Welsh Journals

From the Horse's Mouth I by PHOEBE SIMONS I AM ONLY 90 AND HAVE only known Gower since 1882, but all this is from the horse's mouth. I used to go and talk to the old ancient ones as they were called. Porteynon. CULVER" was King Eynon you know. He was beat in battle and he retired to Culver and fortified it and lived there. Anyone good with a bow and arrow could pick off any intruder coming down the rocks. In the 1860s the curate-in-charge at Porteynon, Mr. Williams, and Mr. Mole, the Wesleyan minister, used to dig for bones in Culver, and on one occasion unearthed a mammoth's head which was too big for them to play with and they re-interred it. This shows how the coast has dropped even in 100 years, for even in my day you walked in through the lowest door. The minister had a sack of bones he carted round to every cure, until he died, when his wife who loathed them threw them into the sea at Southampton. The PAINT MINE in the carboniferous shale behind Port- eynon supplied the earth for the painting of the G.W.R. railway carriages, hence those hideous chocolate and dead ochre colours of the line. Also the people in Port Eynon used to dig for manganese on the burrows and Hoskins, he was diggin' where White House is now, and he didn't shore it and got buried and a fine trouble it was to dig he out-that was he, that was, real ignorant The last house towards the cliff in Overton was the home of the Captain Bevan who took the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian out to Brazil. To make the saloon look larger a huge mirror was built in from top to floor. Maximilian did not realize it was a mirror and walked smack into it and it was shattered to splinters, and Captain Bevan recording it said, Well I knew that was the end of he WASHLIES now. Fresh water spring there, there's where us used to go come spring, all together. Take the blankets and plunge 'em in a good salt pool, kill the fleas, and heat the water on a drift fire and wash 'em, tread 'em we did, and then on the furze to dry and have a good time after singing and dancing till they was dry BOILING GREEN ? Out there on the burrows. 'Twas there Mr. Talbot's Sea Fencibles was camped waiting for old Boney.