Coast (2005) s01e03 Episode Script
Bristol to Cardigan Bay
1 Croeso, as they say in Wales, or welcome.
We're 700 miles into our journey around the entire coastline of the United Kingdom, trying to understand why we British are so magnetically drawn to the edges of our country.
It's an extraordinary adventure of epic proportions, as we attempt, for the first time on television, to make our way around the entire coast of our island nation, exploring thousands of miles of lonely sea, sky and stunning views.
On our travels, we've already seen our coast threatened by war, storms and weather.
Now we're about to meet an even more powerful force.
The tide.
It's a journey guaranteed to put the bliss back into blisters! My travelling companions are a team of experts.
Writer and Historian Neil Oliver, seeks out the people behind the stories.
Zoologist Miranda Krestovnikoff, discovers the secrets of the sea we can't usually see, while anthropologist Alice Roberts discovers great truths that lie buried with bare bones.
And if it's ancient, archaeologist Mark Horton digs it.
This is the story of Coast.
The next leg of our journey covers 460 miles of the Welsh coastline, heading west from the Severn estuary down to the tip of St David's Head and then back up to Fishguard.
It's a part of the coastline where one natural phenomenon dominates pretty much everything, from defence to building regs.
It has one of the most extreme tidal ranges in the world.
The extreme tides mean that twice a day, every day, there's a vertical rise in sea level of between 12 and 14 metres.
That's an incredible 40 feet in old money, pretty much as high as that house over there.
And from time to time, those tides create an awesome, almost unbelievable spectacle.
I'm standing on the banks of the River Severn.
It's the longest river in Britain, much of it marking a border between England and Wales.
And although it's late at night, there are people like me dotted along the river banks, anxiously watching, anxiously waiting to see an incredible natural spectacle.
It's the Severn Bore.
I've waited much of my life to see the Severn Bore.
It's one of nature's miracles, rather like the Northern Lights or a double rainbow.
If you ask the locals, they'll tell you the Bore has a mind of her own.
I'm sure there's something moving up there.
The river's lost its shine.
All I can hear is my own heart pumping like mad.
PEOPLE WHOOP Breaking waves! There's breaking waves on the far side.
Here it is, this is fantastic! Must be about 200 metres away, and I can see the breaking wave already.
CHILDREN CALL: Look! What's that? This placid river is suddenly being ripped up and all the laws of nature have been thrown into reverse, broken, because there's a great standing wave just MOVINGunstoppably the wrong way.
It's coming upstream.
And it looks like something living! LOUD RUSH And it's breaking on this side, too, so we've got waves on both sides, this huge wall of surf that's breaking out right close to me here and going out 15 metres, fantastic! Absolutely incredible.
There are more waves following it.
My God, that huge wave! Fantastic! Run quick, because the river goes through some bends further upstream, if I'm quick I'll be able to cut the Bore off and meet it further up.
The Bore first appears some five miles inland from the sea as the Severn suddenly bottlenecks.
Then it takes the best part of an hour to follow the river's twists and turns to Minsterworth, where I am.
And in another five minutes or so, it should reach Minsterworth church.
CYCLE BRAKES SQUEAK Made it.
What's the time? I reckon I've got about a minute at most until the Bore comes creaming round that corner down there.
SOUND OF RUSHING WATER Now I've seen it once, I'm beginning to understand why thousands of years ago, the people who lived along this riverbank looked at this wave with awe and a lot of incomprehension.
In fact, in ancient Welsh, this was just known as "the roaring wave".
Absolutely awesome.
From Minsterworth, the Bore continues relentlessly, ripping at the river banks all the way to Gloucester.
But make no mistake about it, what we are looking at isn't caused by the tide - the Bore IS the tide.
It's the raging sea 20 miles inland.
The entire river has been forced backwards, and those waves taste of salt! But if I'm to find out exactly what causes the Severn Bore, at least part of the answer must lie 240,000 miles up there in the night sky, because what I do know is that it's not Britannia that rules the waves, it's the Moon.
Just like two kids spinning in a playground, the Earth and Moon are in a constant pirouette around each other and also around the sun.
As it rotates around our planet, the Moon exerts a gravitational pull on the greatest single mobile mass on Earth, the sea, which is physically moved backwards and forwards to give us high and low tides.
Although much further away from earth, the sun also exerts its own massive gravitational pull, So when, on occasions, the Sun, Moon and Earth align in a straight line, the pull of the sun and moon together almost doubles the effect.
And it's no surprise that what we get on earth is exceptionally high or "spring" tides - exactly when we get the biggest Bores on the River Severn.
So the sun and moon cause the tides, but the Severn Estuary has the second highest tides not just in the UK, but in the entire world.
Second only to The Bay of Fundy in Canada.
Why? Well, the morning after the night before, the tide has gone into full reverse.
In search of answers, I've met up with oceanographer Chris Wooldridge.
Tide's now pouring back out to the Atlantic and the buoy's being tilted over by the force of the water, isn't it? It's beginning to go like a train.
How does the shape of the Bristol Channel, the Severn Estuary, convert into this tidal wave further inland? Because down here it looks fairly placid.
Well, the very shape itself - an ever-narrowing funnel - plus the length of the basin, the length of the estuary, and the gradient and shape of the seabed.
These are the unique factors that combine to trigger the Severn Bore.
This wall of water brought in from the Atlantic, it's got to go somewhere.
It's been dragged across the ocean by the pull of the Moon, and the landmass wants to stop it.
But that tidal wave is going to run on, forced into an ever-narrowing funnel and forced up at speed.
So you've got the whole of the Atlantic ocean squeezing up this funnel and then rushing upstream.
Wow! Uh-oh! WATER ROARS Unlike the Northern Lights or a double rainbow, the Bore adheres to a strict timetable and it's no surprise that crowds flock to see it, nor that many feel the urge to ride it.
To tame it.
The beauty is that with two tides a day, there's a twice-daily rodeo.
What is amazing is that for hundreds, if not thousands of years, people have apparently struggled to LIVE with these tides rather than running a mile.
Professor Martin Bell has spent 20 years examining evidence of this struggle preserved deep in the thick tidal mud of the Gwent Levels, between the Severn Bridge and Cardiff.
Martin has promised to show me something incredible preserved in this mud.
My first impressions? Well, the mud-flats of the Gwent Levels don't have quite the instant appeal of the Valley of Kings or even Salisbury Plain! This grey, claylike material is laid down in layers, like layers of cake icing, eh, except more skiddy? Yes, and these sediments, banded sediments, incredibly, preserve human footprints.
So you can see these Is that what these are?! Yes, these are actually Mesolithic human footprints.
That is astonishing! Made in the soft mud, but now semi-consolidated as the whole things become compressed.
As you see, they're quite small.
They are obviously mostly children of seven, eight, nine, probably.
So roughly when do these footprints date from? 7,000 years ago, at a time of very rapid sea-level rise, when the whole estuary was really inundated.
Previous to that, there'd been a bay stretching between Pembrokeshire and Devon, but suddenly this funnel-shaped estuary opened up.
It's at that time that the huge tidal range, 14.
8 metres, would've developed.
That was the beginning of the Severn Bore? Exactly.
These children could've seen the first tides that caused the Severn Bore? Yes.
SOUNDTRACK: CHILDREN LAUGH .
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WATERFOWL CALL 7,000 years ago, children played in the mud of the Gwent levels.
200 years ago, Cardiff was only a fledgling town with its toes in the mud of the Severn estuary.
Then, suddenly, the place exploded.
By 1905, it was a city.
By 1955, after many centuries of direct rule from London, Cardiff became the capital city of Wales, the youngest capital city in Europe.
Our historian, Neil, is finding out more about how Cardiff became this meteoric boomtown.
Cardiff was built, as local girl Shirley Bassey would say, by men of distinction and real big spenders.
This grand building is the old Cardiff Coal Exchange where, in 1904, the world's first ï¿¡1 million cheque was signed.
In fact, these coal sheikhs fixed the global price of coal.
So how come? It started in the 1850s, when the Admiralty decided that only steam coal from the Welsh Valleys was good enough for the Fleet.
Soon, massive quantities poured down the Rhondda to Cardiff Docks.
Coal exports reached their peak in 1913, when 26 million tons of the stuff were shipped out all over the world.
That's enough coal to fill the Millennium Stadium here 19 times over.
And that's official.
Until 1839, that scale of export would not have been possible.
Cardiff simply wasn't capable of playing host to ships big enough for such a vast scale of export.
Enter, centre stage, one of my fellow countryman, John Patrick Creichton Stuart, 2nd Marquis of Bute and, at the time, one of the richest men in the UK.
What Bute did was to tame and harness the sea by building docks with lock-gates, keeping the tide in when HE wanted, allowing far bigger ships to come and go.
Coal flooded out to every last outpost of Empire, and coal fired the belly of her Fleet.
But what came back along the Imperial shipping-lanes was people, thousands of people.
From over 50 countries, they poured into Cardiff Docks in search of El Dorado.
Most of these people settled in a small area of dockland still known the world over as Tiger Bay.
One of their descendants is Betty Campbell.
"Tiger Bay" was really its nickname, it was never a name that was put on any map at all.
We were always known as we lived "down the docks".
In the '60s we became known as Bute Town.
And of course, now we're having the transition from Bute Town to Cardiff Bay.
But no matter what people call us it'll always be Tiger Bay.
How diverse was the culture? How many different kinds of people were here? The churches tell you the diversity - Norwegian church, Jamaican church You didn't have to read a book, you just LIVED the experience of a Greek Easter or a Muslim Eid.
