The Grist & the Quay / Strand

The ground the town was given

The moor, marsh and foreshore that Laugharne's medieval lord granted the borough are still the town's land, seven hundred years on.

Mary Curtis, writing her Antiquities of Laugharne in 1880 from inside the town's own living memory, sets it down without flourish: the lands of the Corporation, given by Sir Guy de Brian, are "extensive" — once reaching as far as Marros and Kiffig, and in her day still stretching out toward St Clears Bridge. A town that governs itself needs something to govern. Here that something is real ground: the moor, the marsh and the foreshore that came with the grant and never left.

Curtis walks it for you. In the Lower Moor the burgesses hold lands allotted to them, coming into their portions by rotation. In the Upper Moor nothing is allotted at all — its rents are collected and put in the town chest, a working treasury filled from the town's own acres. The Lees, under the hills where New Walk runs, split by the Pill into a Western and an Eastern Lees, and the land on Hugden — all of it Corporation property. And the very edges are fixed by named stones written into the charter itself, among them the "Long Rock," a boundary marker the charter names.

That last detail is the quiet hinge of the whole story. The land the town holds, the boundary the charter names, and the bounds the town beats are one thing seen three ways. This is why the common lands, the burgesses' ancient share, and the walking of the bounds all reach back to this same grant. Laugharne does not merely remember its charter. It stands on it.

The record: Mary Curtis, The Antiquities of Laugharne (1880): the Corporation lands granted by Sir Guy de Brian; the Lower and Upper Moor, the Lees and Hugden; and the charter-named boundary stones, including the "Long Rock".

Seventy-six senior burgesses

A share of the common moor, won not by money or birth but by outliving the men ahead of you — just seventy-six hold it.

Mary Curtis, in 1880, counted the burgesses at six or seven hundred, and recorded that of that whole body just seventy-six "come into land for life by senior rotation." It is a system built to reward longevity and to keep the land in the town's own hands, generation after generation — waiting made into a form of inheritance.

And the number is not one witness's guess. Sixteen years earlier, Pigot's 1844 directory — an entirely separate source — gives the same working machine from the outside: the de Brian lands then worth £20, their portions "enjoyed by seventy-six of the senior poor burgesses." Two records, sixteen years apart, land on exactly the same seventy-six. That is a rare, clean agreement for a piece of custom this old — and it quietly confirms the town's standing rule along the way: one Portreeve, with the grand jury beside him. One, never two.

This is the thread that runs straightest through the whole book. Those seventy-six senior burgesses and their share in the common lands are precisely what the law of 1883 reached to protect, and what carried the charter's grant of moor and marsh forward into the town's later existence. It even ties back to the great house on the foreshore, whose story turns on this same body of Corporation land. The burgess-share is no antiquarian curiosity. It is the living legal thread by which a thirteenth-century gift of moor and marsh is, in law, still the town's.

The record: Mary Curtis, The Antiquities of Laugharne (1880): the seventy-six senior burgesses coming into land by senior rotation; Pigot & Co.'s Directory (1844): the de Brian lands, worth £20, "enjoyed by seventy-six of the senior poor burgesses".

The town written down every few years

Eleven public houses for a town of under two thousand — counted again and again by the directory-men who watched Laugharne change.

The earliest clean sighting is Pigot's directory of 1830. Laugharne — "or Lacharne, commonly called Larne" — is a township of 1,953 people, and it names its eleven inns one by one: the Ball, the Bush, the Carpenters' Arms, the Globe under Thomas Edwards, the Green Dragon, the Greyhound, the Jolly Sportsman, the New Inn, the Rose & Crown, the Ship, the Three Mariners. One coasting trader, the Mary, ran to Bristol every month.

