Coast (2005) s05e04 Episode Script
Gower to Anglesey
1 The coast of South West Wales.
Our earliest ancestors came to the edge of our islands for sustenance from land, sea and sky.
But this cathedral of the elements didn't only nourish their bodies, they also found succour for the soul.
Far on the horizon lies the vanishing point between the sea and sky.
Out there, it seems as if the heavens and the earth meet.
No wonder then that natural "walkways to eternity", like this one, where the land snakes out into the sea, are special places with spiritual power for pilgrims and pagans alike.
We're on a journey from one great finger of land, at Worm's Head, to another on the Llyn Peninsula.
Travelling up the heavenly west coast of Wales to explore divine and devilish goings on along this stunning shore.
Nick's in search of the smugglers who circled the coast of Gower.
On the Isle of Skomer, Miranda explores a seabird paradise.
There's a taste of military shock and awe 13th century-style for Mark.
Iron gate there, iron gate there The famous murder holes.
And Alice tries to solve the riddle of the singing sands.
Quiet, please, we are recording the squeaky beach.
This is Coast.
Having crossed from Brittany, we're still in the land of the Celts, but back on home turf.
Our journey continues, heading for Anglesey, starting at Worm's Head in Gower.
These long fingers of land on the western edge of Britain reach out to caress the Irish Sea.
Gower was the UK's first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and at the very tip of the Gower Peninsula lies this remarkable headland - Worm's Head.
Viking's coined its name "ormr" from the Old Norse for serpent.
I can see why that green spine of land reminded the Vikings of a serpent reaching out to sea.
Those same Norsemen buried their dead in tombs they built over there on Rhossili Down.
Who would dare disturb the spirits of their departed with such a fierce beast guarding the shore? Even today, you've got to be brave to take on the Worm's Head.
The scramble across the jagged causeway that connects it to the mainland isn't for the faint-hearted.
I've got to read the tides right - the currents that come swirling in across the rocks can easily cut you off, or wash you away.
You can't afford to hang around.
One adventurer who got himself marooned out here was the poet Dylan Thomas.
He told tales of being trapped on the rocks by the rising tide as darkness fell.
Now it gets really tough.
Just as I need to get a move on, the landscape and the elements are against me.
Once you've scrambled along the rocks of the low neck, you reach a jagged arch, cut by the sea clean through the body of the beast.
It takes you to the outer head - the loneliest tip of Gower.
They call this the Devil's Bridge, and I'd love to cross over and carry on, but I'm going to leave that little slice of heaven to the birds.
I'm here in May, and at this time of year, the tip of Worm's Head is out of bounds because the seabirds are busy nesting.
I'm glad to get a head start on the tide.
It's scary how fast the sea rushes in to make this an island once more.
But there'll be other great walkways into the sea to explore as I venture westward along the Welsh shore.
Worm's Head is just a tiny little snake of land poking its head out of the Gower Peninsula, which itself pokes out like a pimple on the face of the South Wales coast.
But this is no unsightly blemish, more a site of serene beauty scraped clean by the last ice age.
Its pretty make-up conceals dark dealings though.
Nick Crane's looking for trouble in paradise.
He's on the trail of Gower's secret history.
On 1st November, 1887, this ship, The Helvetia, was struck by a terrible storm which swept along the coast of South Wales.
Now the skeletal ribs rise from their watery grave every low tide to reveal the remains of a hull once laden with a cargo of wood.
The Helvetia was an honest trader that fell foul of the weather.
The same wild shores which wrecked Helvetia were used by other vessels for a much more sinister and profitable purpose - smuggling.
I'm searching for hard evidence of the smugglers who once stalked this coast.
Surely they couldn't cover their tracks completely? Contraband travelled by sea, and so am I, with the crew of the Olga.
Boats like this were built for speed.
She's a Bristol Channel pilot cutter whose legal trade was to guide bigger ships safely to port.
But such sleek lines and yards of sail also made boats like this ideal for a profitable sideline.
How suitable would a pilot cutter like this have been to smugglers? Very good, there's a lot of space down below, lot of contact with all the trade ships coming in, and it would have beached nicely because it's got a nice flat bottom, and the boat actually has legs which it uses to stand on the beach.
This is actually the Olga.
So the legs are stopping the ship from falling over? Yeah.
Although the boat was quite capable, if it was quite muddy, to stand on her own without the legs.
She would stand upright.
That means pilot cutters could use any part of the coast they wanted.
Any part of the coastline they wanted to, yeah.
Flat-bottom vessels like this were perfectly suited to the bays and coves of Gower, which has plenty of spots to beach a boat with an illegal haul.
The peak years for smuggling were around 1800.
To fund the Napoleonic Wars, communities were heavily taxed on everyday goods.
Smugglers' boats bulged with basics like salt, soap and tea, as well as alcohol and tobacco.
In lawless areas like Gower, violent criminal gangs roamed and the customs men were heavily armed too.
Museum curator Steve Butler has brought some of the tools of the trade.
My goodness.
This is a blunderbuss.
This is a very vicious-looking weapon.
The blunderbuss was designed to fire shot over a short distance in a broad spread.
You wouldn't want to be hit by anything coming out of this.
Absolutely not.
We have your flintlock pistol, and once they were fired, of course, at which point, what else could they do with them? In close-quarter fighting they would use them as a club, hence they were so strongly-built.
That way round? That way round, big butt-end here on the end of the handle.
This is all bound in brass.
And for very obvious reasons, that could do some serious damage.
And what you're describing here, Steve, you're describing a war zone.
It is largely a war zone and it was almost out of control.
Armed to the teeth in fast boats, you can see how the smugglers kept one step ahead of customs.
But they couldn't stay at sea forever.
They had to land their contraband somewhere.
Surely the smugglers had to have hidey-holes along this coast.
Perhaps the storerooms is in a secluded cliff near Port Eynon.
Below me is one of the most mysterious structures on the coast of Wales.
Wow, look at that.
'This is Culver Hole.
' It's so tightly-packed into the rock it almost looks natural.
As front doors go, this is fairly inaccessible.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
It's built like a castle, we've got these very strange-shaped windows above.
There are no floors in it.
Look at these stone niches, lots of them.
I'm hoping to find out more from National Trust warden Sian Musgrave.
Hi, Sian, very good to meet you.
Hi, Nick, and you.
Now, can you tell me what is this peculiar building? It's very inaccessible, so it's a great hiding place.
Would it have been used by smugglers, do you think? I think there's a high degree of probability that it was used by smugglers.
When the tide comes in, you can get a boat right in.
And inside there's what appears to be a tunnel leading out from the back wall.
Yeah, there's a small tunnel and a little chamber which again leads us to think that it could have been used to keep things out of the customs men's reach.
The highpoint of smuggling was about 200 years ago.
But this structure looks much older, medieval even.
And the old English name Culver Hole suggests an earlier use.
Culver is an old word which means pigeon.
It's a pigeon house.
It's actually a medieval dovecote.
So that's what those rectangular niches are? Yeah, they were built as an integrated part of the structure so that the pigeons could go in and nest, so it would encourage the populations to multiply and then it would serve as food and they'd take the eggs as well as the meat.
Culver Hole was originally a coastal larder many centuries ago, when pigeon meat was a prized foodstuff.
But there's layer upon layer of history here.
I can easily believe that much later on, it was converted to a hidy-hole for contraband.
Giant pigeon loft, or secret smugglers' lair? A bit of both, I reckon.
Hard evidence, it seems, is always elusive.
Smugglers take their secrets to the grave.
Gower has seen bad guys circling around its seas for centuries, but in 1940, the bandits were airborne.
Dogfights raged in the skies above the Bristol Channel.
Ports and munitions factories in South Wales were tempting targets for German bombers so Pembrey became an important Battle of Britain airfield.
It wasn't unknown for famous fighter aces to land here at Pembrey, but on June 23rd, 1942, the surprise arrival of one flyer caused quite a stir.
A German pilot landed at this Welsh airfield in a very special plane.
The airman was Oberleutnant Armin Faber, an experienced Luftwaffe pilot.
Following a dogfight over the Bristol Channel, Faber put his top-secret plane down at Pembrey.
Bold as brass, the enemy fighter was taxiing along this tarmac, causing Sgt Charles Jeffreys to spring into action.
It's said that Sgt Jeffreys grabbed the first weapon that came to hand - a flare gun, as it happens.
He dashed down the steps of the control tower over there and out onto the runway, where he threw himself across the wing of the German fighter, thereby capturing the pilot and, more importantly, his plane.
And what a prize it was - this terrifying new weapon of war, the Focke-Wulf 190, the scourge of the Spitfires.
Despite their dominance early in the war, Spitfires no longer had the upper hand.
The FW 190 was christened the Butcher Bird by the allied pilots, and it lived up to its name.
In the early months of 1942, the RAF lost scores of Spitfires.
The Butcher Bird was on a killing spree.
What made the Focke-Wulf 190 such a formidable foe was a mystery, so the Allies couldn't believe their luck when Armin Faber landed one on the Welsh coast.
To understand what the RAF pilots wanted to learn about the captured German fighter, and to appreciate the performance edge that made Faber's plane so deadly in his dogfight over the British coast, I'm going up myself.