There were people from every port where coal was unloaded from the ships.
I mean, who would think that they'd heard of Cardiff, the coal port? But they all had.
The majority of them married local girls, and that's why we've had lots of mixed marriages.
So we are talking about a multicultural community? Definitely a multicultural community - not a ghetto community, where you just have one particular race living - it was a very multicultural community.
My own grandmother was white, and people looking at me would never think there was a drop of white blood in me, but on my nana's side - her name was Catherine O'Leary - on her side, we were white all the way through.
We all realised that we were ALL different, we had different religions, but the main thing was to have respect.
We didn't "tolerate" each other, we respected each other.
And that is why everyone got on so well.
Really, we were before our time.
The coal ships no longer return to Cardiff on the tide, carrying their human ballast from over 50 countries, and new wealth has been poured into the vibrant development of Cardiff Bay.
But the rest of the world, Shirley Bassey and me, seem determined to remember that once, while coal was king, a small community flourished here named and defined by itself, Cardiff's own little United Nations, Tiger Bay.
Barely five miles away from the urban hustle and concrete bustle of Cardiff, the sheer destructive force of the sea becomes evident again.
Already the coast is changing.
The flat banks of the River Severn over here giving way to something much darker and more rugged over here in South Glamorgan.
Whenever I see contours like that being cut off by the coast itself, I can be pretty certain when I reach that spot, I'm going to be standing on top of a towering buttress of rock above the hammering tide.
But no map ever prepares you for the sheer drama of the real thing.
180 million years old, these 100-foot cliffs are a mighty defensive fist of Liassic limestone and shale.
But the sea constantly gnaws at any weakness in the rock, causing great chunks of it to come crashing down, making it one of nature's hard-hat areas.
And that's why I intend giving the cliffs a wide berth to do a bit of beachcombing! Now the tide's out, this beach has turned into a great big, flat, wet desert, great for walking on, but devoid of life.
Or is it? This brown rock here is not a rock at all.
These tubes are Worm City.
Each sand built des-res tube in Worm City is the creation of the aptly-named honeycomb worm which, with its neighbours, usually inhabits the lower end of a rocky beach.
All areas of a sandy beach provide a home or hunting ground for some creature or other.
Believe it or not, this too is a marine worm, known as a sea-mouse.
At 15cm long, it's the same LENGTH as a house mouse, but timid it ain't! It buries itself in sand to hunt for other worms and even small crabs.
Sand-mason worms, too, live partially buried in sand, but they choose to build a hunting lodge from sand, broken shell and home-made glue.
They feed by sending out sticky tentacles to catch morsels of food in the seawater.
One worm you're unlikely to see, unless you're an angler digging for bait, is the lugworm.
The 20cm long worm spends its days in a U-shaped tunnel.
From one end it sucks in sand, using its body as a sieve, and extracts the food and oxygen it needs.
Then it physically squirts the unwanted sand out through the other, hence those curious squirls you see on the beach.
So tread softly.
The next time you play Frisbee or take the dog for a walk on the beach, remember there IS something down there.
But what of the sand these creatures choose to inhabit? Think about it - we're no different.
If you fancy a trip down to the coast right now, don't move.
You're surrounded by it.
Without sea-sand, there wouldn't be a new house, hospital, school, brick or bridge.
Sand is one of the great gifts of the tide.
And the greater the tide, the greater the gift.
But is sand itself the product of waves relentlessly pounding cliffs into boulders into bits? Or is it something far more ancient? At Merthyr Mawr, archaeologist Mark is finding out with the help of scientist Nicky Rimington.
Nicky, what actually is sand? Well, it's a product of the rocks it was eroded from.
This sand, for example, has lots of quartz in it and little bits of shell.
Some of the darker grains might be heavy minerals like amphiboles and pyroxenes and things.
That's what gives it its colour? That's right.
That's what makes it particular to this beach, the rocks where it came from And what's happened to it between getting from those rocks to here.
There's pretty much a finite amount of sand out in the system.
It was brought into the Severn Estuary and Bristol channel in the last Ice Age by glaciers melting.
So thousands of years ago, a huge mass of ice ground and pulverised the rocks below it, took them out to sea in tiny, tiny bits, and now that rock is making its way back inland, as sand? That's right, that's right.
So there's real, live history just in a handful of sand? Yeah.
If you compare it to some other examples of sand This one has come from Tuscany in Italy, from a volcano.
Very much darker, much more coarse.
Completely different makeup, different minerals, not the quartz we see here.
This one Oh, isn't that lovely.
It's.
White sand! .
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from West coast of Scotland.
Completely different again.
Let's take a little bit, if I may.
Yeah.
Just to compare it.
Gosh, that's wonderful, totally different colour, isn't it? Yeah.
This is very much more a pure quartzite, and has been weathered to that much finer consistency.
This is a magical substance! Yep.
How does it MOVE backwards and forwards? Quite an important part of this stretch of coast is the high tidal range, and that's why you get such massive beaches exposed.
What happens is the sand can be brought onto the beach by the actions of water, but then, as the beach dries out, the wind is able to move the grains of sand, and eventually that's what you end up with - great big sand dunes.
We're at the top.
Yeah, here we are.
Wow, what a view! Yes.
So this is all sand dunes? Yes, that's right.
Millions of tons of sand underneath all that vegetation.
I thought there'd be a little ridge by the beach but it actually goes back for hundreds of yards.
Kilometres, even.
I mean, it all looks actually quite stable.
This section is heavily vegetated and fairly stable, but look how close we are now to the front of the dune system, the beach and really the banks offshore.
It's all part of the same system.
We know sea-level is rising.
Over the next century or so, it's estimated that sea-level might rise by 40cm.
It only takes a few bigger waves coming in to erode that front dune.
And all of a sudden you're exposing the more stable dunes behind.
So what looks today rather a robust system is actually incredibly fragile? Yep, that's right.
It's only when you view this stretch of coast from the air that you begin to realise that the dunes of Merthyr Mawr, the happy-holiday sands of Porthcawl and, next to them, the huge Kenfig dune system, aren't separate entities.
They're all sand-blasted links in the same chain.
On a day that seems to fulfil the prophecy of climatic change, I've come to meet Barrie Griffiths, a local historian who's been studying the Kenfig dunes.
This is a good old lump of masonry.
Oh, it's seen better days, that's for certain.
Barrie's been finding evidence here at Kenfig of the massive destructive potential of tiny grains of sand.
What a splendid castle this is! I mean, it sort of looks early.
Well, it is somewhere about the middle of the 12th century.
It was built by Robert, Earl of Gloucester and at the same time, he put a town here.
So there's a town under all those sand dunes? Somewhere out there there is a town but where is anybody's guess, really.
It must've been like living on the edge of the Sahara - sand going everywhere, in the courtyards, in the houses, filling up the rivers.
Well, yes, indeed.
And of course the sand was all around the town and it was helped on by the fact that you had abnormally high tides at this period in history.
So you've got sea level changes as well? Sea level changes.
A document of 1440 talks of "inundations of the sea" in this area, up to four miles inland.
They were literally driven out by a combination of sea and sand.
Barrie's research has produced a crucial sequence of dates that matches exactly what is known from the rest of Europe.
It was the time of a mini ice-age when temperatures fell by about two degrees.
But because of the extreme tidal range, there was an extreme response.
Ice Age sand was spewed out from the Severn Estuary in a sequence of furious gales and incursions by the sea.
All round Swansea Bay, there are tales of lost villages.
But you'd have a heck of a job finding them.
The sand that buried them has been buried itself.
In the 1950s, the massive Sandfields estate, the biggest in Europe at the time, was built in Port Talbot - on sand dunes.
Port Talbot steelworks opens built on sand dunes.
The whole of Swansea's seafront was builton sand dunes.
In the middle ages, tiny particles of sand invaded this coast at a time of climatic change, creating what was the biggest sand-dune system in Europe.
And it's still there, now largely hidden by modern development.
The question - could this invasion ever happen again? The answer - we simply don't know.
Don't panic, as Corporal Jones might say.
The sea is currently very benign on Swansea beach.
Right now - The Gower calls! The Gower was designated the UK's very first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty back in 1956.
It's not difficult to see why.
But the Gower was popular for some while before it was given official recognition.
People have been coming here for at least 30,000 years.
Proof of such early visitors came in a spectacular discovery made here over a 170 years ago.
Even today, the very name Paviland Cave brings a sparkle to the eyes of hardened archaeologists and anthropologists alike.
And for our own anthropologist Alice Roberts, the trip down to the cave is long overdue.
Now, this is actually the first time I've ever been to Paviland, so I'm very excited.
It's a bit of a pilgrimage for me, because it's somewhere I've always wanted to visit.
It is fantastic.
It's beautiful here.
Gorgeous.
'My guide on the rocky road to Paviland 'is archaeologist and expert on Early Man in Britain, Paul Pettit.
' Where is the cave Paul? The cave is round the corner, just out of sight, about 20m above where you see the waves.
How long have we got when we go around to the cave? Well, low tide is in about an hour.
We'll probably have about an hour down there, to be safe.
Right.
We'd better get on with it.
There's amazing shapes that the sea has carved out of this limestone.
It's a weird landscape, isn't it? It's very strange.
But quite impressive.
To an anthropologist, Paviland Cave is like the Holy Grail because here, in 1823, an ancient burial was discovered.
In it were the red-ochre-stained bones and relics of the young person who was to become known as "the Red Lady of Paviland".
