Sweet Babou and I are big fans of a marvelous BBC One show called Gavin & Stacey.
A main premise of the show is the heroine’s attachment to Barry Island and her Welsh friends and family. We now live about 5 minutes from Barry and Barry Island. Guess where we went as soon as possible?
It was lush, it was.
For one thing, take a gander at the wildflowers around the edge of the little park near Cold Knap lake:
Then there is the lookout over the Bristol Channel (which was know as the Severn Sea during the Tudor Era). It’s all ‘scrub’ brush around a footpath and some benches designed simply to enjoy the view outward onto the sea, but it is beautiful even without the view. Seriously, the ‘scrub’ alone is worth a trip to eyeball it.
As if that’s not enough, the thistles are abundant in the tall sea-grass and it is glorious.
The view behind the thistles in the picture above? That’s England, that is. Somerset County to be exact … and maybe a bit of Devon if you look toward the Celtic Sea. Then there is the “real” view – overlooking the waters of the channel:
Everyone goes to the sandy beach toward the center of the island, but we loved the rock beach of Cold Knap, near the cliffs to the west.
The sound of the waves pulling back over the rocks as the water recedes sounds eerily like distant thunder rumbling, but in a pleasant way that is hard to explain. The girls loved it, and loved throwing rocks into the surf to see the splash:
Oh, and just there – behind the public toilets – did I mention the 2000 year old Roman ruins? The ones that anyone can just walk into and sit down on? Just plop on the edge of a wall built when Christ was still preaching like it’s no big deal!
The girls weren’t all that impressed, but Sweet Babou and I are still squealing internally.