Is it looking safe, Chris? Is it looking safe? Hey, Neil, it's looking great, yeah.
Good to see you.
Yeah.
So, what will a plane like this teach me about the Focke-Wulf? Well, what it's going to simulate is the agility and the speed of the Focke-Wulf.
Although it's not as big an aeroplane, it's got that agility and it's got that punch and speed that the Focke-Wulf had that was making it special and making it a real competitor, you know - better than the Spitfires at the time.
So my pilot will fly to mimic the performance of a Focke-Wulf 190 up against a Spitfire.
For me, it's just a game.
For airmen in the Second World War, it was a fight to the death.
How you feeling? I feel fine.
Brilliant.
Well, it's a combination of fine and terrified.
My plane's manoeuvring like the FW 190 - faster, and better in a roll or dive, compared to my opponent flying like a Spitfire.
We're in the Focke-Wulf and we're trying to shoot this guy down.
Here we go, we're going to pass down his right-hand side.
Oh, I can take him, I can take him.
This is the fly through.
Even in this mock dogfight, I can see how the superior agility, firepower, and visibility from Armin Faber's plane gave him a deadly advantage.
I've got him.
One visual.
Here we go, next pass.
Visual.
Guns, guns, guns.
There he is, follow him down.
In 1942, Luftwaffe pilot Faber did a wing-waggle over Pembrey airfield to celebrate victory.
And then, to everyone's astonishment, his Focke-Wulf 190 landed on Welsh tarmac! So why would an experienced German pilot gift his top-secret fighter plane to the Allies? There were theories that Armin Faber had switched sides, or that in the heat of battle he was disorientated and lost his bearings.
In a dogfight over the English Channel, he'd shot down a Spitfire.
Then Faber drifted towards the Bristol Channel, downing another Spitfire.
Confused by combat, thinking he was back over occupied France, Faber mistakenly landed at Pembrey.
Or so one theory goes.
Time to draft in Peter Murton from the Imperial War Museum.
How likely do you think it is that an experienced pilot would get lost under those circumstances? I have to suggest that an experienced Luftwaffe fighter pilot, who is well used to doing aerobatics and high joule manoeuvres in a dogfight would not become disorientated quite so quickly as perhaps you've experienced today.
So as far as you're concerned, what really happened? He realised there's no chance of him backtracking and getting back cross country and across the English channel.
There was an umbrella of Spitfires waiting to hack him out of the sky or forcing him lower and lower to the ground, but apart from that, he was short of fuel.
So, really, it was pure self-preservation? Yeah, most certainly.
He decided that the only way that he was going to survive was to pick the nearest aerodrome on UK territory and land.
Fighter command have captured a nice new specimen of Germany's latest fighter, the Focke-Wulf 190 Armin Faber's plane was repainted in RAF colours and tested to destruction.
As a result, future Marks of Spitfire were designed with modified wings and bigger engines, to regain their edge in the skies.
Armin Faber became a prisoner and survived the war after landing here at Pembrey.
The events of that day in 1942 also meant countless Allied pilots survived, thanks to their improved planes.
We continue our journey westward along Carmarthen Bay.
Crossing the water into Pembrokeshire, Tenby's sweeping golden beaches are just a taste of the majestic shoreline that awaits us.
Some of the best surfers in the world are drawn to open, wind-blown bays like Freshwater West.
Hi, I'm Kirsty Jones, I'm a professional kitesurfer.
I'm Kitesurf World Wave Champion and I've come to Freshwater West to train for my next World Cup competition.
It's my favourite beach to come surfing.
It's a world-class surfing break and it's also really great for kitesurfing.
It's a really special place for me because that's where my roots are from and it's always nice to come back, even though I travel all over the world.
OK, here we go.
I'm going to hit the wave on this one! Kitesurfing is using a big power kite to pull you along on the water, and you can do tricks, you can do jumps.
I'm going to do a little grab now.
You can just cruise along on the water.
It's just an amazing sport.
I'm going to go for a forward loop now.
Freshwater West is just amazing when it's like this.
There's something really special about the feeling of the sea air and the sea coming back to Wales.
I just love it.
Many Welsh islands owe their names to travellers.
Often Vikings can take the credit, and Skomer is no exception.
Skomer derives from the Old Norse word "skolm", meaning short sword.
Vikings aren't the only adventurers that have been attracted to these islands.
This is a seabird paradise that welcomes some of the greatest airborne travellers on the planet.
Miranda's exploring this lush outcrop seeking out old friends and new arrivals.
I've visited Skomer quite a few times and it's lovely to be back, but every time I come here it's like I've got to get to know the island all over again, it's ever-changing.
It's a place of so many different facets.
One of the most precarious habitats is the Wick, a sheer cliff with ledges ideally suited to nesting birds - razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes and fulmars.
I'm going to explore this fantastic abundance of birdlife, not just by day, but at night too.
In daylight, it's puffins that rule the roost.
And it's not rocky sea cliffs but rabbit burrows that's their idea of a perfect des res.
This is one of the most important puffin colonies in north-western Europe.
The best way to appreciate the puffin's lifestyle is to get in the water with them.
Island warden Jo Milborrow is going to help me snorkel right up close.
I'm absolutely dying to get in.
It's been a warm day and the water looks so inviting and there are loads of puffins behind us.
Yeah, they're great, aren't they? Yeah, hope we can get close! Hopefully, if we go in they'll come and have a look at us.
Brilliant.
Oh, it's cool! It's very cool.
That's chilly! It's very chilly.
Puffins are easily spooked, so we have to be patient and move slowly.
But we're soon rewarded with a rare chance of swimming within just a few feet of them.
Some of Skomer's grey seals are lounging nearby but, for me, it's the puffins that steal the show.
Absolutely surrounded by puffins, maybe just five or six feet away from me.
Some of them just skimming over the top of my head.
Incredible, they just seemed to be oblivious to the fact that I was there, maybe I just fooled them that I was a seal.
Puffins certainly steal the limelight during the daytime.
But Skomer attracts vast numbers of globe trotters who are much harder to spot until night falls.
Every summer, Skomer welcomes back a flock of old friends, birds from the island who've travelled way out to the coast of South America, a round trip of 18,000 miles, and they come back here to the island, often to within just a few feet of where they were born, to mate and breed.
I'm in search of one of the greatest adventurers of the animal kingdom - the Manx shearwater.
This tiny island off Wales becomes an extraordinary landing strip for Manx shearwaters, returning after winter from fisheries far down in the South Atlantic.
Because they're shy nocturnal birds, you'd be hard pushed to see them in daylight.
But, as the sun sets, the atmosphere really changes.
That cacophony means the Manx shearwaters are arriving in their thousands, and I can just glimpse them in the darkness.
Professor Tim Guildford is going to help me get a closer look.
They're everywhere.
They are, the place is absolutely littered with them.
And this guy has probably just landed.
I'm guessing this is a non-breeder.
Fabulous! So this one's probably just a recent prospector who's looking to mate.
He's beautiful.
I don't know if you can see on the top of the beak there, there's two little holes.
These nostrils are actually salt excreting glands.
Yes, like a storm petrel.
Yeah, absolutely.
That allows this whole family of birds to live in the open ocean without ever having to drink, so they can essentially either create their own water metabolically, or they can excrete salt sufficiently not to need fresh water.
They look a bit hopeless on land, the legs are placed so far back on the body that they can't balance well.
They flatten themselves out, don't they? They're sort of waddling very low.
It's a very strange gait isn't it? A very strange gait, yeah.
'There are more than 100,000 breeding pairs on Skomer, 'and nest cameras provide new insights into how they rear their young.
'Researchers like Tim have also been tagging the birds with electronic geo-locators.
' OK, that's great.
OK.
Here they come.
Brilliant, so this is one of the tagged birds? And on this leg That's the geolocator? It's so small.
Yeah, on this leg is the geolocating device The electronic log of the bird's position is downloaded to produce detailed maps.
This tells us, for every day and night of the year, where the bird has been.
So at last, now, we can reconstruct its entire migratory journey.
The male is the black one and the female is the purple one.
What we see is this outward migration down the west coast of Africa, across to Brazil and then down to Argentina over winter.
They head back then in the early Spring, they take slightly different routes, but what you do see is this extraordinary curve through the Caribbean.
They don't come back the way they went out.
Isn't that incredible, they're not doing the same journey there and back? It is.
I wonder why.
We think they're exploiting the North Atlantic currents, this circular current.
So the currents and the weather systems move like this so they're basically following weather systems, making it efficient, using the winds.
And soon they're off, back out to sea.
By daybreak, the shearwaters have vanished, perhaps the most remarkable secret of this magical seabird sanctuary on the Pembrokeshire coast.
Across St Bride's Bay is the tiny harbour of Solva.
We're nearing the western edge of Wales.
St Davids is Britain's smallest city with Wales's biggest cathedral.
The nation's patron saint established a monastery here in the 6th century, when the sea was a religious highway spreading the word around early Christian Britain and Ireland.
Pembrokeshire has Britain's most coastal national park, a glorious shoreline that you can walk from beginning to end enjoying a coast path 186 miles long.
It helps to get your walking boots on to find the surprises tucked away along this shore.
Like here, at Abereiddi.