It took decades to discover that not everything about HER was as it first appeared.
Wow, so Paul, this is Paviland Cave? This is Paviland Cave, yes.
Fantastic.
It's beautiful, isn't it? It's wonderful.
Where was the burial actually found? The burial was placed against the wall back here.
I'll take you to it.
So this is it, in this nice little alcove here.
The Red Lady was tucked against the side of the cave here, the cave wall.
Right up against the wall? Laid out, right up against the wall, as far as we can tell.
And this almost complete mammoth skull was placed here, most definitely in association with the burial.
And the whole skeleton was covered with red ochre, wasn't it?.
It was.
The whole sediments were bright red.
And there were a number of artefacts placed with the burial that had that similar staining as well.
What sort of artefacts? I can show you some examples, much of which we can see was definitely jewellery worn by the red lady.
First we had about two handsful of these periwinkle shells coloured in red ochre and pierced to be suspended, probably as a necklace.
Right.
We also had a couple of these fox canines pierced, again, for suspension but also more enigmatic items such as these.
These are broken fragments of rods of mammoth tusk How strange! .
.
polished with red ochre.
We don't understand what they were used for.
But they were broken and placed on the body of the Red Lady.
When the person who found the bones told the Press - surprise, surprise, there was wild speculation.
There's a lot of Roman activity nearby, and he thought, "Well it's the burial of a young female," he thought, "Covered in red, in a cave, Romans nearby.
It's got to be a prostitute.
" Really? Or "a witch".
So the SCARLET Lady of Paviland.
Yes, red in more senses than one.
The interpretation has changed completely.
It wasn't a red lady at all, it was a male burial.
In fact, it's the earliest burial in Britain, isn't it? Yes, we've radiocarbon-dated the Red Lady to about 30,000 years old.
So, it's a skeleton of a modern human.
You've got somebody about 5 foot 10.
Yes, probably lived as part of a small, highly mobile band of hunter-gatherers.
So the Red Lady HIMself was buried here at a time when the surrounding environment was very, very different.
What was it like? We can go outside and I'll show you.
As you can see, we're now looking down on the tide incoming.
but at the time the Red Lady lived and died, we'd be looking down about 100 metres at a vast plain below us.
The climate's already starting to deteriorate towards the severe conditions at the last Ice Age.
So you weren't on the coast? We weren't.
That was about 75 miles away at the time.
This would have been tundra then? It was a Polar desert, in fact.
And some 10,000 or 11,000 years will pass without a single human, as far as we can tell, in the UK.
We'd better get a move on because the tide is coming in pretty quick.
We don't want to be cut off.
No.
The "Red Lady" of Paviland was no unsophisticated "caveman".
He was simply BURIED in a cave 30,000 years ago, with dignity and ceremony, by people very much like us.
But ice drove us away.
By the time we modern humans were able to return about 20,000 years later, thousands of square miles of land had been obliterated by ice sheets.
The sea separated us from the rest of Europe.
Now, the tides only occasionally allow us a brief glimpse of the life and death of one of our ancestors from before the ice.
The Red Man of Paviland.
As a kid I used to spend hours doing this, staring into rock pools at miniature parallel universes.
Whole communities assembling and dispersing with every tide.
Down at the far end of The Gower, our team zoologist, Miranda, is taking a closer look at these fantastic miniature worlds.
Between the Gower Peninsula and Worm's Head, a vast causeway is revealed twice a day, every day on the ebbing tide.
Amongst the great ribs of exposed rock are some fantastic rockpools, many of them host to constantly-changing colonies of plants and sea creatures for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Showing me round the causeway is local expert rockpooler Russ Spencely.
Ah, here's something really interesting.
Oh, yes! 'What a great start - a mermaid's purse! Actually the egg of a dogfish, a kind of small shark.
' And we're very lucky, because this one is actually alive and kicking.
You can see the! You normally find they're empty, already hatched.
Oh, look, look.
You can see the embryo swimming around, attached to the egg yolk.
The yolk is huge.
That is like an inch across! And there's this tiny little dogfish.
The yolk has got to keep that embryo growing for nine months.
It's like a baby in a womb - but you can see in.
That's exactly what it is.
How beautiful! I'll put it back in there.
Hopefully, that'll hatch.
Oh, brilliant, that was really good.
What are the best tips for getting close to the critters you don't often see? You're totally reliant on the tide.
You've got to get down on a low tide to find the most interesting things.
A dead crab? This time of year, the odds are it's a moulted crab.
As they grow, they cast off their old shell.
You can tell.
Open it up and there's nothing in it but the gills.
Gosh.
If you smell it, there's no smell.
Doesn't smell.
Look at that.
Somewhere close by will be the crab which came out of that.
It'll be about half as big again and probably hiding, because its new shell is a bit soft for a few days.
It's a bit vulnerable.
It's very tasty to everything else in the sea.
Yeah.
what a perfect little crab.
The more you look, the more you feel a real sense of privilege, being able to peer into these perfect little worlds stranded for a moment between the waves and the sea-shore.
This is brilliant.
This is really rockpooling high-tech style.
It looks idyllic from up here, but life in a rock pool is pretty tough.
One of the harshest environments.
All these creatures have evolved to live in salt water.
For about four hours a day, they're exposed to the elements when it may be hot or cold, raining, snowing These creatures face all sorts of extreme challenges.
On a hot day, evaporation can increase salinity, and without waves to aerate the pool, you'd think a lack of oxygen could also be a threat to life.
But no, seaweed kicks in, providing oxygen through photosynthesis.
The biggest problem for a rockpool's lodgers can be a sudden cold wave causing the temperature to drop by as much as 15 degrees - a whacking 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's like jumping from a hot jacuzzi into an ice-cold bath.
I'm always amazed at how many species survive and thrive in our rockpools.
Well, there's various reasons for this.
The British Isles is where the northern species and the southern, warm-water species meet.
We get some of each.
We've a huge tidal range here, so there's a vast area for them to live in.
That's why we have all these wonderful creatures.
.
.
Who says the camera never lies? Look at this, it's a blenny.
He looks enormous.
Go on, then! But he's only a few centimetres long.
He's brilliantly adapted to these conditions.
He can change colour to disguise himself and, if the going gets tough, he can actually crawl out of the pool on specially adapted pectoral fins and survive in open air.
There you go - small is clever.
In some of the deepest pools, exposed at very low water, you might even get to see a lobster waiting eagerly to see what's going to drop in on the next tide.
The tide is moving quite rapidly.
Oh, heck! OK.
Another 20 minutes or so, we'll be underwater again.
This will revert back to the seabed.
OK, shall we get out of here? I think it's time to gather the kit.
Rockpooling is such a great way to while away a few hours, and there's a wealth of fabulous animals to discover on our shores.
We're blessed here in the UK with a huge, extensive coastline, so you'll be spoilt for choice with where to go.
Leaving the rocky wonderland of Worm's Head, we head for the magnificent sands of Pembrey, Neptune's own race-track.
Para-karting's the new kid on the block as far as land-sailing sports are concerned.
Pembrey is already a honeypot for para-karters from all over the UK, drawn to this organised event because this huge tract of sand is smooth as a snooker table, hard as iron and it's re-layed twice a day, courtesy of the tides.
It's a wonderful, wind-powered rush, hurtling along at 30-40mph, a few centimetres off the ground.
But for me, for the moment, something milder, more mellow.
Just across the Tywi Estuary from Pembrey, a literary landmark - the pretty, sleepy seaside town of Laugharne.
This was the last boozing place, and the last resting place, of one of the 20th century's best known poets, Dylan Thomas.
Indeed, many claim that Laugharne and its people were the inspiration for Thomas' lyrical radio play, Under Milk Wood.
"It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, "starless and bible-black, "the cobblestreets silent "and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible "down to the sloeblack, slow, black, "crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
" Having visited Laugharne for myself, it doesn't worry me in the least if the characters in the play were based on real-life villagers.
But from now on, every time I hear Richard Burton's treacle tones or read for myself the verbal wizardry of Under Milk Wood, it's images of this place that will come to mind.
"Listen.
It is night moving in the streets, "the processional salt slow musical wind "in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, "it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, "the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
" MALE CHOIR SING: # We are not wholly bad or good Who live our lives under Milk Wood And Thou, I know, wilt be the first To see our best side, not our worst.
CURLEW CALLS After the vast half-moon of Carmarthen Bay, the coast begins to twist and turn and, as we reach the holiday haven of Tenby, majestic cliffs and glorious sandy coves begin to dominate the coastline.
This is Pembrokeshire, home to the UK's only coastal National Park.
It's also where you'll find the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
And if you're going to stay the course, you're in for a bracing 186-mile walk, clambering over more than 400 stiles and negotiating 11,000m of ascent and descent.
And if all that sounds a bit too much like climbing Everest before breakfast, you can always hop on the bus.
It's no ordinary bus.
'It's one of a chain of buses called the Puffin Buses, and they all run on environmentally friendly fuel.
' Hi.
How much is it to Stackpole, please? 'It's walker-friendly, too, 'picking you up and dropping you off at various points along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
'They'll even accommodate your dog, your pushchair and your surfboard.
' Have you been on this bus before? I use it quite often, actually.
I'm very fortunate in that it goes past my house, entirely follows the Pembrokeshire Coast National Trail, and so I use it to go down the beach.
I can throw my surfboard on, or take the dog on the bus and walk the dog.
It's very handy for going to the pub! We have fantastic pubs on the coast.
You can take your dog to the pub, surf, and not worry about getting home afterwards.
