Day 2; The Gower and Carmarthenshire to Pembrokeshire.
Tours of North Ceredigion and the Cambrian Mountains will always be our core business but we
also offer of tours of all of Wales. We can even build in transfers to or from other areas. Every tour is different - we always spend as long as necessary working with guests to plan their trip in advance, but we can provide outline, example itineraries.
(Days minus 1 and 0 were spent visiting Cardiff, St Fagans open air museum with its buildings from all over Wales and a nearby castle and coal mining heritage).
Day 1 with Cambrian Safaris was spent exploring the Wye Valley and the Black Mountains and discovering some of Wales' long history.
Day 2. We head west to the Gower Peninsular and on westwards.
The M4 motorway takes us west, past Port Talbot, the steel works is still the largest in the UK and one of the biggest in Europe. Modern industry began in 1770 with the establishment of copper smelting. Swansea is Wales' second city and was once a major port exporting coal to the world. The National Waterfront Museum tells the story of industry and innovation in Wales with much emphasis on the social history of industry.
Llanelli is another industrial town, with a large
tin-plate works. Before this town, lies the Gower peninsular, only about 12 miles long and the southern limit of the ice during the last ice age and rich in ancient history.
We stop to visit the Gower Heritage Centre
and take a tour of the old water wheel powered Mill here, the tour is peppered with old sayings and their meanings. A coffee and a cake in the cafe before a look at 2 very different burial chamber sites, from 5 to 6,000 years ago.
A cliff top walk completes our all too brief visit to the Gower, with views south to the high cliffs of Exmoor. Much of the sea below us is shallow and was low laying land until the last few thousand years, in fact some areas were only claimed by the sea in early medieval times, a true Welsh Atlantis and not the only one.
The westward travel continues, the M4 soon ends but progress is just as quick on the A48 and A40. Saundersfoot and Tenby are delightful seaside towns, nearby is a workshop where a craftsman demonstrates the making of Welsh 'Lovespoons' and tells the stories behind the symbolism that goes with them.
We finish the day with a visit to a tiny chapel built into the cliffs just south of Pembroke.
Tonight's accommodation is an old favourite of mine - the Lamphey Hall hotel, right across the road from the church in Lamphey, a couple of miles east of Pembroke. In the evening we take a stroll on the large beach at Freshwater East.
Over the next few days we'll be continuing up the west side of Wales with various intrusions in-land! Each day we will miss out all sorts of wonderful places... that's the trouble with Wales, so much to see and do, but we have to leave something for next time! In each of the areas we spend a day - you could probably stay for a week and not do them justice.