The locals call this place the Blue Lagoon, and its aquamarine colour gives it the look of a tropical pool, but it's far from natural.
Now it's a playground for divers and coasteers, but this place is a clue to an industrial boom that happened here more than 100 years ago.
It's not just the sea that's been eating away at this coast.
The locals have done their share of nibbling too.
This was a slate quarry that once employed around 100 workers.
And just along the coastal path, another giant hole in the ground.
An exceptionally hard stone - dolerite - was blasted out of the cliffs here, an ideal material for buildings and roads.
The rock was hauled a short distance by rail to the tiny harbour at Porthgain.
The village is still dominated by enormous brick hulks.
Here the stone was crushed and graded in five separate bunkers, then it cascaded down a loading chute into boats waiting at the quayside.
Today, you see just the odd boat going in and out of the harbour, fishing for crabs and lobsters.
But when the quarry was going full tilt, the company had six steam coasters and at one time there were 100 other vessels, all registered at the port, and they're not entirely forgotten either.
The nameplates of many of them are inside the pub, nailed to the walls and above the tables.
A remarkable industrial operation dominated the surrounding area right up until the 1930s.
Unearthing this lost world of endeavour is a bit of archaeology anyone can do, so much still remains.
The Teifi Estuary marks the dividing line between Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire, with its own popular holiday destinations - resorts like Newquay and the Georgian seaside town of Aberaeron.
Further north is Aberystwyth, a University town used to gowns, and beach towels.
That dual personality is captured in this grand Victorian building, the Old College.
It was conceived as an opulent resort hotel, but it went bust before it was finished, only to be snapped up for a bargain price in 1872 by the founders of Wales's very first university.
It was all made possible by 70,000 donations from the public, people like miners and quarrymen who were passionate that education was the path to a better life.
Now Aberystwyth is known as the university founded on the pennies of the poor.
North from Aberystwyth to another Victorian seaside resort - Barmouth.
The Mawddach Estuary, where the Snowdonia National Park sweeps down to the sea.
The poet William Wordsworth called the mix of coast and mountain here "sublime".
But there'll be no time to stand and stare for Nick.
I'm about to find out what it takes to compete in one of the world's toughest sporting challenges, a race on land and at sea.
Every year since 1977, teams gather in Barmouth to launch an assault on Britain's highest mountains.
I've come here to train with the crew of the Mistral as they prepare for the gruelling Three Peaks Yacht Race.
Hi, Helen.
Hello! Very good to meet you, can I come on board? Welcome aboard! Thank you.
There you go.
The course works its way up the west coast stopping at, Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales, Scafell Pike, England's highest peak, and they save the hardest till last.
Britain's tallest challenge, Ben Nevis.
To get between the climbs, contestants take to their boats, all the way to Fort William.
Right, I'm ready.
Yeah, go for it.
Can we just ease that sheet a little bit, please? What's the wind blowing at? That last gust was about an eight, so 40 knots of wind.
How does it feel? The boat feels great, how does everybody else feel? Yay! Mind the sheet.
OK, guys, are you ready to go? There's a crew of five - the skipper, two specialist sailors and two runners.
Every second saved at sea is a stride up the mountain, so they run a tight ship.
The race is timed for boat performance speed and catching the right tide, and if you catch the right tide, you can get 6-12 hours ahead of other people who missed that tide.
Will you be sailing at night? Our first difficult navigation is coming through the sand bar at Caernarfon at 2am, which will be dark.
That sounds a complete horror story.
Yeah, essentially.
It can be tricksy and quite difficult.
In all, they'll have to sail nearly 400 miles to get between Britain's three tallest peaks.
When they arrive at a climb, they've got to get inland quick.
The first port of call is Caernarfon, the stopping off point for Snowdon.
Whatever the weather, tourists will pay to take the train to the summit, but the race contestants will have to run up it.
Our brief training run over, we get to do something they won't during the race itself - take a rest! This is just a taster, I guess, of what you're going to be facing when the race kicks off properly.
How many miles are you going to be running on the whole race? In total, there's over 100km.
The leg we're on today, the Snowdon leg, is 36km.
You're running up here at night, aren't you? Yeah, it will probably be about four o'clock in the morning which is going to be rather unpleasant for both of us.
What happens when things get really difficult, or worse, go wrong? Instead of a sleeping bag, we carry a blizzard bag which is Which I can show you here.
It weighs about 300g, so a lot of the runners will be carrying these which are double foiled blankets, so they insulate you a bit.
They're a bit like a sleeping bag.
So in a race like this, every gram counts, every gram saved is another few seconds you can cut off the race.
Exactly, faster up the hill, yeah.
So let's roll this out, Find a nice little hole for you to sleep in and go in.
Just wriggle inside do we? Do you take your shoes off first? I guess you would? No, not at all.
It's cosy, isn't it? And if it was really cold, we'd be in there with you as well! Go on then, Maria.
It took the team five days - and 38 minutes, to be exact - to reach Fort William.
Of the 32 yachts at the start line in Barmouth, they came in a creditable 13th.
I only wish I could have stayed with them on their epic journey.
Struggle's no stranger to this coast.
People come to pit themselves against the landscape.
But the landscape has also been pitted against the people.
This coast doesn't only promise a paradise of freedom, it's also been transformed for terror here at Harlech.
At the end of the 13th century, an English King invaded Wales, determined the locals would submit to his divine right to rule.
On this spiritual shore, Edward I of England hatched a devilish plan to enshrine his authority over the Welsh - in stone! What a piece of work and truly awe-inspiring.
It looks terrifying now, but can you imagine what it would have looked like 800 years ago? I want to bring this building back to its former glory and discover what made this one of Britain's most formidable fortresses.
Although the stone walls are largely intact, Harlech Castle has been stripped of its strongest defence - the sea.
Back when it was built, I would have been walking on water, not the sand dunes that are here now.
Rhian Parry knows what's happened to the coast since the castle was constructed.
We do know from this map of 1610 by Speed that it was quite a different picture.
You can see, here's the castle.
Look, we're presumably somewhere by that mermaid.
And look at the ships going in and out of the estuary.
The tradition is, and there's some documentary evidence, of course, that there was a port for Harlech at Ynys at Ty Gwyn y Gamlas, which literally means the white house of the canal, and it's likely that this was all marsh and at high tide it was under water completely.
So, Ynys island is Yes, is this one here.
So, if that was an island then, in the medieval period, this was all marsh and open water.
Indeed and there are lots of little islands and the place names tell you that they were islands and people didn't call them islands for nothing.
Restoring the sea to lap against the walls of Harlech castle is step one of my medieval make-over.
This is how it looked when Edward I of England built it to conquer the Welsh.
But the sea was more than a barrier.
It was also a gateway.
Andrew, why have you brought me to this lump of masonry? The name is explanatory in itself - this was the water gate, and the implication is that the water was adjacent to it.
The sea actually lapped up onto the side of these rocks? It did.
So you've got to imagine water down here.
With jetties and ships and everything? Certainly a bustling harbour, because they had an enormous amount of material to get up.
All the stone they were bringing in, the iron they were bringing in, food.
They were feeding 900 men, at one point.
So how do you get up there? There's a path that goes up and I'll show you where that is.
The site of the castle starts to make sense.
With water guarding one side and steep slopes on the other, there was only one way in - a landward gate which was heavily fortified.
Look at this, those towers! There's one, two, three, four towers? Yeah.
They give an enormous aspect, don't they? Any attacker who got this far would have to breach the gatehouse, a massive defensive obstacle that dominates the castle.
You're making a huge statement, that this is the strongest bit.
Yeah, very definitely.
And this is sort of the chamber where This is the worrying chamber where you didn't want to be.
Two arrow slits.
Two arrow slits either side.
So, crossbows would have come through there.
You've got iron gate there, iron gate there And attack from above as well.
Murder holes.
Murder holes pouring down onto you.
Boiling oil Yeah, that sort of thing.
This concentric design, walls within walls, held back the hostile Welsh nearby.
That's the Snowdonia range of mountains over there, and there's Snowdon.
And this was of course the Welsh stronghold of the Princes of Gwynedd.
This was the real point that Edward had to get to, the bit he had to crack.
So what was his big idea? He was going to encircle it with castles.
So Harlech is one, Caernarvon is the other on the north and then you've got Conwy, and then slightly later, Biwmares was built as well.
And this really represented, finally, the conquest of the Welsh.
It did, yes, yes, very definitely.
It's likely the grey stone walls of Harlech Castle looked very different in its heyday.
Edward had the structure plastered with a white render of lime mortar and we're looking for the evidence.
Let's see if we can find some.
I think you'll be lucky! Presumably, you find it in, sort of, corners, where it's protected.
If it's anywhere, that's the best place.
Hang on, what's up here? That looks like it, doesn't it? What's that? Oh, goodness.
There it is, just a little bit.
That's presumably the protective face.
Yes, it's overlaying the stones there.
Yes, I would suggest that that is some of it.
There's the original Edwardian mortar, lime render.
I think it will be.
Look just like, look behind I know that's inside.
Yes, inside the window reveals that, that's astonishing, isn't it? There it all is.
So you've got render, and then lime wash on the outside.
Yes.
Wouldn't it be great to lime wash the castle bright white? But I guess no-one's actually going to let me do that, but I have found a wall just down the road where we can try the stuff out.