Absolutely! Bye-bye! Time for me to get some exercise again.
There's something truly magical about the coast between Stackpole and St Govan's Head.
Although it's in all the guidebooks, it's a very private moment when you stumble across St Govan's church nestling in a deep gully.
Tradition has it that this was the last resting place of Sir Gawain, one of the knights of the round table.
Whatever the truth, there's an atmosphere here that rivals that of any great cathedral.
You can drink deeply of the beauty of this landscape and be inspired by it.
But you can't eat it.
Fortunately, the very nature of the coast here provides a golden opportunity for industry.
As we leave the tidal rhythms of the Bristol Channel and veer North, the coast gets fully exposed to the ravages of the sea.
And yet it's here that we find the huge oil and liquid-gas terminals of Pembroke Dock and Milford Haven, because the Cleddau estuary on which they stand is almost like an inland lake, protected by the sheltering arm of St Ann's Head.
To a geographer like me, this is a ria, a flooded valley.
But to shipping, it's one of the deepest and finest natural harbours in the world.
In the 1950s, Milford Haven was a thriving fishing port.
Then, suddenly, there was a sea-change in its economy when, instead of Wales exporting fuel all over the world in the shape of coal, Milford Haven became central to our need to import fuel in the shape of crude oil.
Day and night, massive tankers sail through the narrow jaws of the estuary.
SHIPS HORNS BLAS Then one night the haven became hell.
We're getting reports that a 147,000-tonne tanker has run aground in South Wales.
On 15th February 1996, the Sea Empress all but broke her back off St Ann's Head, spilling over 70,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea.
Thousands of seabirds died, the local economy was badly hit for a time and the clean-up took months.
It was a disaster.
But it was a mercifully rare disaster for Milford Haven, even for the UK, thanks to the existence of lighthouses.
Given the hell's-teeth collection of rocks at the mouth of the estuary, it's not surprising that there's a greater concentration of lighthouses here than almost anywhere else in the UK.
There's something about a lighthouse, a certain light in an uncertain darkness.
Try to imagine the UK coastline without them.
They get to you.
They get to our historian, Neil, big time.
When I was a wee boy, long before I thought about a job in history, I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.
But I'm never going to get the chance, because in the mid 1990s, every lighthouse in the UK was automated.
I still want to know how it would feel to be marooned on a rock not knowing how or when I was going to get back.
Now it's my time to find out.
I'm off to visit one of the most remote lighthouses in the UK, to see what it's like and to reveal a real life horror story.
20 miles on land seems like nothing.
20 miles out to sea is scary! That tiny thing sticking out of the sea - it looks like a golf tee - it's the Smalls lighthouse.
We're not going to do anything simple like land beside it and go up the stairs, we'll land on TOP of it.
Now, that's what I call a tricky bit of parking.
That's unbelievable, I can't believe anybody managed to build that.
And as you get closer, the thought of landing on top of it just gets worse and worse! It's not getting big enough.
It's definitely not big enough to land on.
Well, there you go, safe as houses.
I don't know what I was worried about(!) Helicopters, lighthouses, this is shaping up to be the best trip of my life.
But this is not how I want to be remembered.
If you'll excuse me, I'm off to change into something less orange.
The local seals seem unimpressed by my arrival.
They've seen loads of people here recently, when the lighthouse was converted to run on wind and solar energy, the first of its kind in the UK, and all to powerwait for it a 35 watt bulb, which, thanks to its superbly engineered lens, can be seen 21 miles away.
That's incredible.
Down into the bowels Oh, very nice, very nice indeed.
I've been in guest houses that weren't as well-appointed as this, and voila, the toilet.
Now, it's a modern suite, but Smalls lighthouse was the first lighthouse in the UK to have a flushing toilet.
IT FLUSHES OK, I've been able to tick off two firsts already for the Smalls lighthouse.
Green energy - excellent.
And the first flushing lighthouse loo - brilliant.
But there's another reason for coming here.
This Victorian pamphlet says there used to be another lighthouse here.
I want to see what, if anything, remains of it, because the events that unfolded inside it shook the lighthouse world to its foundations and changed the way they were run forever.
This is unbelievable! Another one! I knew there were supposed to be remains of the original lighthouse, but I had no idea it'd be so substantial.
Back in 1775, a guy called Henry Whiteside won the contract to build the first lighthouse out here.
And the solution he came up with almost beggars belief.
What he did was, he erected a circle of massive oak beams, great posts rising 70-odd feet into the sky.
On top of that he built the lighthouse itself, the home of the beacon.
Also home to a couple of guys who'd be out here for weeks, even months, at a time.
This is a picture of the thing.
People must've thought he was off his head when he showed them this drawing, but his solution was that the waves would break through these massive posts and, instead of breaking them, would just carry on.
And he was right, because this thing stood up to westerlies for over 70 years.
But as you can imagine, if you build a lighthouse on stilts, you're asking for trouble.
And sure enough, within months of the thing becoming operational, the lighthouse keepers out here were complaining that it was rocking drunkenly in heavier gales.
And so Whiteside and his engineer were summoned out here fast to see what they could do to reinforce it and to shore it up.
But no sooner had they got here than the weather closed down on them, and they were stuck, marooned out here.
Now, there's four of them, there's not enough rations, so Whiteside HAS to make contact with the mainland.
And what he does is put messages in bottles, put the bottles in little barrels and throw them over the side.
Unbelievably, one of these actually gets to the man it's addressed to.
The man who is Whiteside's employer, who can send a ship out here to get them off this miserable rock.
Whiteside has sent the first message in a bottle.
Now, that was surely enough to get this place its spot in the history books.
But there's another story.
And it's a story of horror and madness and death.
The winter of 1800-1801 was a particularly savage one.
And during that time Smalls lighthouse was being manned, as was the custom, by a two-man team.
Now, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffiths were notorious for one thing, and one thing only, and that was their constant arguing.
So when Griffiths died out here in the lighthouse in a freak accident, Howell had a predicament.
What he wanted to do, quite naturally, was to get rid of the body, but he was panic-stricken in case people would think the pair had had another fight, he'd killed Griffiths and dumped the body to get rid of the evidence.
And so, in fear of a murder charge, he decides to hold onto the body.
He puts it in a makeshift coffin and settles down to wait for the rescue party.
But the storm is so relentless that nobody ever comes.
After a few days, the body starts to smell, and in desperation, he drags the coffin out on to the balcony that surrounds the lamp house.
During one of the worst storms yet, a massive wave shatters Griffiths' coffin.
The putrefying corpse spills out and, by a cruel fluke of the way it lands, the wind is able to take one of the arms and blow it thus so that it looks as though the corpse is beckoning people onto Smalls lighthouse once again.
And this is the sight that greets the rescue party when, after more than three months, the storm has abated enough for them to get out to the lighthouse.
Inside the lighthouse they found Thomas Howell.
Folk that knew him didn't even recognise him.
His hair had turned completely white, and his ordeal had driven him stark, staring mad.
The tragedy changed the lighthouse world forever.
From then, until the mid 1990s when they were all fully automated, every lighthouse in the UK was assigned a three-man crew.
So that if a disaster should overtake one of them, there'd still be two to help keep each other sane.
20 miles North of the Smalls is St David's Head, one of the most culturally rich landscapes in Wales.
And yet, the siting of St David's Cathedral is surprisingly modest and discreet.
It was deliberately built in a hollow, so it couldn't be seen from the sea by the rather worldly Vikings.
But the Vikings weren't the last seafarers to cause panic in this part of Pembrokeshire.
This countryside looks tranquil enough but, for 48 alarming hours in 1797, it was right at the epicentre of revolutionary turmoil sweeping across Europe.
We were at war with the new French Republic, and disaffected Irishmen had joined in to bring Republican revolt to Britain.
It's Wednesday, 22nd February 1797, a date that will live in infamy.
The last invasion of Britain.
Hugging the cliffs below me are four warships, and they're flying the British colours.
Anybody who knows their ropes will tell you that rigging's not British, it's French.
On board the heavily armed ships is the Legion Noir, 1,400 French troops under the command of Irish republican, General William Tate.
They land here at Carreg Wastad.
Their mission, to spread terror and to overthrow King George III.
But don't be misled.
The invaders weren't the elite force suggested by their name, the Black Legion, they were much more like the Dirty Dozen but without Lee Marvin, an undisciplined rabble of convicts and criminals.
It's when they start to forage for food that the invasion goes belly-up.
You see, a Portuguese ship loaded with port and brandy had just been wrecked, so every homestead had a full drinks cabinet.
The soldiers had come a long way, they were thirsty and they were blokes.
What do YOU think happened? Much of what did happen next is the stuff of legend.
But we do know that the local militia was called, and that Welsh women swelled the militia's ranks, striking terror into the hearts of French troops.
Possibly the invaders mistook the women in their tall black hats and red cloaks for British Grenadiers.
Or perhaps the women were scary enough as themselves! 1,400 men with hangovers and food-poisoning do not constitute an effective fighting force.
After 48 hours, they surrender.
The last invasion of British soil dissolved into French farce.
And the denouement? Captured French troops were exchanged for British prisoners of war, there was the inevitable run on the pound Oh, and George III patriotically sacked his French chef.
Britain was safe.
Hoorah! From Fishguard, the next leg of our journey will take us around Cardigan Bay and up to North Wales and back into England.
There are rich pickings, with stories of a Welsh Atlantis.
A little known visitor to our shores - a turtle as big as a mini.
And an extraordinary race that led to the building of two of our finest bridges.
