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East of there the cliffs get bigger. Three Cliffs Bay is the one on every photograph of Gower, a river bending across the sand between two headlands. There is no road to it, so you walk in from Southgate or down the valley from Parkmill.

The north side is a different country altogether. The land flattens into the estuary at Llanrhidian and Penclawdd and the tide goes out a very long way. Sunsets over those sands are why people drive up there in the evening.

Behind Rhossili there is a stretch of land called the Vile. It is still farmed in long narrow strips separated by earth banks, an acre or so each, the way most of England and Wales was farmed in the Middle Ages.

The name has nothing to do with anything unpleasant. Vile comes from gefilde, an old word for field. Almost everywhere else the strips were merged into bigger fields centuries ago, and at Rhossili they simply never were.

At the south end of Rhossili beach the ribs of a wooden ship come out of the sand. She was a Norwegian barque called the Helvetia, carrying five hundred tonnes of timber into Swansea when a gale caught her in November 1887.

She ran west round Worm's Head for shelter in the bay, and then the wind swung, tore her anchor out and put her on the beach. Nobody was drowned and the timber came ashore. Her stem post still stands about eight feet clear of the sand.

The wreck shows at low tide and goes again, so check the times before you walk down to it. The National Trust farms the Vile in strips once more and sows it with flowers, so in high summer the ground between Rhossili village and the cliff is stripes of colour.

Rhossili Sunflowers, a separate commercial farm on the same headland, charges at the gate and opens from half past nine until dusk. It shuts in bad weather and the bloom is short, so check before you set off. Gower carries a second name now, Gower National Landscape.

It is a certified dark sky community as well. Every street light on the peninsula throws its light down instead of up. On a clear night at Port Eynon or Oxwich you can see a great deal more overhead than you expect this close to a city.

Which beach suits you depends on what you want from a day. Port Eynon and Oxwich shelve gently and you can park near both. Rhossili takes the weather straight in off the Atlantic, and no lifeguard patrols it at any point in the year.