The castle's coating of lime render was probably finished off with this stuff - bright white lime wash.
Lime wash is the most marvellous material, one of the great forgotten things from the Middle Ages.
It absorbs carbon dioxide and hardens just like stone.
The trouble is, to keep it bright and white, you have to do it every year.
It's bad enough painting a little wall like this.
Can you imagine what it was like painting a whole castle? It's just the question is, why bother? Modern weapons are all about stealth, but in an earlier age, this fortress was very much about broadcasting a message.
The building wasn't hiding, it was standing out, a brutish display of English power.
This was the castle in full glory, the shock and awe of the 13th century.
Can you imagine what that castle would have looked like painted all white? A symbol of the conquest of Wales, but also a provocation.
Just across Tremadog Bay, from the battlements of Harlech Castle, you can glimpse another, less menacing fortress.
I'm on the Llyn peninsula at Criccieth.
Mark Horton, over the water at Harlech, isn't the only one with a castle on this coast.
There are plenty to go around.
The original Criccieth Castle wasn't built by English Edward I, but by his opponents, the Welsh Princes, Llywelyn the Great and Llywelyn the Last.
I think his name, Llywelyn the Last, tells you all you need to know about how things worked out.
The Welsh, from their power base in the mountains of Gwynedd, rose up in a war of national independence in 1282.
But they were fatally divided and Edward crushed them.
Llywelyn was separated from his army and killed by the English at Cilmeri.
Edward then took over this Welsh castle at Criccieth and remodelled it.
But 100 or so years after defeat by Edward I, the Welsh were back for more.
There was another great uprising in 1400, led by the charismatic Owain Glyndwr.
Owain was a truly national leader, with powerful allies like the King of France.
By 1403, much of Wales was under Owain's control.
He even captured the mighty Harlech and held it for five years.
At Criccieth he tore down much of the castle that the English had extended, a grand gesture that ultimately proved futile.
The English struck back.
Owain's Glyndwr's revolt stuttered on, but he became a hunted man, a fugitive and a guerrilla, and nothing certain is known about him after 1412.
He slipped away then into the shadow world of myth and legend, a so-called Son of Prophecy, who would return from his mountain hideout to free Wales in her hour of need.
Owain's yet to return to claim Criccieth Castle.
For now, it stands a silent sentinel, guarding the sainted lands beyond, the holy places of the Llyn Peninsula.
At the western tip of Llyn is the fishing village of Aberdaron.
And on the beach, the Church of St Hywyn, the last stop for pilgrims on their way to the island of Bardsey.
Three pilgrimages here were said to be equivalent to one visit to Rome, and tradition has it that 20,000 saints are buried on Bardsey island.
The Welsh coast is a fertile shore for the making of myths.
Here, legend tells of a city lost to the sea - Cantre'r Gwaelod, the Welsh Atlantis.
And then you come to Porth Oer.
Here, there's more than a grain of truth in a local claim to fame.
Alice is on a mission to solve the riddle of the Singing Sands.
If you believe its name, this beach isn't just heavenly to look at, it's also rather wonderful to listen to.
It's called the Whistling Sands.
It's not the wind that's whistling, supposedly it's the sand itself that squeaks.
To get to bottom of it, I'm joined by our acoustics expert David Sharp from the Open University, who'll be listening for the special music of this place.
And coastal scientist Rod Jones, who'll be looking for the squeak in the sand.
Listening to the sound of the beach can be a bit hit and miss.
If it's been a very high tide or it's rained, you'd be out of luck.
But on a dry, sunny day like this, we should hear the squeak underfoot.
Hi David, how are you? Hello, I'm fine, thank you.
Now squeaking sand, I'm getting a tiny squeak as I'm walking along but it's very quiet.
OK, well, just try scuffing your foot through quite hard and see what happens.
Why don't we walk along a little bit and see if we can get that SQUEAKING Oh, there we go.
Oh, that was a good one.
This looks quite mad.
That's it.
Brilliant, I'm getting it really nicely on the screen.
That's really squeaking! I've never heard that before on a beach.
But we need more feet for the full effect.
Quiet please, we are recording the Squeaky Beach.
Yes, come on.
We'll make a line, I think.
What we probably need to try to do is to get in step.
How did that sound, David? Oh, it sounded excellent.
We've got a really good recording.
And is this beach unique in making this sound? Well, it's not unique.
There are around 30 beaches in the UK that will have these properties, but this is one of the better ones.
There's a good chance you're close to a whistling beach, particularly on the west coast.
But why aren't there more? What makes these beaches special? I'm with coastal scientist Rod Jones to find out what makes some sand sing.
What is it that makes the sound at a particular beach special? Why isn't all sand the same? Well, sound is affected by the energy of the environment where it sits.
So you've got your waves coming in and that's sorting the sand, and it's taking some grains and pulling them offshore, and others it's pushing to the top end of the beach.
And you've also got the process of wind, so when the tide's out, these sands will dry and the wind will blow across them and blow the finer particles up to the top of the shore.
Right.
And the balance of the wave energy, wind energy, and the supply and grain size of the sediments that you've got at the back there, will define what the particle size and characteristics are of the beach sediment.
How the wind and waves sort the sand depends on the shape of a bay.
We compared samples from two different beaches, from here at Whistling Sands and from Criccieth nearby.
Right, shall we try this sand first? Which is from Criccieth.
If I just zoom in on it So, large grains and also a variety of different grain sizes as well.
And shapes as well.
Yeah.
You can actually see little particles of slate there, as well as quartz and a lot of other things.
It's a very varied sort of sand.
OK, shall we have a look at the sand from Whistling Sands now? Let's just compare it with the last one and see just how different it is.
Now that looks very different.
It is, isn't it? The other one was much more varied in terms of grain size, whereas this one seems to be much more dominantly composed of quartz.
And it's much more uniform.
Yes.
In terms of size of grains.
They're quite well rounded, which means they will stack well together.
They've been sorted down, a lot of the coarser and the finer fraction have been lost.
So wind and waves here have sifted the sand into amazingly uniform, well-rounded particles.
But how does that produce a squeak? David's come up with a super-size model of the sand grains.
David, what are you doing? OK, well, what we've got here is normal sand found on most beaches, not regular at all.
And what we've got here is our singing sand, with lots of grains of the same size and all very well rounded.
When you kick your foot through the sand, you cause it to shear.
That means, you cause layers to rub across each other.
Right.
Now let's have a look what happens with the normal sand, and you can see that the grains just move up and down, all at different times, at different rates.
With the singing sand, if you kick your foot through that, what happens is that the grains all move up and down at the same time.
They all move together.
Yeah.
So why does that produce a squeak? Well, it's actually the whole layer moving up and down and the whole surface then acts a bit like a loudspeaker, vibrating and causing pressure changes in the air above, which we hear as sound.
SQUEAKING And not just any sound.
David's had time to analyse the squeaks he recorded to see if the beach is as musical as its nickname, Whistling Sands, suggests.
The interesting thing is the regularity in which we get these pressure changes, so we get these increases in pressure happening at very regular intervals, and that's all caused by the sand vibrating up and down, just like we saw with the balls, And that gives us this pitched sound, like a musical note, almost.
We can actually demonstrate that, if you want to just try singing some notes into the microphone, we'll record that.
OK.
OK, here we go.
Right, off you go.
Ahhhh SHE SINGS REGULAR NOTES OK, that's brilliant.
If we zoom in on one of those And again, yes, you can see the regular pattern, you've got this regular repetition of these increases and decreases in air pressure.
And it's this regular change that gives us the sense of pitch.
Unlike most sand, this sand actually sings.
It really does sing, yeah.
Scientists are starting to explain the sound of the sands, but there remains a magical quality to this place that's hard to define.
I love the fact the Singing Sands are still something of a mystery, and it's a puzzle that's played out along the beaches of our coast, in the sand under our feet.
The golden sands and clear waters of Llyn have a majestic backdrop - the imposing mountains of Snowdonia.
And facing them across the water, Anglesey, the island known as Mon Mam Cymru - the mother of Wales.
On its western edge is Llanddwyn Island, home of Saint Dwynwen, the patron saint of Welsh lovers.
Which brings me to my final destination - Llangwyfan.
I'm on the causeway leading out to the Church in the Sea.
This is Llangwyfan, the church of Saint Cwyfan.
The Irish knew him as Saint Kevin, and he was from Glendalough, not far from the stretch of Irish coast directly across the water from here.
There's been a church on this site since at least as early as 1254.
It was extended in 14th and 15th centuries so it wasn't always the humble building that's here now, because back in the day, there was a lot more land out here than there is now.
Over the centuries, the sea eroded this site until the graves started to fall into the water.
So now the church sits here on a tiny promontory, that, just like Worm's Head where my journey started, becomes an island at high tide.
Places like this, sometimes part of the land, but sometimes part of the sea, are reminders that everything is temporary.
No matter how hard we hold onto things, our grasp of them is momentary.
And just like the tides around this promontory, we're just passing through.
From the sainted headlands of west Wales, our journey continues next time along the wild Atlantic coast of north west Ireland.
If you want to explore our coast and beyond, the Open University has produced a booklet with ideas and information to inspire your travels.