Fourteen years on, Pigot's 1844 shows a busier town. The people hold level — 2,020, then 2,010 — but the licensed trade swells from eleven houses to sixteen taverns plus the Globe Commercial Inn, now kept by James Pepler and doubling as the excise office. Watch the Globe's keepers march straight down the years: Edwards in 1830, Pepler in 1844. And mind the near-collision that guards them — the 1844 list also has a plain "Commercial" house under John Sedger, which is not the Globe Commercial Inn. That one word, "Globe," is load-bearing; drop it and you hang the wrong keeper on the town's most-watched inn. The Bristol run had doubled too: two vessels now, the Betsy and the Penelope, fortnightly.

The directories fix the market and fairs as well, and here they trade a tidy story for an untidier truth. The market was a Friday one, "abundantly supplied with corn and provisions," and it ran on a separate grant from the borough charter — a writ ad quod damnum of 9 William III (1697/98) vesting a market and two fairs in a private man, Thomas Powell, Esq., and his heirs. (By name he fits Thomas Powell of Broadway — a different Powell entirely from the one caught in another of the book's name-traps.) And the fairs did not simply move from September to November, as it looks at first: Pigot 1844 shows four fairs at once — 6 May, 19 June, 28 September, 10 November — so they multiplied and then thinned. Expansion, not a swap.

One caution rides along with all of it, and it is the sharpest lesson in the cluster. Every directory printed a little antiquarian preamble at the top — the castle destroyed "in 1215," the charter "confirmed by Henry III… enlarged by Edward VI," de Brian's "richly embroidered mantle" kept in the church — copied almost word for word from one edition to the next. That is directory editorial, not evidence; it is exactly how a plausible error walks a whole century. So take the gift and refuse the fool's gold: the trade lists are gold, the history at the top of the page is copied hearsay — and the charter behind it all stays where it belongs, late in the thirteenth century, never a printed year.

The record: Pigot & Co.'s directories of 1830 and 1844: the 1830 listing (population 1,953) naming eleven Laugharne inns, the Globe under Thomas Edwards; the 1844 listing (population c.2,010–2,020) with sixteen taverns and the Globe Commercial Inn under James Pepler, doubling as the excise office. Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of Wales (1833): the Friday market. The 1697 Crown market-and-fairs grant to Thomas Powell of Broadway — a market franchise distinct from the borough charter.

Six chapels and four kinds of dissent

A small estuary town once raised at least six chapels outside the parish church, and a lost medieval chapel by the shore — almost none survive.

The senior cause came first, and it came early. The Old English Congregational chapel at Providence, Cliff Street, went up in 1750 — a full generation before Methodism even reached the town — rebuilt in 1809, rebuilt again in 1853, and gone by about 1950. A New Congregational chapel then rose on King Street around 1890: Romanesque, round-headed windows, a gallery on cast-iron columns — and it is the only one of all the town's chapels the record shows still standing. It is very likely the later home of the same cause that began at Providence; but the records don't say so in as many words, so the thread is left hanging rather than tied. A second Independent cause, Philadelphia, was rebuilt in 1800 — which means it was older still — and then vanishes from the record.

Then the Methodists, in two colours. The Wesleyan chapel on New Bridge Street was built in 1810/11, in the decade organised Methodism arrived, and demolished by 1998. The Tabernacle on Wogan Street — styled "English Presbyterian and Calvinistic Methodist" — was built in 1833, rebuilt in 1872, gone by 1989. And quietest of all, and probably deepest-rooted, on the northern edge at Cross Inn lay a Quaker burial ground with its meeting-house — the Society of Friends — recorded demolished by 1989. Add two more Moravian and Baptist causes at the rural edges, and a Moravian preaching society in the town under the Haverfordwest congregation from 1763, and the picture fills in.

The oldest of all stands apart from every chapel. The pre-Reformation Mariner's Chapel once stood near the castle, just south of the open ground called the Grist — a chapel for men who went to sea. By 1880 only ivy-covered walls were left, with a reported stoup and piscina; by 1912 even the walls could not be traced; its rectangular footprint, about thirty-five feet by twenty, east–west, lay by then below the high-water mark on business premises. It rests on antiquarian observation and nothing you can touch, so it is held gently at arm's length — a seamen's chapel on the tideline, remembered by the record but no longer by the ground.

