Llantwit Major and the Heritage Coast

Around the year 490 a monk called Illtud opened a school on a brook near the coast of Glamorgan, south Wales, and it became the oldest centre of learning in Britain, the university of the Celtic saints. Below the church that stands on his site, the cliffs of the Heritage Coast are layered like pastry and the beaches are full of Jurassic fossils.

St Illtud's occupies one of the oldest Christian sites on this coast; inside are medieval wall paintings of Mary Magdalene and St Christopher and a thirteenth-century Jesse stone, and on the back of the Samson Cross the letters ILTU are the oldest surviving mention of the saint. Llanilltud Fawr, Llantwit to everyone, is a labyrinth of old streets around it, and in the 1930s the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had bought and enlarged St Donats Castle nearby, drank in the Old Swan Inn with Charlie Chaplin and Bob Hope. From the town the Col-huw stream runs down to the beach, and the Wales Coast Path follows fourteen miles of Heritage Coast, sheer cliffs of layered limestone and shale with coves, caves and fossil-strewn shores, nine of those miles to Nash Point. There, twin lighthouses of 1832 were built after the steam vessel Frolic went down on the sands in 1831 with all 78 aboard, on a shore where wreckers were said to tie lanterns to grazing sheep to lure ships in; the café by the lighthouse serves hot Welsh cakes. It is the coast Cardiff forgets it has, fifteen miles from the capital and older than anything in it.