We didn't bring our sunhats

We are usually alone at Trefalen Cottage, just Chris and me. But sometimes we have visitors. The visitors we enjoy most of all are Gabriela and Silvia, our granddaughters. And last weekend was to be their first visit to Pemrokeshire since Christmas. The weather forecast was not encouraging; icy blasts from the north, strong cold winds, overnight frosts. But they came anyway, bags laden with winter jackets, woollen hats, wellington boots and gloves.  

     But of course the weather in this tiny corner of Pembrokeshire does not obey the weather forecasts. Saturday was warm and Sunday even warmer, especially between the rocks, out of the wind, on the far side of Broadhaven beach.

     This is one of our favourite parts of the beach  because we have so many places to paddle. There is the pool of water fed by the lily ponds, sometimes no more than a big puddle, sometimes a lake. There is the channel that joins the pool to the sea, sometimes a rushing torrent, sometimes a trickle and sometimes not there at all. And of course there is the sea itself, sometimes creeping up the beach, into the dry spaces between the rocks, sometimes hurling itself into the channel.

     And we did paddle. We also  built sandcastles, constructed  bridges across the stream and ate our picnic tea leaning back against the warm rocks. The bag of warm jackets , gloves and hats lay on the beach beside us, ignored. All that Gabi and Silvi needed were their improvised sunhats

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wild garlic and a wedding arch

It is April and the wild garlic is here again. It was in flower when we first moved into Trefalen cottage, in 2008, and the wide green leaves and star like white flowers remind me each year of those early days. I didn’t know anything about wild garlic then. But now, for four or five weeks each year, we feast on wild garlic soup (made with potatoes and crème fraiche), and wild garlic salad (it goes well with nuts). And, whatever the weather, we open the car windows wide as we descend into the magical green and white banks just after St Petrox.

     April means, too, the start of real work on my vegetable patch. It backs onto the road leading to Broadhaven beach and in summer gardening can be very sociable. But the road is quiet now and I am glad there is no one to see the ravages of the winter. Even the   purple sprouting broccoli is bursting into yellow flowers, and then there will be nothing until the first salad crops, or maybe the spinach. I have sown the spinach and the beetroot under cheap plastic cloches, which are impressively surviving the gales. But it is hard to believe that, a couple of months from now, this forlorn patch will be a riot of reds, oranges , purples and green as the strawberries, carrots, beetroot, blackcurrants fight with the spinach and salads for space.

     However you can’t dig and weed all day. So I took time out last weekend to go on a ‘driftwood search’. There are piles of driftwood in one of the coves to the east of Broadhaven but it is only accessible by kayak. So we drove to Stack Rocks. There is a tiny beach, just accessible via a gulley, to the west of the car park and we managed to haul up enough wood to make a wedding arch for Kathy, our younger daughter, and Mark. The arch is now propped against the cottage wall, swaying in the wind and rain and waiting for its day of glory in June.

     By June the beach will be a mass of colour; windbreaks, beach umbrellas, tiny tents. But I like it right now; grey and white and brown. At high tide the sea batters the headlands and Church Rock, at low tide there is just a vast expanse of sand. Sometimes, from high up on the cliffs, I see a tiny solitary figure making its way across the sand. But it soon disappears, up the steps to the car park or across the bridge to the Lily Ponds, leaving the beach, once again, to me.

      However away from the beach there is plenty of life, especially on the last Friday of the month, which is curry night at St Govan’s Inn. Last Friday it was as busy as ever, all tables occupied (including my favourite one in the corner with the climbing photographs) and a crowd around the bowls of curry set out on a table near the bar. In summer there is a happy mix of locals and holidaymakers at curry night but the holidaymakers are still in Cardiff, London, Birmingham. They will be here soon though.