Experience Dylan Thomas' Laugharne

In the dusty cellar of Laugharne’s unnamed bookshop, vast leather-bound volumes of Dumas, Steinbeck and Dickens claim sporadic spaces on the shelves. It is appallingly organised. Classics vie for space alongside day-out guides to Pembrokeshire. Homer’s Odyssey competes with Fleming’s Casino Royale. Antique books that would whet the appetite of the most ardent bibliophile jostle with tattered editions of well thumbed romances. Under piles of musty magazines lie troves of literary criticism. The bookshop, fascinating like an old aunt’s attic, is redolent of its wider setting.

Laugharne, which lies on the estuary of the river Taff in Carmarthenshire, was once home to Wales’ most famous Anglo-Welsh poet; Dylan Thomas, and is the apparent inspiration for his play for voices; Under Milk Wood.

The literary pilgrim can fulfil his journey with ease here. The Boat House – Thomas’ home from 1949-53 is now a heritage centre complete with original furnishings and memorabilia; while the nearby writing shed where he penned many of his later poems is also on show. This is not, however, the best place to brush up on either your facts or thirst for poetry. The true home for Thomasites is the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea which has an incredibly detailed and aesthetic series of displays, interviews and readings on giant video screens and murals. The centre even has its own second hand bookshop of mighty proportions as well as retaining in its possession the original doors from the afore-mentioned writing shed – why these are hoarded here is a mystery.

Laugharne, then, reveals more a dark shadow of influence than contextual fact. Its pubs, tea rooms and chip shops create a timid façade behind which the voice of Thomas’ poetry is allowed to thunder; their quality, however, should not be discounted on these grounds.

The Owl and The Pussycat restaurant and tea room serves a first class lunch, with a long list of local seafood on offer from sweet cured herrings and local dressed crab salads to prawn baguettes. Its traditional welsh lamb broth (Cawl) may sound humble but makes up for it by being absolutely delicious, while more adventurous taste buds should try the stilton and walnut served on granary toast with fresh pear and balsamic dressing. Follow this up with a pint of nectar-sweet Taffy Apple Welsh Cider and the meal is complete. These niceties though, however pleasant, are but the trappings that allow Laugharne to rage beneath the surface.

Thomas opens Under Milk Wood with a view of the ‘fishingboat-bobbing sea’, a consonantal pleasantry that is nevertheless ‘crowblack’, dark as welsh myth; the land’s violent gut. Another Anglo-Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas once observed, as he travelled through Wales, viewing the mountains from afar; ‘Westwards the sky would be ablaze, reminding one of the battles of the past. Against the radiance the hills rose dark and threatening as if full of armed men waiting for a chance to attack.’

In the bleak, grey view of Laugharne there is a ferocity that burns war-like behind the quaint tea shops, a fierce romanticism, seeped in old rocks and the jagged ruins of castle walls; as fearsome as the relentless swirl of the tide, as rugged and beautiful as the wind-beaten shore.

As in its bookshop, hiding beneath the fancies of tourism lies the passion and poetry that Dylan Thomas moulded into his infamous Llareggub. In the humour and dalliance of its daily life there hides the sinister, the darkly comic, the melancholy, the roaring beer laugh of the poet who, with beast, angel and madman within him, fed his poems from the soul of his home.

References:

Thomas, R.S., Autobiographies (London, 1997)

Thomas, Dylan, Under Milk Wood (London, 2000; first published 1954)

Dylan Thomas

The Boat House

Laugharne Castle

Taff Estuary

Laugharne Castle

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