it is a short walk up from the Uplands.

Langland and Caswell are the nearest beaches and lifeguards patrol both from early May to mid-September. Dogs are barred from the two of them between the first of May and the thirtieth of September. Each holds an excellent rating for bathing water quality.