Kenfig

There was a town here. By the 1140s Kenfig was a walled borough with a castle at one corner and 142 house plots inside the rampart, and then the sand came, so steadily through the fifteenth century that the town was abandoned to the dunes, though its corporation went on meeting until 1883. Today, on the south Wales coast between Porthcawl and Port Talbot, the castle tower's stump rises out of the sand, and the dunes around it rank among the finest in Europe.

The castle was built early in the twelfth century by the lord of Glamorgan, a fourteen-metre square tower inside a palisaded court that would have dominated the town's skyline, rebuilt in stone around 1300 and ruinous by the early 1500s; it was excavated between 1924 and 1932, and what is left is scanty and strange, masonry emerging from a hillside of marram grass. The reserve that swallowed it is about 1,300 acres of dunes and wetland between Porthcawl and Port Talbot, the remnant of a system that once ran from the Ogmore estuary to Gower. It is managed hard, with grazing and scrub control, to keep the sand moving, because the rare plants need bare ground: the fen orchid, extremely rare in Britain, has climbed here from 200 plants to more than 4,000. Kenfig Pool, 70 acres, is the largest natural lake in South Wales, a refuge for wildfowl and among the few UK sites where a bittern can be seen in winter. Sker Beach, the most westerly in the county, is reached only through the reserve; Porthcawl, with its 1887 promenade, is the resort next door for the fish and chips.