Six chapels, four traditions, one lost chapel by the water — and today only the King Street chapel and St Martin's still stand. Which is its own quiet fact about how a town's devotions outlast their walls: the walls come down, and the town keeps the count.

The record: Royal Commission / Coflein records for the Laugharne chapels: Providence Congregational, Cliff Street, 1750 (rebuilt 1809 and 1853; NPRN 6308); New Congregational, King Street, c.1890, still standing (NPRN 6307); Philadelphia Independent, rebuilt 1800 (NPRN 97164); Wesleyan, New Bridge Street, 1810/11 (NPRN 6312); Tabernacle, Wogan Street, 1833 (NPRN 6311); Quaker meeting-house and burial ground, Cross Inn (NPRN 6310); and the medieval Mariner's Chapel near the Grist (NPRN 417871), recorded as ivy-covered walls in 1880 and untraceable by 1912.

The quay on the inlet that is now a car park

Under this car park below the castle lies a medieval quay, dug back into the light in the summer of 2025.

The Trust for Welsh Archaeology, digging at Island House in the shadow of the castle, uncovered a medieval quay and called it, in their own words, "the first medieval quay to be excavated in Wales." Hold that phrase gently, because it is more wonderful for being precise. It is not a boast that this is the oldest quay in Wales — great ports like London and Bristol have long known their quays. It is that no one had ever dug one here. A working harbour, hidden in plain sight, under a car park.

Picture it as it was. A small tidal inlet just outside the town walls, boats riding in on the tide. On the quayside, stone buildings — one of them a high, proud hall house with a fire venting through the roof, read by the diggers as "probably the home of a wealthy merchant profiting from the coastal trade." An earlier season had already found a watercourse the castle and town were tipping their rubbish into as far back as the twelfth century. This place was alive.

And then the reach of it. The broken pottery pulled from the ground tells of trade routes running "from Bristol, the French coast and as far south as Spain" — enough for the supervisor to say Laugharne makes us "re-evaluate the importance of Laugharne within the trading network of the British Isles." The first quay went in during the twelfth or thirteenth century — the very moment the town got its charter. So the charter-era town was no backwater: it had a lord, a court, a name in the royal rolls, and now, proven in the ground, a port trading with France and Spain.

One number the town must keep straight, because it is often misplaced. The date 1437 belongs not to the quay but to Island House's own roof timbers, dated by tree-ring and radiocarbon. The quay is far older — twelfth or thirteenth century. Never "the 1437 quay."

Everything about the life on that quayside is still held lightly, and honestly, because so far the record is a single excavation release, not the full report — no site plan yet, no separate quay-timber dating, no pottery list. But it is a real, physical, attributable lead, and one of the great images the town owns: small boats at a quay on an inlet, in the shadow of the castle, on ground you can stand on today and never guess.

The record: Trust for Welsh Archaeology (Heneb) excavation at Laugharne, announced 23 July 2025 (heneb.org.uk): a medieval quay the excavators describe as "the first medieval quay to be excavated in Wales"; a first quay dated to the twelfth–thirteenth century; pottery indicating trade with Bristol, the French coast and Spain. Findings rest on the excavation release; the full report is awaited.

A creek of the port of Carmarthen

In Tudor English a "creek" was a working landing place — and Laugharne was one, with a little trading fleet of its own.

To the Elizabethans a "port" was not a harbour but a stretch of coast. Beneath a head port sat member ports, and beneath those, the creeks — the real landing places where goods came and went. Laugharne was one of them: a named customs creek of Carmarthen, with its own sworn officers "for the Creeke of Laugharne and Marrosse." You can still read their names — Rhese Madog, David Wallter, Gryffyth Phillyppes, John Philipe. Men who stood on this shore and counted the cargo.

And here is the wonder of the accounts — they are full of ships. Not Carmarthen's ships upriver, but vessels the clerk wrote down as "of Laugharne": the Michaell, the Angell, the Margett, the Edward and James, the Mary — a little fleet of coasters, twelve to thirty tons, exactly the right size to work the Taf and cross the Bristol Channel. This was a home port with hulls of its own.