For a free copy or to find out more about Open University programmes on the BBC, phone: Or go to the website:
Our earliest ancestors came to the edge of our islands for sustenance from land, sea and sky.
But this cathedral of the elements didn't only nourish their bodies, they also found succour for the soul.
Far on the horizon lies the vanishing point between the sea and sky.
Out there, it seems as if the heavens and the earth meet.
No wonder then that natural "walkways to eternity", like this one, where the land snakes out into the sea, are special places with spiritual power for pilgrims and pagans alike.
We're on a journey from one great finger of land, at Worm's Head, to another on the Llyn Peninsula.
Travelling up the heavenly west coast of Wales to explore divine and devilish goings on along this stunning shore.
Nick's in search of the smugglers who circled the coast of Gower.
On the Isle of Skomer, Miranda explores a seabird paradise.
There's a taste of military shock and awe 13th century-style for Mark.
Iron gate there, iron gate there The famous murder holes.
And Alice tries to solve the riddle of the singing sands.
Quiet, please, we are recording the squeaky beach.
This is Coast.
Having crossed from Brittany, we're still in the land of the Celts, but back on home turf.
Our journey continues, heading for Anglesey, starting at Worm's Head in Gower.
These long fingers of land on the western edge of Britain reach out to caress the Irish Sea.
Gower was the UK's first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and at the very tip of the Gower Peninsula lies this remarkable headland - Worm's Head.
Viking's coined its name "ormr" from the Old Norse for serpent.
I can see why that green spine of land reminded the Vikings of a serpent reaching out to sea.
Those same Norsemen buried their dead in tombs they built over there on Rhossili Down.
Who would dare disturb the spirits of their departed with such a fierce beast guarding the shore? Even today, you've got to be brave to take on the Worm's Head.
The scramble across the jagged causeway that connects it to the mainland isn't for the faint-hearted.
I've got to read the tides right - the currents that come swirling in across the rocks can easily cut you off, or wash you away.
You can't afford to hang around.
One adventurer who got himself marooned out here was the poet Dylan Thomas.
He told tales of being trapped on the rocks by the rising tide as darkness fell.
Now it gets really tough.
Just as I need to get a move on, the landscape and the elements are against me.
Once you've scrambled along the rocks of the low neck, you reach a jagged arch, cut by the sea clean through the body of the beast.
It takes you to the outer head - the loneliest tip of Gower.
They call this the Devil's Bridge, and I'd love to cross over and carry on, but I'm going to leave that little slice of heaven to the birds.
I'm here in May, and at this time of year, the tip of Worm's Head is out of bounds because the seabirds are busy nesting.
I'm glad to get a head start on the tide.
It's scary how fast the sea rushes in to make this an island once more.
But there'll be other great walkways into the sea to explore as I venture westward along the Welsh shore.
Worm's Head is just a tiny little snake of land poking its head out of the Gower Peninsula, which itself pokes out like a pimple on the face of the South Wales coast.
But this is no unsightly blemish, more a site of serene beauty scraped clean by the last ice age.
Its pretty make-up conceals dark dealings though.
Nick Crane's looking for trouble in paradise.
He's on the trail of Gower's secret history.
On 1st November, 1887, this ship, The Helvetia, was struck by a terrible storm which swept along the coast of South Wales.
Now the skeletal ribs rise from their watery grave every low tide to reveal the remains of a hull once laden with a cargo of wood.
The Helvetia was an honest trader that fell foul of the weather.
The same wild shores which wrecked Helvetia were used by other vessels for a much more sinister and profitable purpose - smuggling.
I'm searching for hard evidence of the smugglers who once stalked this coast.
Surely they couldn't cover their tracks completely? Contraband travelled by sea, and so am I, with the crew of the Olga.
Boats like this were built for speed.
She's a Bristol Channel pilot cutter whose legal trade was to guide bigger ships safely to port.
But such sleek lines and yards of sail also made boats like this ideal for a profitable sideline.
How suitable would a pilot cutter like this have been to smugglers? Very good, there's a lot of space down below, lot of contact with all the trade ships coming in, and it would have beached nicely because it's got a nice flat bottom, and the boat actually has legs which it uses to stand on the beach.
This is actually the Olga.
So the legs are stopping the ship from falling over? Yeah.
Although the boat was quite capable, if it was quite muddy, to stand on her own without the legs.
She would stand upright.
That means pilot cutters could use any part of the coast they wanted.
Any part of the coastline they wanted to, yeah.
Flat-bottom vessels like this were perfectly suited to the bays and coves of Gower, which has plenty of spots to beach a boat with an illegal haul.
The peak years for smuggling were around 1800.
To fund the Napoleonic Wars, communities were heavily taxed on everyday goods.
Smugglers' boats bulged with basics like salt, soap and tea, as well as alcohol and tobacco.
In lawless areas like Gower, violent criminal gangs roamed and the customs men were heavily armed too.
Museum curator Steve Butler has brought some of the tools of the trade.
My goodness.
This is a blunderbuss.
This is a very vicious-looking weapon.
The blunderbuss was designed to fire shot over a short distance in a broad spread.
You wouldn't want to be hit by anything coming out of this.
Absolutely not.
We have your flintlock pistol, and once they were fired, of course, at which point, what else could they do with them? In close-quarter fighting they would use them as a club, hence they were so strongly-built.
That way round? That way round, big butt-end here on the end of the handle.
This is all bound in brass.
And for very obvious reasons, that could do some serious damage.
And what you're describing here, Steve, you're describing a war zone.
It is largely a war zone and it was almost out of control.
Armed to the teeth in fast boats, you can see how the smugglers kept one step ahead of customs.
But they couldn't stay at sea forever.
They had to land their contraband somewhere.
Surely the smugglers had to have hidey-holes along this coast.
Perhaps the storerooms is in a secluded cliff near Port Eynon.
Below me is one of the most mysterious structures on the coast of Wales.
Wow, look at that.
'This is Culver Hole.
' It's so tightly-packed into the rock it almost looks natural.
As front doors go, this is fairly inaccessible.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
It's built like a castle, we've got these very strange-shaped windows above.
There are no floors in it.
Look at these stone niches, lots of them.
I'm hoping to find out more from National Trust warden Sian Musgrave.
Hi, Sian, very good to meet you.
Hi, Nick, and you.
Now, can you tell me what is this peculiar building? It's very inaccessible, so it's a great hiding place.
Would it have been used by smugglers, do you think? I think there's a high degree of probability that it was used by smugglers.
When the tide comes in, you can get a boat right in.
And inside there's what appears to be a tunnel leading out from the back wall.
Yeah, there's a small tunnel and a little chamber which again leads us to think that it could have been used to keep things out of the customs men's reach.
The highpoint of smuggling was about 200 years ago.
But this structure looks much older, medieval even.
And the old English name Culver Hole suggests an earlier use.
Culver is an old word which means pigeon.
It's a pigeon house.
It's actually a medieval dovecote.
So that's what those rectangular niches are? Yeah, they were built as an integrated part of the structure so that the pigeons could go in and nest, so it would encourage the populations to multiply and then it would serve as food and they'd take the eggs as well as the meat.
Culver Hole was originally a coastal larder many centuries ago, when pigeon meat was a prized foodstuff.
But there's layer upon layer of history here.
I can easily believe that much later on, it was converted to a hidy-hole for contraband.
Giant pigeon loft, or secret smugglers' lair? A bit of both, I reckon.
Hard evidence, it seems, is always elusive.
Smugglers take their secrets to the grave.
Gower has seen bad guys circling around its seas for centuries, but in 1940, the bandits were airborne.
Dogfights raged in the skies above the Bristol Channel.
Ports and munitions factories in South Wales were tempting targets for German bombers so Pembrey became an important Battle of Britain airfield.
It wasn't unknown for famous fighter aces to land here at Pembrey, but on June 23rd, 1942, the surprise arrival of one flyer caused quite a stir.
A German pilot landed at this Welsh airfield in a very special plane.
The airman was Oberleutnant Armin Faber, an experienced Luftwaffe pilot.
Following a dogfight over the Bristol Channel, Faber put his top-secret plane down at Pembrey.
Bold as brass, the enemy fighter was taxiing along this tarmac, causing Sgt Charles Jeffreys to spring into action.
It's said that Sgt Jeffreys grabbed the first weapon that came to hand - a flare gun, as it happens.
He dashed down the steps of the control tower over there and out onto the runway, where he threw himself across the wing of the German fighter, thereby capturing the pilot and, more importantly, his plane.
And what a prize it was - this terrifying new weapon of war, the Focke-Wulf 190, the scourge of the Spitfires.
Despite their dominance early in the war, Spitfires no longer had the upper hand.
The FW 190 was christened the Butcher Bird by the allied pilots, and it lived up to its name.
In the early months of 1942, the RAF lost scores of Spitfires.
The Butcher Bird was on a killing spree.
What made the Focke-Wulf 190 such a formidable foe was a mystery, so the Allies couldn't believe their luck when Armin Faber landed one on the Welsh coast.
To understand what the RAF pilots wanted to learn about the captured German fighter, and to appreciate the performance edge that made Faber's plane so deadly in his dogfight over the British coast, I'm going up myself.
Is it looking safe, Chris? Is it looking safe? Hey, Neil, it's looking great, yeah.