It's a section of our coast that I hardly know, and I'm really looking forward to it.
We're 700 miles into our journey around the entire coastline of the United Kingdom, trying to understand why we British are so magnetically drawn to the edges of our country.
It's an extraordinary adventure of epic proportions, as we attempt, for the first time on television, to make our way around the entire coast of our island nation, exploring thousands of miles of lonely sea, sky and stunning views.
On our travels, we've already seen our coast threatened by war, storms and weather.
Now we're about to meet an even more powerful force.
The tide.
It's a journey guaranteed to put the bliss back into blisters! My travelling companions are a team of experts.
Writer and Historian Neil Oliver, seeks out the people behind the stories.
Zoologist Miranda Krestovnikoff, discovers the secrets of the sea we can't usually see, while anthropologist Alice Roberts discovers great truths that lie buried with bare bones.
And if it's ancient, archaeologist Mark Horton digs it.
This is the story of Coast.
The next leg of our journey covers 460 miles of the Welsh coastline, heading west from the Severn estuary down to the tip of St David's Head and then back up to Fishguard.
It's a part of the coastline where one natural phenomenon dominates pretty much everything, from defence to building regs.
It has one of the most extreme tidal ranges in the world.
The extreme tides mean that twice a day, every day, there's a vertical rise in sea level of between 12 and 14 metres.
That's an incredible 40 feet in old money, pretty much as high as that house over there.
And from time to time, those tides create an awesome, almost unbelievable spectacle.
I'm standing on the banks of the River Severn.
It's the longest river in Britain, much of it marking a border between England and Wales.
And although it's late at night, there are people like me dotted along the river banks, anxiously watching, anxiously waiting to see an incredible natural spectacle.
It's the Severn Bore.
I've waited much of my life to see the Severn Bore.
It's one of nature's miracles, rather like the Northern Lights or a double rainbow.
If you ask the locals, they'll tell you the Bore has a mind of her own.
I'm sure there's something moving up there.
The river's lost its shine.
All I can hear is my own heart pumping like mad.
PEOPLE WHOOP Breaking waves! There's breaking waves on the far side.
Here it is, this is fantastic! Must be about 200 metres away, and I can see the breaking wave already.
CHILDREN CALL: Look! What's that? This placid river is suddenly being ripped up and all the laws of nature have been thrown into reverse, broken, because there's a great standing wave just MOVINGunstoppably the wrong way.
It's coming upstream.
And it looks like something living! LOUD RUSH And it's breaking on this side, too, so we've got waves on both sides, this huge wall of surf that's breaking out right close to me here and going out 15 metres, fantastic! Absolutely incredible.
There are more waves following it.
My God, that huge wave! Fantastic! Run quick, because the river goes through some bends further upstream, if I'm quick I'll be able to cut the Bore off and meet it further up.
The Bore first appears some five miles inland from the sea as the Severn suddenly bottlenecks.
Then it takes the best part of an hour to follow the river's twists and turns to Minsterworth, where I am.
And in another five minutes or so, it should reach Minsterworth church.
CYCLE BRAKES SQUEAK Made it.
What's the time? I reckon I've got about a minute at most until the Bore comes creaming round that corner down there.
SOUND OF RUSHING WATER Now I've seen it once, I'm beginning to understand why thousands of years ago, the people who lived along this riverbank looked at this wave with awe and a lot of incomprehension.
In fact, in ancient Welsh, this was just known as "the roaring wave".
Absolutely awesome.
From Minsterworth, the Bore continues relentlessly, ripping at the river banks all the way to Gloucester.
But make no mistake about it, what we are looking at isn't caused by the tide - the Bore IS the tide.
It's the raging sea 20 miles inland.
The entire river has been forced backwards, and those waves taste of salt! But if I'm to find out exactly what causes the Severn Bore, at least part of the answer must lie 240,000 miles up there in the night sky, because what I do know is that it's not Britannia that rules the waves, it's the Moon.
Just like two kids spinning in a playground, the Earth and Moon are in a constant pirouette around each other and also around the sun.
As it rotates around our planet, the Moon exerts a gravitational pull on the greatest single mobile mass on Earth, the sea, which is physically moved backwards and forwards to give us high and low tides.
Although much further away from earth, the sun also exerts its own massive gravitational pull, So when, on occasions, the Sun, Moon and Earth align in a straight line, the pull of the sun and moon together almost doubles the effect.
And it's no surprise that what we get on earth is exceptionally high or "spring" tides - exactly when we get the biggest Bores on the River Severn.
So the sun and moon cause the tides, but the Severn Estuary has the second highest tides not just in the UK, but in the entire world.
Second only to The Bay of Fundy in Canada.
Why? Well, the morning after the night before, the tide has gone into full reverse.
In search of answers, I've met up with oceanographer Chris Wooldridge.
Tide's now pouring back out to the Atlantic and the buoy's being tilted over by the force of the water, isn't it? It's beginning to go like a train.
How does the shape of the Bristol Channel, the Severn Estuary, convert into this tidal wave further inland? Because down here it looks fairly placid.
Well, the very shape itself - an ever-narrowing funnel - plus the length of the basin, the length of the estuary, and the gradient and shape of the seabed.
These are the unique factors that combine to trigger the Severn Bore.
This wall of water brought in from the Atlantic, it's got to go somewhere.
It's been dragged across the ocean by the pull of the Moon, and the landmass wants to stop it.
But that tidal wave is going to run on, forced into an ever-narrowing funnel and forced up at speed.
So you've got the whole of the Atlantic ocean squeezing up this funnel and then rushing upstream.
Wow! Uh-oh! WATER ROARS Unlike the Northern Lights or a double rainbow, the Bore adheres to a strict timetable and it's no surprise that crowds flock to see it, nor that many feel the urge to ride it.
To tame it.
The beauty is that with two tides a day, there's a twice-daily rodeo.
What is amazing is that for hundreds, if not thousands of years, people have apparently struggled to LIVE with these tides rather than running a mile.
Professor Martin Bell has spent 20 years examining evidence of this struggle preserved deep in the thick tidal mud of the Gwent Levels, between the Severn Bridge and Cardiff.
Martin has promised to show me something incredible preserved in this mud.
My first impressions? Well, the mud-flats of the Gwent Levels don't have quite the instant appeal of the Valley of Kings or even Salisbury Plain! This grey, claylike material is laid down in layers, like layers of cake icing, eh, except more skiddy? Yes, and these sediments, banded sediments, incredibly, preserve human footprints.
So you can see these Is that what these are?! Yes, these are actually Mesolithic human footprints.
That is astonishing! Made in the soft mud, but now semi-consolidated as the whole things become compressed.
As you see, they're quite small.
They are obviously mostly children of seven, eight, nine, probably.
So roughly when do these footprints date from? 7,000 years ago, at a time of very rapid sea-level rise, when the whole estuary was really inundated.
Previous to that, there'd been a bay stretching between Pembrokeshire and Devon, but suddenly this funnel-shaped estuary opened up.
It's at that time that the huge tidal range, 14.
8 metres, would've developed.
That was the beginning of the Severn Bore? Exactly.
These children could've seen the first tides that caused the Severn Bore? Yes.
SOUNDTRACK: CHILDREN LAUGH .
.
WATERFOWL CALL 7,000 years ago, children played in the mud of the Gwent levels.
200 years ago, Cardiff was only a fledgling town with its toes in the mud of the Severn estuary.
Then, suddenly, the place exploded.
By 1905, it was a city.
By 1955, after many centuries of direct rule from London, Cardiff became the capital city of Wales, the youngest capital city in Europe.
Our historian, Neil, is finding out more about how Cardiff became this meteoric boomtown.
Cardiff was built, as local girl Shirley Bassey would say, by men of distinction and real big spenders.
This grand building is the old Cardiff Coal Exchange where, in 1904, the world's first ï¿¡1 million cheque was signed.
In fact, these coal sheikhs fixed the global price of coal.
So how come? It started in the 1850s, when the Admiralty decided that only steam coal from the Welsh Valleys was good enough for the Fleet.
Soon, massive quantities poured down the Rhondda to Cardiff Docks.
Coal exports reached their peak in 1913, when 26 million tons of the stuff were shipped out all over the world.
That's enough coal to fill the Millennium Stadium here 19 times over.
And that's official.
Until 1839, that scale of export would not have been possible.
Cardiff simply wasn't capable of playing host to ships big enough for such a vast scale of export.
Enter, centre stage, one of my fellow countryman, John Patrick Creichton Stuart, 2nd Marquis of Bute and, at the time, one of the richest men in the UK.
What Bute did was to tame and harness the sea by building docks with lock-gates, keeping the tide in when HE wanted, allowing far bigger ships to come and go.
Coal flooded out to every last outpost of Empire, and coal fired the belly of her Fleet.
But what came back along the Imperial shipping-lanes was people, thousands of people.
From over 50 countries, they poured into Cardiff Docks in search of El Dorado.
Most of these people settled in a small area of dockland still known the world over as Tiger Bay.
One of their descendants is Betty Campbell.
"Tiger Bay" was really its nickname, it was never a name that was put on any map at all.
We were always known as we lived "down the docks".
In the '60s we became known as Bute Town.
And of course, now we're having the transition from Bute Town to Cardiff Bay.
But no matter what people call us it'll always be Tiger Bay.
How diverse was the culture? How many different kinds of people were here? The churches tell you the diversity - Norwegian church, Jamaican church You didn't have to read a book, you just LIVED the experience of a Greek Easter or a Muslim Eid.