They are full of people, too. Trade in the town had faces and names: John Palmer the clothier, Thomas Palmer bringing French salt home through Tenby, William Rogers who doubled as a customs man, Richard Rogers taking in oil and Bristol cloth, David Wilcocke landing iron. A whole merchant class, page after page.

Follow the cargoes and the town opens onto the world. Inward from Bristol came iron, oil, woollen cloth, hops and soap — the everyday interchange traffic. And outward, across the water, the creek reached France directly: pitch carried to and fro, coal cleared for Dieppe, salt brought back through Tenby. A small tidal creek on a Welsh estuary, quietly trading with the Continent.

There is even a shadow at the water's edge, and it belongs here. John Callice of Tintern — the most notorious Welsh pirate of the age — is on record selling his plunder in Laugharne and Carew in the 1570s. A working creek was also a place to land goods that had never troubled the customs men. His one firm mark in the record is this waterfront; the tempting link to the great commissions of those years is not proven, and so it is not drawn.

The clerks used only the anglicised spellings — Laugharne, Lagharne, Lacharn — never Talacharn or Abercorran; that silence is noted as a finding, not read as absence. And one analytic page of the old edition, which may yet carry a headline count of the town's households and ships, remains unread, so no grand number is claimed ahead of it. What is certain is enough: a creek, a fleet, its merchants, and a line of trade reaching all the way to France and Spain.

The record: E. A. Lewis (ed.), The Welsh Port Books, 1550–1603 (Cymmrodorion Record Series, 1927): Laugharne as a named customs creek of the port of Carmarthen, with its sworn officers, a resident fleet of coasters (the Michael, Angel, Margaret, Edward and James, Mary; 12–30 tons), named masters and merchants, and trade with Bristol and with France; John Callice of Tintern recorded selling plunder at Laugharne in the 1570s.

The working edge of the town

Three buildings in a line on the Strand were not homes but a port's working edge — a granary, a malthouse and a great warehouse.

The Strand is the first, a tall late-Georgian house facing east across the foreshore. Read its walls and it tells on itself: a vertical joint runs plainly between front and rear, the fabric confessing two separate builds. The listing writes the trade straight in — the rear range was "formerly a granary warehouse," the cross range "formerly a malthouse associated with a brewery of the David family." Inside, a reused early-nineteenth-century staircase, one panelled room, and — a perfect Strand-end detail — a ground-floor recess set with a cockleshell emblem. It is logged as a carving only, no more; but on this shore, of all shores, it is a lovely thing to find in the plaster.

Strand House stands beside it, Georgian and handsome behind rubble walls and iron gates — nine- and twelve-pane sashes, an arched doorway under a five-pane fanlight, and in the kitchen a full-height dresser built for the room. It is on the 1834 survey map, so it was standing by then. But it, too, carries its working past in its bones: "vertical joints, blocked openings and narrow windows relating to the period when this was a warehouse." A merchant's store, later dressed as a gentleman's house.

Ball Court is the most eloquent of the three, and the only one the estuary defeated. Cadw calls it a "former warehouse dating from the period when Laugharne was a commercial port," its odd name coming "from its subsequent use as a ball court." Four storeys, five bays, roofless and long disused, it still stands tall in every view of the foreshore — a ruin that refuses to disappear. Its age comes cleanly from two old maps read against each other: absent from the 1834 survey, but there on the 1842 Tithe Map as a "store house." No guessed date, just two maps and the gap between them.

"The period when Laugharne was a commercial port" — those are the statutory record's own words, the town's maritime life set down in law. And these are the three buildings that held it: the grain, the malt, the merchandise of a working harbour. Two of them you would walk past as houses today; one you cannot miss. Together they are the edge where Laugharne met the sea, still standing on the sands.

