Rhossili and Worm's Head

From the top of the village the whole bay lies below you at once: three miles of sand, a green down behind it, the ribs of a wrecked ship showing at low tide, and, furthest off, a rocky headland snaking out to sea that the Vikings named for a serpent. Rhossili is the end of Gower, the peninsula west of Swansea in south Wales and the first place in Britain called a National Landscape, and its beach keeps turning up on lists of the best in the world.

The walk out to Worm's Head is the adventure, and it has rules: the causeway is uncovered for roughly two hours before and after low water, the times are posted on a board by the crossing, and even locals get it wrong; Dylan Thomas, as a boy, was stranded out there until midnight. Grey seals haul out below the rocks; the beach is reached by steps from the village car park, and the Helvetia, wrecked in 1887, lies where she came to rest in the sand. Rhossili Down rises behind, where paragliders ridge-soar the updrafts on summer days, and the sand and cliffs have stood in for other worlds in Doctor Who and a run of BBC dramas. Gower is also where cockles and laverbread come from, the seaweed off these shores and the cockles from the Penclawdd estuary on the north coast, and the peninsula's walks, by local habit, end at a pub, most often the King Arthur in Reynoldston with its log fire. Bring proper shoes for the causeway, check the board, and give the headland its full two hours.