Welsh Journals

Uhe Value of Tiicholaslon Wood PEOPLE OFTEN travel by bus to Nicholaston Cross in Gower, get off there between Tor and Nicholaston Church, and walk down from the main road, through farmyards and trees, to the sands and waves of Oxwich Bay. But more often than not, on the bus, they do not ask for tickets to Nicholaston Cross, they ask for Crawley Woods. But where exactly are Crawley Woods ? There are some fine ones two hundred miles away in the Sussex Weald, but you can search all the various scales of ordnance maps for Gower and still not find the name Crawley Woods. So it is yet another problem for that curious (and by no means rare) bird, the student of place names. The answer lies not among the trees but in the fields above them, on the very edge of the limestone plateau. There, on an estate map drawn in 1782, the most southerly field in Nicholaston parish is named Crowley.' It was part of a thirty-seven acre farm then leased by Widow Phillips, whose farm- house was in Nicholaston hamlet, immediately east of the track running down to the burrows. Above that track, then, all those trees clothing a spur of old cliff projecting quarter of a mile south and west from Nicholaston itself, have taken this name as Crawley.' The really important point here is that Crawley Woods is often applied to all the woodland clothing the old cliffs, from Nicholaston right along for a mile-and-a-half to Underhill on the margin of Oxwich Marsh. This can be misleading. Crawley Woods ends at the Western side of Crawley field, and Nicholaston Wood, the woodland whose future is so keenly debated, begins. In 1782 the bulk of it was called Nicholaston Hall Wood because its twenty-six acres were a quarter of the largest farm in Nicholaston, the demesne land of its capital messuage, Nicholaston Hall. Value can express itself in other than monetary terms, and in Nicholaston Wood does so in at least three different ways. Firstly there is a very real scenic value. Now peninsular Gower is largely treeless geographical factors of situation (relative to constant onshore winds) and site (not all the limestone levels are drift covered), together with the active clearance of ground for agriculture since earliest prehistoric times, account for this. Therefore Gower is noted chiefly for its cliff scenery. Professor J. A. Steers in his Survey of Coastal Landscape and Amenity gives exceptional grading only to the stretch of coastline from Porteynon to Rhosili. But a totally different and often more lasting scenic impression is provided by a wooded coastline. It is very fortunate that such a coastline, occurring at just one point on the Gower coast, is perfectly accessible to all. This is the Oxwich Bay region a circle drawn with a radius of a mile-and-a-half from the centre of Oxwich Marsh, embraces more trees than any other coastal circle of that size. It is enough to say that Nicholaston Wood forms the vital eastern wing of this wooded arc. As such it reveals the sheltered nature of the wooded bay, because a line drawn from the tip of Oxwich Point to the limit of tree-growth at Nicholaston runs