The record: Cadw listed buildings, the Strand group below Gosport House: The Strand (Cadw 9666, Grade II), Strand House (Cadw 9667, Grade II) and Ball Court (Cadw 9668, Grade II). The listings record the granary and malthouse origins, Strand House's former-warehouse phase, and Ball Court as a former warehouse "dating from the period when Laugharne was a commercial port"; Ball Court is dated by its absence from the 1834 survey map and its presence on the 1842 tithe map.

The women who came in from the sands

When the sea trade faded, the town lived off the sands — the cockle-women of Gosport, walking miles out and back with their catch.

The town's historian, Mary Curtis, named the quarter without ceremony: "Gosport, where the cockle people dwell." And then she gave us the fullest picture we have of the trade as a living scene, and it is worth hearing nearly whole:

"It is a busy scene, one fit for an artist, when the women come in from the sands with their bags of cockles; perhaps they have walked miles. They return as they went, in groups dressed in their worst, with hats of all sizes and shapes … their skirts tucked up in all forms … wooden shoes; some with baskets, others with tin pans on their heads full of cockles, which they poise admirably with their arms akimbo … Six or ten women will come in with six or more poor donkeys staggering under their loads … On Sundays these women come out like butterflies, dressed in all their finery."

There is a hard reason the cockles mattered so much, and Curtis names it too. In 1861 a new law took away the old liberty of fishing for salmon and sewin — everyone now needed a licence — and the fish that had filled the poor man's table grew too dear to keep. So the town turned to what the sands would still give for free: cockles and flat fish became the mainstay of the Laugharne poor. Necessity walked those women out across the estuary.

The tide even kept the trade in its own names — the point below the New Walk is Cockshelly, the anchorage Bach Point — and the last named gatherer the record holds, Mrs Mary Phillips of Gosport Street in 1895, carries the scene on into the twentieth century. The quay had silted, the master mariners had sailed away to Cardiff and Milford, the Elizabethan creek's ships were long gone — but the women of Gosport still walked out to the sands and came back with the town's supper, and did it within living memory. This is the human end of the working port: not a cargo or a customs book, but a butterfly-Sunday and a tin pan full of cockles, poised.

The record: Mary Curtis, The Antiquities of Laugharne, Pendine, and their Neighbourhood (1880): Gosport as the cockle quarter, the cockle-women coming in from the sands, cockles as the mainstay of the poor, and the effect of the 1861 fishing-licence law; Mrs Mary Phillips, cockle-gatherer of Gosport Street (Kelly's Directory, 1895).

The town that traded on a Friday

Every Friday for perhaps six hundred years, the port turned into a market town on the open ground beneath the Town Hall.

The plainest snapshot is Samuel Lewis's, in 1833: the Friday market "abundantly supplied with corn and with provisions of all kinds," and two fairs a year, on the 6th of May and the 28th of September. That market was the chartered town's own right — the Corporation's bailiff was "crier and keeper of the market-place," appointed each Michaelmas, and the "tolls of corn" were the Corporation's property. Governing the town and holding its market were the same thing.

But here is the twist the town must always keep straight. The market franchise was not the borough charter at all. In 1697 a writ went out and the Crown granted a market and two fairs not to the town, but to a private gentleman — Thomas Powell of Broadway — and his heirs. That is a separate grant, three or four centuries younger than the town's own late-thirteenth-century charter, and the two must never be blurred into one. Curiously, the Crown's grant named a Tuesday market — and Laugharne simply ignored it, going on trading on the old Friday it had kept, so tradition held, since the days of the de Brians. The fairs multiplied too, swelling to four days by 1844 before shrinking back to the spring-and-autumn pair. The 6th of May was the one date that never moved.

