Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising given the time of year that thoughts of ideal places should stray from cities. My kind of town was only briefly a town and these days it would hardly count as a village: a pub, a collection of cottages and a tiny but deep harbour set among the dereliction of what was from 1850 to 1931 a vibrant industrial centre. Unlike the romance of the more ancient steam winding sheds of Cornwall, Porthgain has a ramshackle collection of buildings, railways, inclines, waste heaps, ugly brick silos, sluices, tunnels, an accounts office, and a harbour pilot’s office set at the end of the quay. High on the promontory flanking the harbour are stone towers that acted as way markers for incoming vessels. There is nothing particularly graceful about it all and it is certainly unplanned but its heroic scale, set on this hard weather-beaten west Wales coastline in an otherwise unblemished landscape, is awe inspiring. At least it was to me as a child.
This was the town my parents discovered on my mother’s motorbike, soon after they met during the war, when both had been stationed nearby. It became the place we were accepted, like a lost tribe, every summer when we camped amidst the quarries, sheltered from the Atlantic winds. There was nothing green, rocks served as tent pegs and the landscape was more moonlike than earthly. Derelict narrow-gauge railways and decaying wagons provided adventures that made Stig of the Dump seem pedestrian.
Porthgain was built to feed a housing boom, supplying slates, bricks and especially granite road chippings, which were quarried, manufactured and mined locally. Its tiny harbour, strategically exploiting the protection offered by the jagged coastline, makes it seem almost natural. It is said that the shipping of granite chippings from Porthgain continued up to the time when the roads it had paved were so extensive that they made sea transport redundant. A neat tale, but equally the recession of the 1930s would have played its part.
Porthgain closed overnight. The account books were left lying in office, the quarry locomotive in its shed up on the hill, and trucks on the quay, all as if the ice queen had visited. For the few inhabitants who stayed there was fishing and poaching rabbits in a community that worked together. The harbour was taken over by fishing boats, the granite tunnels along the quay turned into stores for lobster pots, and over a number of decades Porthgain transformed from desolation to destination. The silos became perhaps the least ancient of all our listed ancient monuments. The settlement was made a conservation area, and in 1982 all of the industrial property was purchased by a town trust together with the Pembrokeshire National Park authority. The cottage that once belonged to village elders, Mamagain and Papagain, has been knocked through to next door, and the accounts office converted to an art gallery. On the slope above, the farm that supplied us with fresh chicken and eggs has been ‘improved’ by a local landowner and is now a palatial home. Beyond the quarries where we camped is a heritage trail, but the paths leading down from the quarries to the harbour are fenced off. These were our switchbacks down which imagined Spitfire pilots would race, chasing one another and scattering the hordes of Common Blue butterflies, aptly named Icarus. Also fenced off is the deep quarry that links to the tunnels at the harbour’s edge, a chasm that enticed us despite constant warnings. Unsurprisingly, too, the slate-lined sluice in front of the cottages, a kind of communal waste extract system, has been filled in. I owe my life to the hand, alerted by my sister’s screams, that rescued me on the day I failed to traverse the fast-flowing current.
Nonetheless Porthgain remains an ethereal place that, but for the remoteness and the sheer beauty of its setting, would have been bulldozed as fill for an Asda store long ago. For anyone with feral children and a love of sandy beaches, empty even on a bank holiday, my kind of town still makes for a wonderful holiday.
Mark Whitby is director of engineer Davies Maguire & Whitby, which he founded last year with Gareth Davies, Seamus Maguire and Des Mairs following the merger of Whitbybird with Ramboll.
First published in AT220, July/ August 2011
