Welsh Journals

Plants and Man at Oxwich by GORDON T. GOODMAN TuRN DOWN THE STEEP ROAD leading from Oxwich Towers and you are suddenly confronted by the impressive panorama of Oxwich Bay. Better still, walk eastwards along the top of Cefn Bryn and see the broad sweep of the bay laid out below you, a huge triangle of low ground shelving away into the sea on the one side and hemmed in on the other two by the higher land of Gower, on which stand the villages of Nicholaston and Penrice. The eye is immediately caught by the pattern of colour. First, there is the wide stretch of yellow inter-tidal sand bordering the sea between Great Tor and Oxwich Point. Behind this are the dunes, with their patchy whitish-green cover of marram-grass on the mobile sand, giving way to the more sober green of bracken and bramble on the stable slopes. Behind the dunes, on the Penrice side, comes a great flat expanse of mixed fen, vivid green in winter and in the summer, yellow with irises. On the Nicholaston side, the mobile dunes run into the dark olive-green of the salt marsh which is formed in front of the reedswamp, a sheet of shallow water lying directly under Nicholaston Wood and covered by a tall growth of common-reed. Scattered here and there are darker colours made by patches of willow scrub or alder trees, the glint of open water and finally, the varied greenery of Nicholaston and Oxwich Woods on the high ground flanking the Bay. The many plant communities that create this patchwork of colour, make Oxwich unique in Wales, with perhaps only two or three counterparts in the rest of Britain for it is extremely rare to find such a wide assemblage of different types of vegetation in such a compact area. From a distance, the landscape looks wild, changeless and hardly touched by man and a stranger might wonder whether Oxwich was always as it is today. Sea-currents dredging up sand and sea-winds blowing it inshore have clearly produced the raw material for much of the landscape, but it is the pattern of plant- life and the hand of man that have largely created the colours and the contours of the area. The limestone of the nearby cliffs reminds us that Oxwich is very old. The rock-floor of Millstone Grit was laid down some 300 million years ago. Subsequent geological movements gave Oxwich its present form of an amphitheatre and planed the Mill- stone Grit away from the surrounding Gower plateau to expose the Limestone once more. Thus, at some time after the Ice Age (say about 6000 years ago) Oxwich would have had its present-day