Gower Winter (Bulldog) Walks – Pwll Du February 2014

Rain, wind, storms, super swells and high tides, Gower has had it all this winter.  Yet there are no excuses not to get out and about, especially as the the days are getting longer and the weather is improving.  Therefore Molly (the french bulldog cross) and I decided to walk down one South Gower’s wilder beaches Pwll Du.

It was a bit of a muddy walk before we got onto the rocky road down to the beach. The recent daisy chain of storm after storm has produced some powerful swells and robbed the bays of much of their sand.  Pwll Du today was no exception.  Even Molly had to have a peak over the path to see what was making all that noise as the waves pumped in and crashed on the pebbles.

So we quickly headed down the path to investigate further.

Pwll Du is a much steeper bay than most South Gower beaches and is known for its imposing pebble storm beach that is much larger than it should be due to limestone quarrying in the past.

It also has a sandy beach in summer, but the winter storms have removed much of that for the moment.

There is a powerful river that runs down Bishopston Valley and blasts its way out of the pebble storm beach.  But seeing as storm beaches are made by storms, there is a much more formidable pebble wall at the top of the beach than normal, and the river is struggling to get through, much to Molly’s interest.

But it won’t be long before nature allows this river to re-establish itself on its way to the sea.  It is already starting to make a good effort to do so.

Large amounts of pebbles were falling out of the rivers way even in the short time that Molly and I looked on.

We took one last look at the bay before making the climb back to Bishopston.

As Molly demonstrates there are some quite unforgiving steps on the climb out of Pwll Du Bay.

We certainly made the most of a rather grey February day, make sure you make the most of yours too, DimExcuses.