Good to see you.
Yeah.
So, what will a plane like this teach me about the Focke-Wulf? Well, what it's going to simulate is the agility and the speed of the Focke-Wulf.
Although it's not as big an aeroplane, it's got that agility and it's got that punch and speed that the Focke-Wulf had that was making it special and making it a real competitor, you know - better than the Spitfires at the time.
So my pilot will fly to mimic the performance of a Focke-Wulf 190 up against a Spitfire.
For me, it's just a game.
For airmen in the Second World War, it was a fight to the death.
How you feeling? I feel fine.
Brilliant.
Well, it's a combination of fine and terrified.
My plane's manoeuvring like the FW 190 - faster, and better in a roll or dive, compared to my opponent flying like a Spitfire.
We're in the Focke-Wulf and we're trying to shoot this guy down.
Here we go, we're going to pass down his right-hand side.
Oh, I can take him, I can take him.
This is the fly through.
Even in this mock dogfight, I can see how the superior agility, firepower, and visibility from Armin Faber's plane gave him a deadly advantage.
I've got him.
One visual.
Here we go, next pass.
Visual.
Guns, guns, guns.
There he is, follow him down.
In 1942, Luftwaffe pilot Faber did a wing-waggle over Pembrey airfield to celebrate victory.
And then, to everyone's astonishment, his Focke-Wulf 190 landed on Welsh tarmac! So why would an experienced German pilot gift his top-secret fighter plane to the Allies? There were theories that Armin Faber had switched sides, or that in the heat of battle he was disorientated and lost his bearings.
In a dogfight over the English Channel, he'd shot down a Spitfire.
Then Faber drifted towards the Bristol Channel, downing another Spitfire.
Confused by combat, thinking he was back over occupied France, Faber mistakenly landed at Pembrey.
Or so one theory goes.
Time to draft in Peter Murton from the Imperial War Museum.
How likely do you think it is that an experienced pilot would get lost under those circumstances? I have to suggest that an experienced Luftwaffe fighter pilot, who is well used to doing aerobatics and high joule manoeuvres in a dogfight would not become disorientated quite so quickly as perhaps you've experienced today.
So as far as you're concerned, what really happened? He realised there's no chance of him backtracking and getting back cross country and across the English channel.
There was an umbrella of Spitfires waiting to hack him out of the sky or forcing him lower and lower to the ground, but apart from that, he was short of fuel.
So, really, it was pure self-preservation? Yeah, most certainly.
He decided that the only way that he was going to survive was to pick the nearest aerodrome on UK territory and land.
Fighter command have captured a nice new specimen of Germany's latest fighter, the Focke-Wulf 190 Armin Faber's plane was repainted in RAF colours and tested to destruction.
As a result, future Marks of Spitfire were designed with modified wings and bigger engines, to regain their edge in the skies.
Armin Faber became a prisoner and survived the war after landing here at Pembrey.
The events of that day in 1942 also meant countless Allied pilots survived, thanks to their improved planes.
We continue our journey westward along Carmarthen Bay.
Crossing the water into Pembrokeshire, Tenby's sweeping golden beaches are just a taste of the majestic shoreline that awaits us.
Some of the best surfers in the world are drawn to open, wind-blown bays like Freshwater West.
Hi, I'm Kirsty Jones, I'm a professional kitesurfer.
I'm Kitesurf World Wave Champion and I've come to Freshwater West to train for my next World Cup competition.
It's my favourite beach to come surfing.
It's a world-class surfing break and it's also really great for kitesurfing.
It's a really special place for me because that's where my roots are from and it's always nice to come back, even though I travel all over the world.
OK, here we go.
I'm going to hit the wave on this one! Kitesurfing is using a big power kite to pull you along on the water, and you can do tricks, you can do jumps.
I'm going to do a little grab now.
You can just cruise along on the water.
It's just an amazing sport.
I'm going to go for a forward loop now.
Freshwater West is just amazing when it's like this.
There's something really special about the feeling of the sea air and the sea coming back to Wales.
I just love it.
Many Welsh islands owe their names to travellers.
Often Vikings can take the credit, and Skomer is no exception.
Skomer derives from the Old Norse word "skolm", meaning short sword.
Vikings aren't the only adventurers that have been attracted to these islands.
This is a seabird paradise that welcomes some of the greatest airborne travellers on the planet.
Miranda's exploring this lush outcrop seeking out old friends and new arrivals.
I've visited Skomer quite a few times and it's lovely to be back, but every time I come here it's like I've got to get to know the island all over again, it's ever-changing.
It's a place of so many different facets.
One of the most precarious habitats is the Wick, a sheer cliff with ledges ideally suited to nesting birds - razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes and fulmars.
I'm going to explore this fantastic abundance of birdlife, not just by day, but at night too.
In daylight, it's puffins that rule the roost.
And it's not rocky sea cliffs but rabbit burrows that's their idea of a perfect des res.
This is one of the most important puffin colonies in north-western Europe.
The best way to appreciate the puffin's lifestyle is to get in the water with them.
Island warden Jo Milborrow is going to help me snorkel right up close.
I'm absolutely dying to get in.
It's been a warm day and the water looks so inviting and there are loads of puffins behind us.
Yeah, they're great, aren't they? Yeah, hope we can get close! Hopefully, if we go in they'll come and have a look at us.
Brilliant.
Oh, it's cool! It's very cool.
That's chilly! It's very chilly.
Puffins are easily spooked, so we have to be patient and move slowly.
But we're soon rewarded with a rare chance of swimming within just a few feet of them.
Some of Skomer's grey seals are lounging nearby but, for me, it's the puffins that steal the show.
Absolutely surrounded by puffins, maybe just five or six feet away from me.
Some of them just skimming over the top of my head.
Incredible, they just seemed to be oblivious to the fact that I was there, maybe I just fooled them that I was a seal.
Puffins certainly steal the limelight during the daytime.
But Skomer attracts vast numbers of globe trotters who are much harder to spot until night falls.
Every summer, Skomer welcomes back a flock of old friends, birds from the island who've travelled way out to the coast of South America, a round trip of 18,000 miles, and they come back here to the island, often to within just a few feet of where they were born, to mate and breed.
I'm in search of one of the greatest adventurers of the animal kingdom - the Manx shearwater.
This tiny island off Wales becomes an extraordinary landing strip for Manx shearwaters, returning after winter from fisheries far down in the South Atlantic.
Because they're shy nocturnal birds, you'd be hard pushed to see them in daylight.
But, as the sun sets, the atmosphere really changes.
That cacophony means the Manx shearwaters are arriving in their thousands, and I can just glimpse them in the darkness.
Professor Tim Guildford is going to help me get a closer look.
They're everywhere.
They are, the place is absolutely littered with them.
And this guy has probably just landed.
I'm guessing this is a non-breeder.
Fabulous! So this one's probably just a recent prospector who's looking to mate.
He's beautiful.
I don't know if you can see on the top of the beak there, there's two little holes.
These nostrils are actually salt excreting glands.
Yes, like a storm petrel.
Yeah, absolutely.
That allows this whole family of birds to live in the open ocean without ever having to drink, so they can essentially either create their own water metabolically, or they can excrete salt sufficiently not to need fresh water.
They look a bit hopeless on land, the legs are placed so far back on the body that they can't balance well.
They flatten themselves out, don't they? They're sort of waddling very low.
It's a very strange gait isn't it? A very strange gait, yeah.
'There are more than 100,000 breeding pairs on Skomer, 'and nest cameras provide new insights into how they rear their young.
'Researchers like Tim have also been tagging the birds with electronic geo-locators.
' OK, that's great.
OK.
Here they come.
Brilliant, so this is one of the tagged birds? And on this leg That's the geolocator? It's so small.
Yeah, on this leg is the geolocating device The electronic log of the bird's position is downloaded to produce detailed maps.
This tells us, for every day and night of the year, where the bird has been.
So at last, now, we can reconstruct its entire migratory journey.
The male is the black one and the female is the purple one.
What we see is this outward migration down the west coast of Africa, across to Brazil and then down to Argentina over winter.
They head back then in the early Spring, they take slightly different routes, but what you do see is this extraordinary curve through the Caribbean.
They don't come back the way they went out.
Isn't that incredible, they're not doing the same journey there and back? It is.
I wonder why.
We think they're exploiting the North Atlantic currents, this circular current.
So the currents and the weather systems move like this so they're basically following weather systems, making it efficient, using the winds.
And soon they're off, back out to sea.
By daybreak, the shearwaters have vanished, perhaps the most remarkable secret of this magical seabird sanctuary on the Pembrokeshire coast.
Across St Bride's Bay is the tiny harbour of Solva.
We're nearing the western edge of Wales.
St Davids is Britain's smallest city with Wales's biggest cathedral.
The nation's patron saint established a monastery here in the 6th century, when the sea was a religious highway spreading the word around early Christian Britain and Ireland.
Pembrokeshire has Britain's most coastal national park, a glorious shoreline that you can walk from beginning to end enjoying a coast path 186 miles long.
It helps to get your walking boots on to find the surprises tucked away along this shore.
Like here, at Abereiddi.
The locals call this place the Blue Lagoon, and its aquamarine colour gives it the look of a tropical pool, but it's far from natural.
