The strangest town in Wales? Print E-mail
Written by Marion Shoard, 2008   
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Laugharne is the beguiling spot in Carmarthenshire where poet Dylan Thomas chose to live for 13 years of his life. Marion Shoard paid it a visit.


Poet and writer Dylan Thomas, the author of such familiar and well-loved works as Fern Hill, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and Under Milk Wood, attracted controversy for virtually all of his 39 years.

That controversy has continued to rage since his tragic death in 1953 and was reignited this summer by the release of the film The Edge of Love, starring Matthew Rhys as Dylan, Siena Miller as his spirited wife, Caitlin, and Keira Knightley as a supposed love interest (though in fact the supposed affair is purely conjectural and no hard evidence that it took place has ever been produced).

Devotees of Thomas have been dismayed by the film's unsympathetic portrayal of his character - a portrayal they consider false. Another weakness, though, is the film's failure to exploit the opportunity offered by the big screen to communicate the importance of place in Thomas's poetic life.

The film is shot in London and New Quay, a small town on the Cardiganshire coast where Dylan and his young family lived in a rented bungalow for 11 months. New Quay is pleasant, but scenically unremarkable.

The two places from which Dylan Thomas drew a huge amount of inspiration and which are imprinted on a great deal of his oeuvre are first (but not foremost) Swansea, where the poet was born and grew up, and second, what Thomas called "the strangest town in Wales".

He was referring to a little-known but quite unique place tucked away at the end of a peninsula in south Carmarthenshire where Thomas lived for a total of 13 years and to which for much of his adult life, including the sojourn in New Quay, he was trying to return. "This timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town" (Thomas's words) is called Laugharne.

A quirk of history allows Laugharne (pronounced Larn), with a population of only 1,300, to call itself a town. A charter granted in 1290 instituted Laugharne Corporation giving it land and an administrative structure presided over by a 'portreeve' that survives to this day, alongside the usual local government apparatus.

Laugharne nestles 15 miles south west of Carmarthen tucked in its own little bay on the banks of the River Taf, close to the point at which it joins another wide river, the Tywi, to flow into the sea at the western end of Carmarthen Bay. As the Taf and Tywi mingle they sustain wide tracts of saltmarsh, mud-flat and sand-bank, all threaded by innumerable channels of river and sea.

Settled by chance


In a radio broadcast in 1953 entitled simply Laugharne, Dylan Thomas recalled how he came to settle here: "Some, like myself, just came, one day, for the day, and never left; got off the bus, and forgot to get on again." Frequent buses still leave Carmarthen for Laugharne.

After heading west between low hills of wood and pasture, the bus turns south at the busy little town of St Clears. Then, the road rises and falls, twists and turns, with glimpses of the Taf looping between salt marsh and reed bed in the valley below. Suddenly green valleys garlanded with bushy hedgerows give way to a scattering of houses.

To the left, at the foot of a hill, the squat, castellated tower of Laugharne's Anglican church rises above a thicket of yews, and heralds a terrace of Georgian dwellings, surprisingly elegant for Wales. The bus passes a handful of little shops, a run-down chapel and assorted pubs including the imposing Brown's Hotel (despite its name, a pub only and Thomas's favourite hostelry).

On a sharp, right-hand bend stands Laugharne's compact, white-washed town hall. From here the road runs down past a long, castellated stone house to a triangular space known as The Grist (rhyming with Christ), which harbours a cluster of small shops, more pubs, roughly-hewn cottages and a 'stunted' war memorial. On the third and seaward side of the triangle rises Laugharne Castle - a gaunt, pink-brown ruin standing sentinel on Laugharne's own bay.

The last of the three houses in which Thomas lived in Laugharne, The Boat House, stands under a little cliff just beyond Laugharne Castle and looks across the bay to a wooded hill - Sir John's hill; one of Thomas's finest poems is entitled Over Sir John's Hill.

It was in The Boat House - this "seashaken house/On a breakneck of rocks" - that Thomas spent the last four years of his life and from which he left for the tour of the US from which he never returned. A few days before his death, lionised during the most punishing reading tour imaginable in what he perceived as an alien world, Thomas remembered, "Tonight in my home the men have their arms round one another, and they are singing."

For Dylan Thomas, Laugharne provided three unique and utterly irreplaceable things. First, it was a place in which he could live and work. He would spend four hours each afternoon in an old tool-shed perched above The Boat House, writing and declaiming his poetry and looking out over the bay. Second, Laugharne offered the rich social mixing that bore fruit in Under Milk Wood, Thomas's 90-minute epic taking the audience inside the life of Llareggub, a small Welsh seaside town, from the middle of one night to the middle of the next.

Under Milk Wood has no plot, no action and no character development, yet it is full of characterisation and atmosphere. Caitlin later recalled, "The folk of Laugharne were engaged in an endless wrangle of feuds, affairs, fights, frauds and practical jokes, and Dylan would return home at lunch-time for a bowl of our thick fatty stew full of the stories he had heard from Ivy" (the wife of the proprietor of Brown's hotel).

The third of the joys that Laugharne bestowed upon Thomas was contact with other living creatures and their surroundings. In his last and (many would argue) finest poems, he writes of the "mussel-pooled and heron-priested shore", "full tilt river and switchback sea", "Sheep white hollow farms", "whistling/ Blackbirds" and the "castle/ Brown as owls".

Poem in October, for example, sees the writer supposedly walking through the sleeping town in the early morning of his birthday, passing the estuary and then ascending Sir John's hill, from which he looks down on the shrinking rainy scene of church and castle.

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