The Land of Sacred Beauty and Mystical Enchantment
The Gower Peninsula is a beautiful and sacred place - a truly magical land which can inspire, comfort and exhilarate the hearts and minds of those who walk its ancient paths and take in its breath-taking scenery. Come and explore the area's countryside, wildlife, legends and spiritual monuments with writer/photographer Chrys Aelf.
Arthur's Stone, Cefn BrynThe Gower Peninsula is a truly pagan landscape. It's wealth of megalithic and neolithic monuments recall a fascinating history when our Gower ancestors celebrated nature spirits and worshipped a variety of deities and gods. These ancient stone configurements punctuate the Gower countryside like a cryptic language, as evocative and rich as the most wonderful of written prose or poetry and speaks of a history that is fabulous and brooding with magic and mysticism.
Whiteford Sands, GowerEmotions and imaginations are easily stirred by Gower's pictorial splendour and this may go someway to explaining why just so much of the peninsula is haunted and infused with remarkable folklore. Dark, shifting shapes of phantom smugglers roaming along the coastal tideline at dusk, a young ghostly woman clutching her baby only moments before drowning both herself and her infant, a black steed-driven chariot commanded maniacally by a long dead squire as he searches for lost treasure, a strange voice requesting unwary visitors to an old, wind-swept parsonage to turn around and confront it - such ghostly encounters are rife on the Gower Peninsula.
Worm's Head, RhossiliTales of King Arthur and the Viking King, Sweyne Forkbeard, lend even further mystery to the numerous already enigmatic old stone monuments which are scattered throughout Gower's countryside. Strange standing stones, huge burial tombs such as Arthur's Stone and Giant's Grave, engraved stones from the Dark Age and the curious 'leper stone' of Llanrhidian Church with its stylised depictions of humans and animals all add an extra, deeper dimension to the Gower usually advertised by the Welsh Tourist Board as a mere collection of beaches. These tales, as well as the recorded adventures of Gower's indiginous race of faeries, known locally as the 'Verry-Volk,' infuse the Gower Peninsula with an air of myth and magic which are just as much a part of Gower's character as its various sandy bays.
Blackthorn, Oxwich, GowerBlessed with so many pagan treasures, the Gower Peninsula truly is a land to cherish and delight in and is one of the most irreplaceable and inspiring locations in the Britain Isles - a place which has been lauded for its spiritual energies since Man first step foot on its sacred soil. The Gower Peninsula's greatest archaeological find - the "Red Lady" of Paviland - for example, was a much honoured Shaman who both visited and was finally laid to rest in a cave near Rhossili (this article is still being worked on and was last revised on September 29, 2009)