There were people from every port where coal was unloaded from the ships.
I mean, who would think that they'd heard of Cardiff, the coal port? But they all had.
The majority of them married local girls, and that's why we've had lots of mixed marriages.
So we are talking about a multicultural community? Definitely a multicultural community - not a ghetto community, where you just have one particular race living - it was a very multicultural community.
My own grandmother was white, and people looking at me would never think there was a drop of white blood in me, but on my nana's side - her name was Catherine O'Leary - on her side, we were white all the way through.
We all realised that we were ALL different, we had different religions, but the main thing was to have respect.
We didn't "tolerate" each other, we respected each other.
And that is why everyone got on so well.
Really, we were before our time.
The coal ships no longer return to Cardiff on the tide, carrying their human ballast from over 50 countries, and new wealth has been poured into the vibrant development of Cardiff Bay.
But the rest of the world, Shirley Bassey and me, seem determined to remember that once, while coal was king, a small community flourished here named and defined by itself, Cardiff's own little United Nations, Tiger Bay.
Barely five miles away from the urban hustle and concrete bustle of Cardiff, the sheer destructive force of the sea becomes evident again.
Already the coast is changing.
The flat banks of the River Severn over here giving way to something much darker and more rugged over here in South Glamorgan.
Whenever I see contours like that being cut off by the coast itself, I can be pretty certain when I reach that spot, I'm going to be standing on top of a towering buttress of rock above the hammering tide.
But no map ever prepares you for the sheer drama of the real thing.
180 million years old, these 100-foot cliffs are a mighty defensive fist of Liassic limestone and shale.
But the sea constantly gnaws at any weakness in the rock, causing great chunks of it to come crashing down, making it one of nature's hard-hat areas.
And that's why I intend giving the cliffs a wide berth to do a bit of beachcombing! Now the tide's out, this beach has turned into a great big, flat, wet desert, great for walking on, but devoid of life.
Or is it? This brown rock here is not a rock at all.
These tubes are Worm City.
Each sand built des-res tube in Worm City is the creation of the aptly-named honeycomb worm which, with its neighbours, usually inhabits the lower end of a rocky beach.
All areas of a sandy beach provide a home or hunting ground for some creature or other.
Believe it or not, this too is a marine worm, known as a sea-mouse.
At 15cm long, it's the same LENGTH as a house mouse, but timid it ain't! It buries itself in sand to hunt for other worms and even small crabs.
Sand-mason worms, too, live partially buried in sand, but they choose to build a hunting lodge from sand, broken shell and home-made glue.
They feed by sending out sticky tentacles to catch morsels of food in the seawater.
One worm you're unlikely to see, unless you're an angler digging for bait, is the lugworm.
The 20cm long worm spends its days in a U-shaped tunnel.
From one end it sucks in sand, using its body as a sieve, and extracts the food and oxygen it needs.
Then it physically squirts the unwanted sand out through the other, hence those curious squirls you see on the beach.
So tread softly.
The next time you play Frisbee or take the dog for a walk on the beach, remember there IS something down there.
But what of the sand these creatures choose to inhabit? Think about it - we're no different.
If you fancy a trip down to the coast right now, don't move.
You're surrounded by it.
Without sea-sand, there wouldn't be a new house, hospital, school, brick or bridge.
Sand is one of the great gifts of the tide.
And the greater the tide, the greater the gift.
But is sand itself the product of waves relentlessly pounding cliffs into boulders into bits? Or is it something far more ancient? At Merthyr Mawr, archaeologist Mark is finding out with the help of scientist Nicky Rimington.
Nicky, what actually is sand? Well, it's a product of the rocks it was eroded from.
This sand, for example, has lots of quartz in it and little bits of shell.
Some of the darker grains might be heavy minerals like amphiboles and pyroxenes and things.
That's what gives it its colour? That's right.
That's what makes it particular to this beach, the rocks where it came from And what's happened to it between getting from those rocks to here.
There's pretty much a finite amount of sand out in the system.
It was brought into the Severn Estuary and Bristol channel in the last Ice Age by glaciers melting.
So thousands of years ago, a huge mass of ice ground and pulverised the rocks below it, took them out to sea in tiny, tiny bits, and now that rock is making its way back inland, as sand? That's right, that's right.
So there's real, live history just in a handful of sand? Yeah.
If you compare it to some other examples of sand This one has come from Tuscany in Italy, from a volcano.
Very much darker, much more coarse.
Completely different makeup, different minerals, not the quartz we see here.
This one Oh, isn't that lovely.
It's.
White sand! .
.
from West coast of Scotland.
Completely different again.
Let's take a little bit, if I may.
Yeah.
Just to compare it.
Gosh, that's wonderful, totally different colour, isn't it? Yeah.
This is very much more a pure quartzite, and has been weathered to that much finer consistency.
This is a magical substance! Yep.
How does it MOVE backwards and forwards? Quite an important part of this stretch of coast is the high tidal range, and that's why you get such massive beaches exposed.
What happens is the sand can be brought onto the beach by the actions of water, but then, as the beach dries out, the wind is able to move the grains of sand, and eventually that's what you end up with - great big sand dunes.
We're at the top.
Yeah, here we are.
Wow, what a view! Yes.
So this is all sand dunes? Yes, that's right.
Millions of tons of sand underneath all that vegetation.
I thought there'd be a little ridge by the beach but it actually goes back for hundreds of yards.
Kilometres, even.
I mean, it all looks actually quite stable.
This section is heavily vegetated and fairly stable, but look how close we are now to the front of the dune system, the beach and really the banks offshore.
It's all part of the same system.
We know sea-level is rising.
Over the next century or so, it's estimated that sea-level might rise by 40cm.
It only takes a few bigger waves coming in to erode that front dune.
And all of a sudden you're exposing the more stable dunes behind.
So what looks today rather a robust system is actually incredibly fragile? Yep, that's right.
It's only when you view this stretch of coast from the air that you begin to realise that the dunes of Merthyr Mawr, the happy-holiday sands of Porthcawl and, next to them, the huge Kenfig dune system, aren't separate entities.
They're all sand-blasted links in the same chain.
On a day that seems to fulfil the prophecy of climatic change, I've come to meet Barrie Griffiths, a local historian who's been studying the Kenfig dunes.
This is a good old lump of masonry.
Oh, it's seen better days, that's for certain.
Barrie's been finding evidence here at Kenfig of the massive destructive potential of tiny grains of sand.
What a splendid castle this is! I mean, it sort of looks early.
Well, it is somewhere about the middle of the 12th century.
It was built by Robert, Earl of Gloucester and at the same time, he put a town here.
So there's a town under all those sand dunes? Somewhere out there there is a town but where is anybody's guess, really.
It must've been like living on the edge of the Sahara - sand going everywhere, in the courtyards, in the houses, filling up the rivers.
Well, yes, indeed.
And of course the sand was all around the town and it was helped on by the fact that you had abnormally high tides at this period in history.
So you've got sea level changes as well? Sea level changes.
A document of 1440 talks of "inundations of the sea" in this area, up to four miles inland.
They were literally driven out by a combination of sea and sand.
Barrie's research has produced a crucial sequence of dates that matches exactly what is known from the rest of Europe.
It was the time of a mini ice-age when temperatures fell by about two degrees.
But because of the extreme tidal range, there was an extreme response.
Ice Age sand was spewed out from the Severn Estuary in a sequence of furious gales and incursions by the sea.
All round Swansea Bay, there are tales of lost villages.
But you'd have a heck of a job finding them.
The sand that buried them has been buried itself.
In the 1950s, the massive Sandfields estate, the biggest in Europe at the time, was built in Port Talbot - on sand dunes.
Port Talbot steelworks opens built on sand dunes.
The whole of Swansea's seafront was builton sand dunes.
In the middle ages, tiny particles of sand invaded this coast at a time of climatic change, creating what was the biggest sand-dune system in Europe.
And it's still there, now largely hidden by modern development.
The question - could this invasion ever happen again? The answer - we simply don't know.
Don't panic, as Corporal Jones might say.
The sea is currently very benign on Swansea beach.
Right now - The Gower calls! The Gower was designated the UK's very first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty back in 1956.
It's not difficult to see why.
But the Gower was popular for some while before it was given official recognition.
People have been coming here for at least 30,000 years.
Proof of such early visitors came in a spectacular discovery made here over a 170 years ago.
Even today, the very name Paviland Cave brings a sparkle to the eyes of hardened archaeologists and anthropologists alike.
And for our own anthropologist Alice Roberts, the trip down to the cave is long overdue.
Now, this is actually the first time I've ever been to Paviland, so I'm very excited.
It's a bit of a pilgrimage for me, because it's somewhere I've always wanted to visit.
It is fantastic.
It's beautiful here.
Gorgeous.
'My guide on the rocky road to Paviland 'is archaeologist and expert on Early Man in Britain, Paul Pettit.
' Where is the cave Paul? The cave is round the corner, just out of sight, about 20m above where you see the waves.
How long have we got when we go around to the cave? Well, low tide is in about an hour.
We'll probably have about an hour down there, to be safe.
Right.
We'd better get on with it.
There's amazing shapes that the sea has carved out of this limestone.
It's a weird landscape, isn't it? It's very strange.
But quite impressive.
To an anthropologist, Paviland Cave is like the Holy Grail because here, in 1823, an ancient burial was discovered.
In it were the red-ochre-stained bones and relics of the young person who was to become known as "the Red Lady of Paviland".
It took decades to discover that not everything about HER was as it first appeared.
