A visit to Llangrannog

 'Where shall we go today?' 

We'd met a couple of women, one a poet, in the car park in New Quay the evening before, and they'd recommended visiting Llangrannog, where they lived, so that's where we went. 

First stop, homage to a Victorian poet whose work neither of us have read because she wrote in Welsh, Sarah Jane Rees, whose bardic name was Cranogwen, and who sounds really interesting, having gone to sea as a child with her father, later setting up her own navigation school. She also edited a Welsh language women's magazine for bluestockings and proto-Suffragettes, lectured in America, and lived openly, it appears, with successive female partners, whilst still being a staunch Methodist and founder of the South Wales Women's Temperance Union. Her grave is in the churchyard of St Carranog's Church and, pleasingly, is entirely in Welsh.  

(Incidentally, St Carranog, or Carantoc, is the same saint who sailed across the Bristol Channel in a coracle, landing at Carhampton on the Somerset coast, where he tamed a dragon at the behest of King Arthur and made an appearance in a sequence of poems in my collection, Map Reading for Beginners.)  

Sarah Jane Rees is also commemorated in the village with a very newly unveiled and extremely impressive statue by Sebastien Boyson, who also sculpted the statue of the miner at the Six Bells memorial. 

After lunch on the front, we went down onto the beach ... 

... and past the rock called Carreg Bica, which, according to legend, was the giant Bica's tooth, spat out when he had a spell of toothache.

I think it looks more like an angel from behind. 

From the neighbouring cove, we climbed the steep steps up the cliff to the coast path. 

stonecrop and slate

Our plan was to walk to the end of the Ynys Lochtyn headland, where there's a colony of seals, but it was very hot and we both had spells of feeling slightly giddy, so we didn't descend to the headland, but looked down on it instead from the heights of the cliff path ... 

... before turning around and walking back to Llangrannog via a path set rather more inland than the outgoing route along the edge of the cliff. 

It wasn't the end of the world not seeing seals, not least since we had Cwtch with us who could have disturbed them, and anyhow, we'd seen some back in 2016, further down the coast at Strumble Head ... 

... and our consolation prize was a pair of choughs, seeing off some gulls from their nesting area.