On The Road: Carmarthenshire

The lush landscapes of this south-west corner of Wales have inspired cooks as well as poets. Venture through them on a road trip to find salt-marsh lamb, air-dried ham, creamy blue cheese and artisan coffee.

- Clare Hargreaves

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas described Laugharne, on Carmarthenshire’s Taf estuary, as a “far, forgetful, important place of herons… pubs, mud, cockles… and human, often all too human, beings”. Today Laugharne (pronounced Larn) may be merely a stopping off point for many who stampede westwards to Pembrokeshire, but for those who linger, it remains as captivating as it was in Thomas’s days. Brown’s Hotel, where he drank (and drank), is still its main watering hole (browns.wales); the boathouse where he lived still perches on its eastern cliffs, now open to the public as a museum and café; and locals continue to hunt for cockles in the tidal mud. 

Unlike Thomas, I’m in search of food, not booze. At lunchtime, bowls of cawl (vegetable soup) and plates of bara brith are to be had at the café in Dylan’s boathouse, or in the Ferryman deli along from Brown’s. In the evening, however, I book in at The Cors (thecors.co.uk), a boho Italianate villa that’s run by ex-artist Nick Priestland (his artworks pepper the walls). “Cors actually means ‘bog’, which might seem an unlikely place to build a villa,” quips Nick, as I settle down to a candlelit dinner: rack of Welsh salt-marsh lamb with a rosemary garlic crust, the pink-tickled meat sourced from Eynon’s butchers in nearby St Clears (eynons.co.uk).