Literary Footsteps in WALES

By Valentina Valentini

Tenby feels like a Welsh fairytale, which makes it the perfect place for authors to spin their words into adventurous parables and heart-rendering poetry.

BEAUTIFUL SEASIDE TOWN OF TENBY

I first fell in love with Tenby, Wales in 2016 on a trip to see a friend whose family has been there for generations. Known as a working holiday home to beloved writers and poets, Beatrix Potter, Roald Dahl, and Dylan Thomas, Tenby is enclosed by 13th-century medieval walls within which sea-washed buildings painted in pastels stand against the winds from the Bristol Channel. These days, hundreds of thousands of literary lovers and holiday-seekers from around the world flock to the idyllic sea-front town to enjoy its tranquility and historical significance.

©VALENTINA VALENTINI

Visitors to Tenby can visit a commemorative plaque at 2 Croft Terrace, the property where children’s author Beatrix Potter stayed in 1900. While staying here, Potter wrote illustrated letters to the children of her former governess (who’d essentially raised her, typical in a Victorian family of status). The lily pond at the property is found in those letters, and she spoke of rabbits living in the cliffs – all details that ended up in her seminal work, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Over the years, I’ve gone back to Tenby and each time I hike the very trails along the Pembrokeshire Coastal Paths that Potter herself would have explored as her mind mulled ideas for some of the most iconic children’s stories of all time. Copies of the letters are held at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery.

VIEW FROM THE BEACH LOOKING UP TOWARDS TENBY

Another of the great children’s storytellers, Roald Dahl, also stayed in Tenby. A plaque there commemorates The Cabin, where he stayed with his mother and siblings every Easter between 1920 and 1936. The British novelist and short story author are originally from Cardiff, Wales. The cozy holiday home is built into the sea wall at Tenby Harbour. So, although it’s butted up against the hustle and bustle of the town’s fishing industry, at the front, the stone patio overlooks the ocean with only the rise and fall of some of the world’s largest tides as a distraction. When I look out over the same view, I can almost grasp the magic that has lived on after these authors have left us, captivating mine and others’ imaginations for generations.

TENBY ALLEYWAYS ©VALENTINA VALENTINI

In later years, when Dahl found his London home too distracting, he would visit author Dylan Thomas’s writing hut in Laugharne, just 40 minutes up the coast from Tenby. Now known as Dylan Thomas Boathouse, with a tearoom and a small museum open to visitors, Thomas lived here with his family and worked in the Writing Shed just above the house during the last four of his short 39 years. He wrote many great stories while overlooking the estuaries of the River Taf as it whisked away to Carmarthen Bay, including Under the Milk Wood. He died suddenly of pneumonia in 1953 while on a trip to New York City, but his body was returned to Laugharne and buried in the churchyard at St. Martin’s.

The Welsh poet had read the final version of the play Under Milk Wood in the former Salad Bowl Cafe in Tenby only a month before his death. Members of the Tenby District Arts Club were invited there to enjoy readings by Thomas on that night and earlier in 1949. A blue plaque now rests on a pillar in front of what used to be the site of the café, now a private home on The Croft, not far from where Potter stayed half a century before.

NORTH BEACH ©VALENTINA VALENTINI