Laugharne

Dylan Thomas called it the strangest town in Wales, then chose to live in it. Laugharne sits where the River Taf widens into Carmarthen Bay, and the Boathouse where he spent his last four years hangs over the estuary below the shed where he wrote, with the whole tidal sweep of the water in the window.

He first came in 1934 and stayed, on and off, for nearly twenty years. Castle House was where he and Caitlin got together, and its owner, the writer Richard Hughes, let him work in a gazebo on the castle ramparts; the castle itself, a thirteenth-century stronghold made into a Tudor mansion by Sir John Perrot and now in Cadw's care, is where he wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog in the summerhouse. In 1949 a benefactor put up the money for the Boathouse and let the family live there rent-free, without plumbing, water fetched from the public tap down the hill; it is a museum with a tearoom now, and the writing shed stands as he left it. Browns Hotel, a pub since 1752, was his other office, its number given out as his own; today it is a boutique hotel whose restaurant, Dexter's, rears its own cattle on a farm nearby. Laugharne is widely taken as the original of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood, and it hosts a literary weekend each April; it is small, tidal and slightly out of time, which is what he loved about it.