And then two human details, remembered by Curtis from living memory. First the trade itself: "Every Friday there was a market held under the Town Hall" — meat, butter, eggs and poultry, for there were no butchers' shops then — while the corn was "sold to the different storehouses, and were then regularly shipped for Bristol." Second, the toll, taken the old way: two women, Molly Richard and Sally Lewis, stood by the Mariner's corner and the storehouse on the Grist, each with a wooden dish, and from every sack a dish of grain was owed — half to the Portreeve, half to the women who gathered it. By Curtis's own day it had all gone quiet: "No market is held here now," she wrote, the Friday meat-market given up, the great fair reduced to a single cake-and-sweets stall by the Town Hall that the town still called Becker's Fair, after the late Rebecca Evans. A town that had traded on a Friday for six centuries had stopped — and someone was still selling sweets on the spot where the fair had stood.

The record: Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of Wales (1833): the Friday market and the 6 May / 28 September fairs; Pigot & Co.'s South Wales Directory (1844): the fair calendar; Mary Curtis, Antiquities of Laugharne (1880): the market as a Corporation right and its decline; the 1697 Crown market-and-fairs grant to Thomas Powell of Broadway — a market franchise distinct from the borough charter.

The sloop that carried a Portreeve's name

A Laugharne sloop of 1811 named the William Skyrme, launched the year Skyrme of Island House wed — a coincidence, not a love story.

She is real, and you can find her at source — though she hides. In the 1820 Lloyd's Register, the sailors' "Red Book," the printer broke her name across a line as "William Sky- / me," so anyone searching for "Skyrme" sails straight past her. Read her columns and there she is: a sloop, master Richards, class A 1, working the London coasting trade, surveyed 1818, her tonnage matching the sixty-five tons the family history remembers. The register gives her build only as the vague "Wales, 1810" — but an advertisement in The Cambrian of October 1821 pins it exactly: Laugharne, 1811. A hull raised on the town's own beach.

Then trace her, year by year, and you get the daily texture of a small port's whole working life. She was a Bristol-Channel and Irish-Sea coaster, never a deep-water ship — Carmarthen, Milford, Llanelly her home run, with regular calls at Dublin, Limerick and Cork. She carried tin-plate out of Carmarthen for London, produce home from Ireland, iron and coal out of South Wales, and made her first foreign voyages, to Le Havre and Rouen, only in 1843 and 1844, right at the end. Somewhere around 1840 she was rebuilt from sloop to schooner. And in early April 1844, after she sank and was refloated off Tralee, the register's margin that year says only one word: "MISSING." Her last known passage was Teignmouth to Glasgow, the 30th of September 1844. Thirty-odd years of coasting, and then the sea kept her.

Two corrections keep the tale honest. First, the Skyrmes did not own her. Her owners down the years were managing firms — Morris, Smith, Davis, Edwards — not the family. She was named for, never owned by, William Skyrme; any story of a "Skyrme fleet" is simply wrong. Second, the wedding romance is one teller's own "intriguing thought," not a fact — no register or newspaper even names Laugharne among her ports, so her home-town trade is inferred, not proven. What is firm is the man the ship points to: William Skyrme of Island House (1778–1823), Portreeve of Laugharne in 1801–2 and again in 1817, who married Mary Lewis on the 17th of May 1811 and whose will was proved in 1823 — the one hard document under the whole story. Widowed, Mary Lewis married again and stayed on at Island House. One name ties the sloop to the merchant family and to the house on the quay. And the ship herself is the plainest emblem of the working town there is: built on the Laugharne shore, named for one of its Portreeves, and worked to death carrying other people's cargoes round the coasts of two nations.

The record: Lloyd's Register of Shipping, 1820 (Shipowners' Register): the sloop William Skyrme, 65 tons, master Richards, in the London coasting trade, surveyed 1818, her name broken across a line as "William Sky-/me". The Cambrian, 20 October 1821: her build at Laugharne in 1811 (against the register's generic "Wales, 1810"). Will of William Skyrme of Island House, Portreeve of Laugharne 1801–2 and 1817, married Mary Lewis 17 May 1811 (The National Archives, PROB 11/1674/373, proved 1823). Later voyages, the c.1840 schooner rebuild and the 1844 "MISSING" entry: D. J. Skyrme, "The Sloop William Skyrme", Dyfed Family History Journal 13/7 (2019).