A week ago, Swansea City Museum being closed, I checked the map and made my way to the National Waterfront Museum instead. 'Use alternative entrance' instructed a sign on the wall, next to a very large blue arrow pointing to - a metal fence. I made my way in the opposite direction, and there, having reached the actual entrance, I was informed that I should have booked a (free) ticket in advance 'to keep our staff and visitors safe'. I sat on a bench, mingling fury with disappointment, but discovered on my phone that tickets were available. So the 'advance' period was the time it took to walk from the bench to the front desk. The Museum was not exactly overrun with visitors. It deals with Welsh industry, which is a pretty big topic. I did like the home-made Steampunk aeroplane from the early 1900s whose pilot's seat is a kitchen chair and whose engine switch is a brass light fitting, which has an egg-timer as a navigational aid, and which boasted two weights on chains, one twenty yards in length and one ten, to warn the pilot when he was about to hit the ground.
Tenby Museum was also hard to get into as the visitor ahead of me was having a debate of some kind with the lady on the desk but eventually I made it in. She apologised for the state of the staircase, but I don't think mentioned the art gallery which was under reconstruction, two young fellows drilling the walls in full view with, in fact, nothing to prevent patrons going to inspect their work, though none of us did. Over a doorway was a bugle, a musket, a black feather cockade, and a small pouch, labelled 'Relics of the French attack on Fishguard in 1797', with no information as to what that event might have been.
But Aberdare Museum I loved - and it was free! The displays there also presented a bit of a challenge as some cases were not labelled at all, but I suppose you could have made up your own stories about them; and the narrative lurched somewhat abruptly from the Neolithic to the early 1800s, but it was all done with great flair. I walked into an early-1900s shop display and the bell rang as I opened the door.
I was staying, as on previous holidays, in a folly, an 18th-century gatehouse to the Penrice Estate which has been done up rather nicely from the days of the last permanent resident, the gamekeeper's widow who had only two rooms and had to access the bedroom via a ladder.
On a day's walking I spotted a 'Tower' on the map and went on a detour to investigate. This folly is on a neighbouring estate to Penrice, Kilvrough, now used as an outdoor education centre. I shouldn't really have been there so I didn't feel it necessary to get too close. The seafront at The Mumbles has a folly of its own: possibly the grandest public lavatory in the country, though it surely can't have begun life as that.
Parc-le-Broes comprises a peculiar assemblage of genuinely historical sites. The Neolithic burial chamber pictured sits just yards from an 18th-century limekiln. The barrow must always have been visible: what did those Georgian lime-burners think of it? Did they have any inkling that they were at work within a stone's throw of forty souls buried there some thirty-eight centuries before? Just up the hill, within the woods, is Cathole Cave, which was inhabited at one time and briefly by me as I sat to have my lunch. Understandably you can't go all the way inside, but an information panel states it's as high as 'fifteen stacked elephants', an unusual unit of measurement.
Finally, out on the moors west of Cefn Bryn is Arthur's Stone, a fallen cromlech. A family was there when I reached it, the children clambering over, around, and under the massive boulders. 'We're trolls!' they cried, and then worried about getting stuck and their parents leaving them behind.
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