Wow, so Paul, this is Paviland Cave? This is Paviland Cave, yes.
Fantastic.
It's beautiful, isn't it? It's wonderful.
Where was the burial actually found? The burial was placed against the wall back here.
I'll take you to it.
So this is it, in this nice little alcove here.
The Red Lady was tucked against the side of the cave here, the cave wall.
Right up against the wall? Laid out, right up against the wall, as far as we can tell.
And this almost complete mammoth skull was placed here, most definitely in association with the burial.
And the whole skeleton was covered with red ochre, wasn't it?.
It was.
The whole sediments were bright red.
And there were a number of artefacts placed with the burial that had that similar staining as well.
What sort of artefacts? I can show you some examples, much of which we can see was definitely jewellery worn by the red lady.
First we had about two handsful of these periwinkle shells coloured in red ochre and pierced to be suspended, probably as a necklace.
Right.
We also had a couple of these fox canines pierced, again, for suspension but also more enigmatic items such as these.
These are broken fragments of rods of mammoth tusk How strange! .
.
polished with red ochre.
We don't understand what they were used for.
But they were broken and placed on the body of the Red Lady.
When the person who found the bones told the Press - surprise, surprise, there was wild speculation.
There's a lot of Roman activity nearby, and he thought, "Well it's the burial of a young female," he thought, "Covered in red, in a cave, Romans nearby.
It's got to be a prostitute.
" Really? Or "a witch".
So the SCARLET Lady of Paviland.
Yes, red in more senses than one.
The interpretation has changed completely.
It wasn't a red lady at all, it was a male burial.
In fact, it's the earliest burial in Britain, isn't it? Yes, we've radiocarbon-dated the Red Lady to about 30,000 years old.
So, it's a skeleton of a modern human.
You've got somebody about 5 foot 10.
Yes, probably lived as part of a small, highly mobile band of hunter-gatherers.
So the Red Lady HIMself was buried here at a time when the surrounding environment was very, very different.
What was it like? We can go outside and I'll show you.
As you can see, we're now looking down on the tide incoming.
but at the time the Red Lady lived and died, we'd be looking down about 100 metres at a vast plain below us.
The climate's already starting to deteriorate towards the severe conditions at the last Ice Age.
So you weren't on the coast? We weren't.
That was about 75 miles away at the time.
This would have been tundra then? It was a Polar desert, in fact.
And some 10,000 or 11,000 years will pass without a single human, as far as we can tell, in the UK.
We'd better get a move on because the tide is coming in pretty quick.
We don't want to be cut off.
No.
The "Red Lady" of Paviland was no unsophisticated "caveman".
He was simply BURIED in a cave 30,000 years ago, with dignity and ceremony, by people very much like us.
But ice drove us away.
By the time we modern humans were able to return about 20,000 years later, thousands of square miles of land had been obliterated by ice sheets.
The sea separated us from the rest of Europe.
Now, the tides only occasionally allow us a brief glimpse of the life and death of one of our ancestors from before the ice.
The Red Man of Paviland.
As a kid I used to spend hours doing this, staring into rock pools at miniature parallel universes.
Whole communities assembling and dispersing with every tide.
Down at the far end of The Gower, our team zoologist, Miranda, is taking a closer look at these fantastic miniature worlds.
Between the Gower Peninsula and Worm's Head, a vast causeway is revealed twice a day, every day on the ebbing tide.
Amongst the great ribs of exposed rock are some fantastic rockpools, many of them host to constantly-changing colonies of plants and sea creatures for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Showing me round the causeway is local expert rockpooler Russ Spencely.
Ah, here's something really interesting.
Oh, yes! 'What a great start - a mermaid's purse! Actually the egg of a dogfish, a kind of small shark.
' And we're very lucky, because this one is actually alive and kicking.
You can see the! You normally find they're empty, already hatched.
Oh, look, look.
You can see the embryo swimming around, attached to the egg yolk.
The yolk is huge.
That is like an inch across! And there's this tiny little dogfish.
The yolk has got to keep that embryo growing for nine months.
It's like a baby in a womb - but you can see in.
That's exactly what it is.
How beautiful! I'll put it back in there.
Hopefully, that'll hatch.
Oh, brilliant, that was really good.
What are the best tips for getting close to the critters you don't often see? You're totally reliant on the tide.
You've got to get down on a low tide to find the most interesting things.
A dead crab? This time of year, the odds are it's a moulted crab.
As they grow, they cast off their old shell.
You can tell.
Open it up and there's nothing in it but the gills.
Gosh.
If you smell it, there's no smell.
Doesn't smell.
Look at that.
Somewhere close by will be the crab which came out of that.
It'll be about half as big again and probably hiding, because its new shell is a bit soft for a few days.
It's a bit vulnerable.
It's very tasty to everything else in the sea.
Yeah.
what a perfect little crab.
The more you look, the more you feel a real sense of privilege, being able to peer into these perfect little worlds stranded for a moment between the waves and the sea-shore.
This is brilliant.
This is really rockpooling high-tech style.
It looks idyllic from up here, but life in a rock pool is pretty tough.
One of the harshest environments.
All these creatures have evolved to live in salt water.
For about four hours a day, they're exposed to the elements when it may be hot or cold, raining, snowing These creatures face all sorts of extreme challenges.
On a hot day, evaporation can increase salinity, and without waves to aerate the pool, you'd think a lack of oxygen could also be a threat to life.
But no, seaweed kicks in, providing oxygen through photosynthesis.
The biggest problem for a rockpool's lodgers can be a sudden cold wave causing the temperature to drop by as much as 15 degrees - a whacking 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's like jumping from a hot jacuzzi into an ice-cold bath.
I'm always amazed at how many species survive and thrive in our rockpools.
Well, there's various reasons for this.
The British Isles is where the northern species and the southern, warm-water species meet.
We get some of each.
We've a huge tidal range here, so there's a vast area for them to live in.
That's why we have all these wonderful creatures.
.
.
Who says the camera never lies? Look at this, it's a blenny.
He looks enormous.
Go on, then! But he's only a few centimetres long.
He's brilliantly adapted to these conditions.
He can change colour to disguise himself and, if the going gets tough, he can actually crawl out of the pool on specially adapted pectoral fins and survive in open air.
There you go - small is clever.
In some of the deepest pools, exposed at very low water, you might even get to see a lobster waiting eagerly to see what's going to drop in on the next tide.
The tide is moving quite rapidly.
Oh, heck! OK.
Another 20 minutes or so, we'll be underwater again.
This will revert back to the seabed.
OK, shall we get out of here? I think it's time to gather the kit.
Rockpooling is such a great way to while away a few hours, and there's a wealth of fabulous animals to discover on our shores.
We're blessed here in the UK with a huge, extensive coastline, so you'll be spoilt for choice with where to go.
Leaving the rocky wonderland of Worm's Head, we head for the magnificent sands of Pembrey, Neptune's own race-track.
Para-karting's the new kid on the block as far as land-sailing sports are concerned.
Pembrey is already a honeypot for para-karters from all over the UK, drawn to this organised event because this huge tract of sand is smooth as a snooker table, hard as iron and it's re-layed twice a day, courtesy of the tides.
It's a wonderful, wind-powered rush, hurtling along at 30-40mph, a few centimetres off the ground.
But for me, for the moment, something milder, more mellow.
Just across the Tywi Estuary from Pembrey, a literary landmark - the pretty, sleepy seaside town of Laugharne.
This was the last boozing place, and the last resting place, of one of the 20th century's best known poets, Dylan Thomas.
Indeed, many claim that Laugharne and its people were the inspiration for Thomas' lyrical radio play, Under Milk Wood.
"It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, "starless and bible-black, "the cobblestreets silent "and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible "down to the sloeblack, slow, black, "crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
" Having visited Laugharne for myself, it doesn't worry me in the least if the characters in the play were based on real-life villagers.
But from now on, every time I hear Richard Burton's treacle tones or read for myself the verbal wizardry of Under Milk Wood, it's images of this place that will come to mind.
"Listen.
It is night moving in the streets, "the processional salt slow musical wind "in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, "it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, "the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
" MALE CHOIR SING: # We are not wholly bad or good Who live our lives under Milk Wood And Thou, I know, wilt be the first To see our best side, not our worst.
CURLEW CALLS After the vast half-moon of Carmarthen Bay, the coast begins to twist and turn and, as we reach the holiday haven of Tenby, majestic cliffs and glorious sandy coves begin to dominate the coastline.
This is Pembrokeshire, home to the UK's only coastal National Park.
It's also where you'll find the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
And if you're going to stay the course, you're in for a bracing 186-mile walk, clambering over more than 400 stiles and negotiating 11,000m of ascent and descent.
And if all that sounds a bit too much like climbing Everest before breakfast, you can always hop on the bus.
It's no ordinary bus.
'It's one of a chain of buses called the Puffin Buses, and they all run on environmentally friendly fuel.
' Hi.
How much is it to Stackpole, please? 'It's walker-friendly, too, 'picking you up and dropping you off at various points along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
'They'll even accommodate your dog, your pushchair and your surfboard.
' Have you been on this bus before? I use it quite often, actually.
I'm very fortunate in that it goes past my house, entirely follows the Pembrokeshire Coast National Trail, and so I use it to go down the beach.
I can throw my surfboard on, or take the dog on the bus and walk the dog.
It's very handy for going to the pub! We have fantastic pubs on the coast.
You can take your dog to the pub, surf, and not worry about getting home afterwards.
Absolutely! Bye-bye! Time for me to get some exercise again.
There's something truly magical about the coast between Stackpole and St Govan's Head.
Although it's in all the guidebooks, it's a very private moment when you stumble across St Govan's church nestling in a deep gully.
Tradition has it that this was the last resting place of Sir Gawain, one of the knights of the round table.
Whatever the truth, there's an atmosphere here that rivals that of any great cathedral.
You can drink deeply of the beauty of this landscape and be inspired by it.
But you can't eat it.
Fortunately, the very nature of the coast here provides a golden opportunity for industry.
As we leave the tidal rhythms of the Bristol Channel and veer North, the coast gets fully exposed to the ravages of the sea.
And yet it's here that we find the huge oil and liquid-gas terminals of Pembroke Dock and Milford Haven, because the Cleddau estuary on which they stand is almost like an inland lake, protected by the sheltering arm of St Ann's Head.
To a geographer like me, this is a ria, a flooded valley.
But to shipping, it's one of the deepest and finest natural harbours in the world.
In the 1950s, Milford Haven was a thriving fishing port.
Then, suddenly, there was a sea-change in its economy when, instead of Wales exporting fuel all over the world in the shape of coal, Milford Haven became central to our need to import fuel in the shape of crude oil.
Day and night, massive tankers sail through the narrow jaws of the estuary.
SHIPS HORNS BLAS Then one night the haven became hell.
We're getting reports that a 147,000-tonne tanker has run aground in South Wales.
On 15th February 1996, the Sea Empress all but broke her back off St Ann's Head, spilling over 70,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea.
Thousands of seabirds died, the local economy was badly hit for a time and the clean-up took months.
It was a disaster.
But it was a mercifully rare disaster for Milford Haven, even for the UK, thanks to the existence of lighthouses.
Given the hell's-teeth collection of rocks at the mouth of the estuary, it's not surprising that there's a greater concentration of lighthouses here than almost anywhere else in the UK.
There's something about a lighthouse, a certain light in an uncertain darkness.
Try to imagine the UK coastline without them.
They get to you.
They get to our historian, Neil, big time.
When I was a wee boy, long before I thought about a job in history, I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.
But I'm never going to get the chance, because in the mid 1990s, every lighthouse in the UK was automated.
I still want to know how it would feel to be marooned on a rock not knowing how or when I was going to get back.
Now it's my time to find out.
I'm off to visit one of the most remote lighthouses in the UK, to see what it's like and to reveal a real life horror story.
20 miles on land seems like nothing.
20 miles out to sea is scary! That tiny thing sticking out of the sea - it looks like a golf tee - it's the Smalls lighthouse.
We're not going to do anything simple like land beside it and go up the stairs, we'll land on TOP of it.
Now, that's what I call a tricky bit of parking.
That's unbelievable, I can't believe anybody managed to build that.
And as you get closer, the thought of landing on top of it just gets worse and worse! It's not getting big enough.
It's definitely not big enough to land on.
Well, there you go, safe as houses.
I don't know what I was worried about(!) Helicopters, lighthouses, this is shaping up to be the best trip of my life.
But this is not how I want to be remembered.
If you'll excuse me, I'm off to change into something less orange.
The local seals seem unimpressed by my arrival.
They've seen loads of people here recently, when the lighthouse was converted to run on wind and solar energy, the first of its kind in the UK, and all to powerwait for it a 35 watt bulb, which, thanks to its superbly engineered lens, can be seen 21 miles away.
That's incredible.
Down into the bowels Oh, very nice, very nice indeed.
I've been in guest houses that weren't as well-appointed as this, and voila, the toilet.
Now, it's a modern suite, but Smalls lighthouse was the first lighthouse in the UK to have a flushing toilet.
IT FLUSHES OK, I've been able to tick off two firsts already for the Smalls lighthouse.
Green energy - excellent.
And the first flushing lighthouse loo - brilliant.
But there's another reason for coming here.
This Victorian pamphlet says there used to be another lighthouse here.
I want to see what, if anything, remains of it, because the events that unfolded inside it shook the lighthouse world to its foundations and changed the way they were run forever.
This is unbelievable! Another one! I knew there were supposed to be remains of the original lighthouse, but I had no idea it'd be so substantial.
Back in 1775, a guy called Henry Whiteside won the contract to build the first lighthouse out here.
And the solution he came up with almost beggars belief.
What he did was, he erected a circle of massive oak beams, great posts rising 70-odd feet into the sky.
On top of that he built the lighthouse itself, the home of the beacon.
Also home to a couple of guys who'd be out here for weeks, even months, at a time.
This is a picture of the thing.
People must've thought he was off his head when he showed them this drawing, but his solution was that the waves would break through these massive posts and, instead of breaking them, would just carry on.
And he was right, because this thing stood up to westerlies for over 70 years.
But as you can imagine, if you build a lighthouse on stilts, you're asking for trouble.
And sure enough, within months of the thing becoming operational, the lighthouse keepers out here were complaining that it was rocking drunkenly in heavier gales.
And so Whiteside and his engineer were summoned out here fast to see what they could do to reinforce it and to shore it up.
But no sooner had they got here than the weather closed down on them, and they were stuck, marooned out here.
Now, there's four of them, there's not enough rations, so Whiteside HAS to make contact with the mainland.
And what he does is put messages in bottles, put the bottles in little barrels and throw them over the side.
Unbelievably, one of these actually gets to the man it's addressed to.
The man who is Whiteside's employer, who can send a ship out here to get them off this miserable rock.
Whiteside has sent the first message in a bottle.
Now, that was surely enough to get this place its spot in the history books.
But there's another story.
And it's a story of horror and madness and death.
The winter of 1800-1801 was a particularly savage one.
And during that time Smalls lighthouse was being manned, as was the custom, by a two-man team.
Now, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffiths were notorious for one thing, and one thing only, and that was their constant arguing.
So when Griffiths died out here in the lighthouse in a freak accident, Howell had a predicament.
What he wanted to do, quite naturally, was to get rid of the body, but he was panic-stricken in case people would think the pair had had another fight, he'd killed Griffiths and dumped the body to get rid of the evidence.
And so, in fear of a murder charge, he decides to hold onto the body.
He puts it in a makeshift coffin and settles down to wait for the rescue party.
But the storm is so relentless that nobody ever comes.
After a few days, the body starts to smell, and in desperation, he drags the coffin out on to the balcony that surrounds the lamp house.
During one of the worst storms yet, a massive wave shatters Griffiths' coffin.
The putrefying corpse spills out and, by a cruel fluke of the way it lands, the wind is able to take one of the arms and blow it thus so that it looks as though the corpse is beckoning people onto Smalls lighthouse once again.
And this is the sight that greets the rescue party when, after more than three months, the storm has abated enough for them to get out to the lighthouse.
Inside the lighthouse they found Thomas Howell.
Folk that knew him didn't even recognise him.
His hair had turned completely white, and his ordeal had driven him stark, staring mad.
The tragedy changed the lighthouse world forever.
From then, until the mid 1990s when they were all fully automated, every lighthouse in the UK was assigned a three-man crew.
So that if a disaster should overtake one of them, there'd still be two to help keep each other sane.
20 miles North of the Smalls is St David's Head, one of the most culturally rich landscapes in Wales.
And yet, the siting of St David's Cathedral is surprisingly modest and discreet.
It was deliberately built in a hollow, so it couldn't be seen from the sea by the rather worldly Vikings.
But the Vikings weren't the last seafarers to cause panic in this part of Pembrokeshire.
This countryside looks tranquil enough but, for 48 alarming hours in 1797, it was right at the epicentre of revolutionary turmoil sweeping across Europe.
We were at war with the new French Republic, and disaffected Irishmen had joined in to bring Republican revolt to Britain.
It's Wednesday, 22nd February 1797, a date that will live in infamy.
The last invasion of Britain.
Hugging the cliffs below me are four warships, and they're flying the British colours.
Anybody who knows their ropes will tell you that rigging's not British, it's French.
On board the heavily armed ships is the Legion Noir, 1,400 French troops under the command of Irish republican, General William Tate.
They land here at Carreg Wastad.
Their mission, to spread terror and to overthrow King George III.
But don't be misled.
The invaders weren't the elite force suggested by their name, the Black Legion, they were much more like the Dirty Dozen but without Lee Marvin, an undisciplined rabble of convicts and criminals.
It's when they start to forage for food that the invasion goes belly-up.
You see, a Portuguese ship loaded with port and brandy had just been wrecked, so every homestead had a full drinks cabinet.
The soldiers had come a long way, they were thirsty and they were blokes.
What do YOU think happened? Much of what did happen next is the stuff of legend.
But we do know that the local militia was called, and that Welsh women swelled the militia's ranks, striking terror into the hearts of French troops.
Possibly the invaders mistook the women in their tall black hats and red cloaks for British Grenadiers.
Or perhaps the women were scary enough as themselves! 1,400 men with hangovers and food-poisoning do not constitute an effective fighting force.
After 48 hours, they surrender.
The last invasion of British soil dissolved into French farce.
And the denouement? Captured French troops were exchanged for British prisoners of war, there was the inevitable run on the pound Oh, and George III patriotically sacked his French chef.
Britain was safe.
Hoorah! From Fishguard, the next leg of our journey will take us around Cardigan Bay and up to North Wales and back into England.
There are rich pickings, with stories of a Welsh Atlantis.
A little known visitor to our shores - a turtle as big as a mini.
And an extraordinary race that led to the building of two of our finest bridges.
It's a section of our coast that I hardly know, and I'm really looking forward to it.