Now it's a playground for divers and coasteers, but this place is a clue to an industrial boom that happened here more than 100 years ago.
It's not just the sea that's been eating away at this coast.
The locals have done their share of nibbling too.
This was a slate quarry that once employed around 100 workers.
And just along the coastal path, another giant hole in the ground.
An exceptionally hard stone - dolerite - was blasted out of the cliffs here, an ideal material for buildings and roads.
The rock was hauled a short distance by rail to the tiny harbour at Porthgain.
The village is still dominated by enormous brick hulks.
Here the stone was crushed and graded in five separate bunkers, then it cascaded down a loading chute into boats waiting at the quayside.
Today, you see just the odd boat going in and out of the harbour, fishing for crabs and lobsters.
But when the quarry was going full tilt, the company had six steam coasters and at one time there were 100 other vessels, all registered at the port, and they're not entirely forgotten either.
The nameplates of many of them are inside the pub, nailed to the walls and above the tables.
A remarkable industrial operation dominated the surrounding area right up until the 1930s.
Unearthing this lost world of endeavour is a bit of archaeology anyone can do, so much still remains.
The Teifi Estuary marks the dividing line between Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire, with its own popular holiday destinations - resorts like Newquay and the Georgian seaside town of Aberaeron.
Further north is Aberystwyth, a University town used to gowns, and beach towels.
That dual personality is captured in this grand Victorian building, the Old College.
It was conceived as an opulent resort hotel, but it went bust before it was finished, only to be snapped up for a bargain price in 1872 by the founders of Wales's very first university.
It was all made possible by 70,000 donations from the public, people like miners and quarrymen who were passionate that education was the path to a better life.
Now Aberystwyth is known as the university founded on the pennies of the poor.
North from Aberystwyth to another Victorian seaside resort - Barmouth.
The Mawddach Estuary, where the Snowdonia National Park sweeps down to the sea.
The poet William Wordsworth called the mix of coast and mountain here "sublime".
But there'll be no time to stand and stare for Nick.
I'm about to find out what it takes to compete in one of the world's toughest sporting challenges, a race on land and at sea.
Every year since 1977, teams gather in Barmouth to launch an assault on Britain's highest mountains.
I've come here to train with the crew of the Mistral as they prepare for the gruelling Three Peaks Yacht Race.
Hi, Helen.
Hello! Very good to meet you, can I come on board? Welcome aboard! Thank you.
There you go.
The course works its way up the west coast stopping at, Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales, Scafell Pike, England's highest peak, and they save the hardest till last.
Britain's tallest challenge, Ben Nevis.
To get between the climbs, contestants take to their boats, all the way to Fort William.
Right, I'm ready.
Yeah, go for it.
Can we just ease that sheet a little bit, please? What's the wind blowing at? That last gust was about an eight, so 40 knots of wind.
How does it feel? The boat feels great, how does everybody else feel? Yay! Mind the sheet.
OK, guys, are you ready to go? There's a crew of five - the skipper, two specialist sailors and two runners.
Every second saved at sea is a stride up the mountain, so they run a tight ship.
The race is timed for boat performance speed and catching the right tide, and if you catch the right tide, you can get 6-12 hours ahead of other people who missed that tide.
Will you be sailing at night? Our first difficult navigation is coming through the sand bar at Caernarfon at 2am, which will be dark.
That sounds a complete horror story.
Yeah, essentially.
It can be tricksy and quite difficult.
In all, they'll have to sail nearly 400 miles to get between Britain's three tallest peaks.
When they arrive at a climb, they've got to get inland quick.
The first port of call is Caernarfon, the stopping off point for Snowdon.
Whatever the weather, tourists will pay to take the train to the summit, but the race contestants will have to run up it.
Our brief training run over, we get to do something they won't during the race itself - take a rest! This is just a taster, I guess, of what you're going to be facing when the race kicks off properly.
How many miles are you going to be running on the whole race? In total, there's over 100km.
The leg we're on today, the Snowdon leg, is 36km.
You're running up here at night, aren't you? Yeah, it will probably be about four o'clock in the morning which is going to be rather unpleasant for both of us.
What happens when things get really difficult, or worse, go wrong? Instead of a sleeping bag, we carry a blizzard bag which is Which I can show you here.
It weighs about 300g, so a lot of the runners will be carrying these which are double foiled blankets, so they insulate you a bit.
They're a bit like a sleeping bag.
So in a race like this, every gram counts, every gram saved is another few seconds you can cut off the race.
Exactly, faster up the hill, yeah.
So let's roll this out, Find a nice little hole for you to sleep in and go in.
Just wriggle inside do we? Do you take your shoes off first? I guess you would? No, not at all.
It's cosy, isn't it? And if it was really cold, we'd be in there with you as well! Go on then, Maria.
It took the team five days - and 38 minutes, to be exact - to reach Fort William.
Of the 32 yachts at the start line in Barmouth, they came in a creditable 13th.
I only wish I could have stayed with them on their epic journey.
Struggle's no stranger to this coast.
People come to pit themselves against the landscape.
But the landscape has also been pitted against the people.
This coast doesn't only promise a paradise of freedom, it's also been transformed for terror here at Harlech.
At the end of the 13th century, an English King invaded Wales, determined the locals would submit to his divine right to rule.
On this spiritual shore, Edward I of England hatched a devilish plan to enshrine his authority over the Welsh - in stone! What a piece of work and truly awe-inspiring.
It looks terrifying now, but can you imagine what it would have looked like 800 years ago? I want to bring this building back to its former glory and discover what made this one of Britain's most formidable fortresses.
Although the stone walls are largely intact, Harlech Castle has been stripped of its strongest defence - the sea.
Back when it was built, I would have been walking on water, not the sand dunes that are here now.
Rhian Parry knows what's happened to the coast since the castle was constructed.
We do know from this map of 1610 by Speed that it was quite a different picture.
You can see, here's the castle.
Look, we're presumably somewhere by that mermaid.
And look at the ships going in and out of the estuary.
The tradition is, and there's some documentary evidence, of course, that there was a port for Harlech at Ynys at Ty Gwyn y Gamlas, which literally means the white house of the canal, and it's likely that this was all marsh and at high tide it was under water completely.
So, Ynys island is Yes, is this one here.
So, if that was an island then, in the medieval period, this was all marsh and open water.
Indeed and there are lots of little islands and the place names tell you that they were islands and people didn't call them islands for nothing.
Restoring the sea to lap against the walls of Harlech castle is step one of my medieval make-over.
This is how it looked when Edward I of England built it to conquer the Welsh.
But the sea was more than a barrier.
It was also a gateway.
Andrew, why have you brought me to this lump of masonry? The name is explanatory in itself - this was the water gate, and the implication is that the water was adjacent to it.
The sea actually lapped up onto the side of these rocks? It did.
So you've got to imagine water down here.
With jetties and ships and everything? Certainly a bustling harbour, because they had an enormous amount of material to get up.
All the stone they were bringing in, the iron they were bringing in, food.
They were feeding 900 men, at one point.
So how do you get up there? There's a path that goes up and I'll show you where that is.
The site of the castle starts to make sense.
With water guarding one side and steep slopes on the other, there was only one way in - a landward gate which was heavily fortified.
Look at this, those towers! There's one, two, three, four towers? Yeah.
They give an enormous aspect, don't they? Any attacker who got this far would have to breach the gatehouse, a massive defensive obstacle that dominates the castle.
You're making a huge statement, that this is the strongest bit.
Yeah, very definitely.
And this is sort of the chamber where This is the worrying chamber where you didn't want to be.
Two arrow slits.
Two arrow slits either side.
So, crossbows would have come through there.
You've got iron gate there, iron gate there And attack from above as well.
Murder holes.
Murder holes pouring down onto you.
Boiling oil Yeah, that sort of thing.
This concentric design, walls within walls, held back the hostile Welsh nearby.
That's the Snowdonia range of mountains over there, and there's Snowdon.
And this was of course the Welsh stronghold of the Princes of Gwynedd.
This was the real point that Edward had to get to, the bit he had to crack.
So what was his big idea? He was going to encircle it with castles.
So Harlech is one, Caernarvon is the other on the north and then you've got Conwy, and then slightly later, Biwmares was built as well.
And this really represented, finally, the conquest of the Welsh.
It did, yes, yes, very definitely.
It's likely the grey stone walls of Harlech Castle looked very different in its heyday.
Edward had the structure plastered with a white render of lime mortar and we're looking for the evidence.
Let's see if we can find some.
I think you'll be lucky! Presumably, you find it in, sort of, corners, where it's protected.
If it's anywhere, that's the best place.
Hang on, what's up here? That looks like it, doesn't it? What's that? Oh, goodness.
There it is, just a little bit.
That's presumably the protective face.
Yes, it's overlaying the stones there.
Yes, I would suggest that that is some of it.
There's the original Edwardian mortar, lime render.
I think it will be.
Look just like, look behind I know that's inside.
Yes, inside the window reveals that, that's astonishing, isn't it? There it all is.
So you've got render, and then lime wash on the outside.
Yes.
Wouldn't it be great to lime wash the castle bright white? But I guess no-one's actually going to let me do that, but I have found a wall just down the road where we can try the stuff out.
The castle's coating of lime render was probably finished off with this stuff - bright white lime wash.
Lime wash is the most marvellous material, one of the great forgotten things from the Middle Ages.
It absorbs carbon dioxide and hardens just like stone.
The trouble is, to keep it bright and white, you have to do it every year.
It's bad enough painting a little wall like this.
Can you imagine what it was like painting a whole castle? It's just the question is, why bother? Modern weapons are all about stealth, but in an earlier age, this fortress was very much about broadcasting a message.
The building wasn't hiding, it was standing out, a brutish display of English power.
This was the castle in full glory, the shock and awe of the 13th century.
Can you imagine what that castle would have looked like painted all white? A symbol of the conquest of Wales, but also a provocation.
Just across Tremadog Bay, from the battlements of Harlech Castle, you can glimpse another, less menacing fortress.
I'm on the Llyn peninsula at Criccieth.
Mark Horton, over the water at Harlech, isn't the only one with a castle on this coast.
There are plenty to go around.
The original Criccieth Castle wasn't built by English Edward I, but by his opponents, the Welsh Princes, Llywelyn the Great and Llywelyn the Last.
I think his name, Llywelyn the Last, tells you all you need to know about how things worked out.
The Welsh, from their power base in the mountains of Gwynedd, rose up in a war of national independence in 1282.
But they were fatally divided and Edward crushed them.
Llywelyn was separated from his army and killed by the English at Cilmeri.
Edward then took over this Welsh castle at Criccieth and remodelled it.
But 100 or so years after defeat by Edward I, the Welsh were back for more.
There was another great uprising in 1400, led by the charismatic Owain Glyndwr.
Owain was a truly national leader, with powerful allies like the King of France.
By 1403, much of Wales was under Owain's control.
He even captured the mighty Harlech and held it for five years.
At Criccieth he tore down much of the castle that the English had extended, a grand gesture that ultimately proved futile.
The English struck back.
Owain's Glyndwr's revolt stuttered on, but he became a hunted man, a fugitive and a guerrilla, and nothing certain is known about him after 1412.
He slipped away then into the shadow world of myth and legend, a so-called Son of Prophecy, who would return from his mountain hideout to free Wales in her hour of need.
Owain's yet to return to claim Criccieth Castle.
For now, it stands a silent sentinel, guarding the sainted lands beyond, the holy places of the Llyn Peninsula.
At the western tip of Llyn is the fishing village of Aberdaron.
And on the beach, the Church of St Hywyn, the last stop for pilgrims on their way to the island of Bardsey.
Three pilgrimages here were said to be equivalent to one visit to Rome, and tradition has it that 20,000 saints are buried on Bardsey island.
The Welsh coast is a fertile shore for the making of myths.
Here, legend tells of a city lost to the sea - Cantre'r Gwaelod, the Welsh Atlantis.
And then you come to Porth Oer.
Here, there's more than a grain of truth in a local claim to fame.
Alice is on a mission to solve the riddle of the Singing Sands.
If you believe its name, this beach isn't just heavenly to look at, it's also rather wonderful to listen to.
It's called the Whistling Sands.
It's not the wind that's whistling, supposedly it's the sand itself that squeaks.
To get to bottom of it, I'm joined by our acoustics expert David Sharp from the Open University, who'll be listening for the special music of this place.
And coastal scientist Rod Jones, who'll be looking for the squeak in the sand.
Listening to the sound of the beach can be a bit hit and miss.
If it's been a very high tide or it's rained, you'd be out of luck.
But on a dry, sunny day like this, we should hear the squeak underfoot.
Hi David, how are you? Hello, I'm fine, thank you.
Now squeaking sand, I'm getting a tiny squeak as I'm walking along but it's very quiet.
OK, well, just try scuffing your foot through quite hard and see what happens.
Why don't we walk along a little bit and see if we can get that SQUEAKING Oh, there we go.
Oh, that was a good one.
This looks quite mad.
That's it.
Brilliant, I'm getting it really nicely on the screen.
That's really squeaking! I've never heard that before on a beach.
But we need more feet for the full effect.
Quiet please, we are recording the Squeaky Beach.
Yes, come on.
We'll make a line, I think.
What we probably need to try to do is to get in step.
How did that sound, David? Oh, it sounded excellent.
We've got a really good recording.
And is this beach unique in making this sound? Well, it's not unique.
There are around 30 beaches in the UK that will have these properties, but this is one of the better ones.
There's a good chance you're close to a whistling beach, particularly on the west coast.
But why aren't there more? What makes these beaches special? I'm with coastal scientist Rod Jones to find out what makes some sand sing.
What is it that makes the sound at a particular beach special? Why isn't all sand the same? Well, sound is affected by the energy of the environment where it sits.
So you've got your waves coming in and that's sorting the sand, and it's taking some grains and pulling them offshore, and others it's pushing to the top end of the beach.
And you've also got the process of wind, so when the tide's out, these sands will dry and the wind will blow across them and blow the finer particles up to the top of the shore.
Right.
And the balance of the wave energy, wind energy, and the supply and grain size of the sediments that you've got at the back there, will define what the particle size and characteristics are of the beach sediment.
How the wind and waves sort the sand depends on the shape of a bay.
We compared samples from two different beaches, from here at Whistling Sands and from Criccieth nearby.
Right, shall we try this sand first? Which is from Criccieth.
If I just zoom in on it So, large grains and also a variety of different grain sizes as well.
And shapes as well.
Yeah.
You can actually see little particles of slate there, as well as quartz and a lot of other things.
It's a very varied sort of sand.
OK, shall we have a look at the sand from Whistling Sands now? Let's just compare it with the last one and see just how different it is.
Now that looks very different.
It is, isn't it? The other one was much more varied in terms of grain size, whereas this one seems to be much more dominantly composed of quartz.
And it's much more uniform.
Yes.
In terms of size of grains.
They're quite well rounded, which means they will stack well together.
They've been sorted down, a lot of the coarser and the finer fraction have been lost.
So wind and waves here have sifted the sand into amazingly uniform, well-rounded particles.
But how does that produce a squeak? David's come up with a super-size model of the sand grains.
David, what are you doing? OK, well, what we've got here is normal sand found on most beaches, not regular at all.
And what we've got here is our singing sand, with lots of grains of the same size and all very well rounded.
When you kick your foot through the sand, you cause it to shear.
That means, you cause layers to rub across each other.
Right.
Now let's have a look what happens with the normal sand, and you can see that the grains just move up and down, all at different times, at different rates.
With the singing sand, if you kick your foot through that, what happens is that the grains all move up and down at the same time.
They all move together.
Yeah.
So why does that produce a squeak? Well, it's actually the whole layer moving up and down and the whole surface then acts a bit like a loudspeaker, vibrating and causing pressure changes in the air above, which we hear as sound.
SQUEAKING And not just any sound.
David's had time to analyse the squeaks he recorded to see if the beach is as musical as its nickname, Whistling Sands, suggests.
The interesting thing is the regularity in which we get these pressure changes, so we get these increases in pressure happening at very regular intervals, and that's all caused by the sand vibrating up and down, just like we saw with the balls, And that gives us this pitched sound, like a musical note, almost.
We can actually demonstrate that, if you want to just try singing some notes into the microphone, we'll record that.
OK.
OK, here we go.
Right, off you go.
Ahhhh SHE SINGS REGULAR NOTES OK, that's brilliant.
If we zoom in on one of those And again, yes, you can see the regular pattern, you've got this regular repetition of these increases and decreases in air pressure.
And it's this regular change that gives us the sense of pitch.
Unlike most sand, this sand actually sings.
It really does sing, yeah.
Scientists are starting to explain the sound of the sands, but there remains a magical quality to this place that's hard to define.
I love the fact the Singing Sands are still something of a mystery, and it's a puzzle that's played out along the beaches of our coast, in the sand under our feet.
The golden sands and clear waters of Llyn have a majestic backdrop - the imposing mountains of Snowdonia.
And facing them across the water, Anglesey, the island known as Mon Mam Cymru - the mother of Wales.
On its western edge is Llanddwyn Island, home of Saint Dwynwen, the patron saint of Welsh lovers.
Which brings me to my final destination - Llangwyfan.
I'm on the causeway leading out to the Church in the Sea.
This is Llangwyfan, the church of Saint Cwyfan.
The Irish knew him as Saint Kevin, and he was from Glendalough, not far from the stretch of Irish coast directly across the water from here.
There's been a church on this site since at least as early as 1254.
It was extended in 14th and 15th centuries so it wasn't always the humble building that's here now, because back in the day, there was a lot more land out here than there is now.
Over the centuries, the sea eroded this site until the graves started to fall into the water.
So now the church sits here on a tiny promontory, that, just like Worm's Head where my journey started, becomes an island at high tide.
Places like this, sometimes part of the land, but sometimes part of the sea, are reminders that everything is temporary.
No matter how hard we hold onto things, our grasp of them is momentary.
And just like the tides around this promontory, we're just passing through.
From the sainted headlands of west Wales, our journey continues next time along the wild Atlantic coast of north west Ireland.
If you want to explore our coast and beyond, the Open University has produced a booklet with ideas and information to inspire your travels.
For a free copy or to find out more about Open University programmes on the BBC, phone: Or go to the website: