IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Pennant Road, LLANELLI, SA14 8ES

The Gower Peninsula is on the horizon across the Loughor Estuary.

Situated on the eastern edge of Swiss Valley, this sprawling housing estate built in the 1960's and 1970's used to have a huge number of children playing in its roads. Now there are OAP's. Their families grown up and gone but most of the original occupants stayed. A good place to grow up.

Passage to the 'horses field' is now confined to the straight and narrow. No meandering allowed!

A fantastic place to grow up in the 1960's and 1970's. An area full of young families with children. There was very little traffic back then, and certainly no cars parked on the road. It was safe to cycle and rollerskate to our hearts content!

Sheltering from the sun.

As distinguished by us as children from the surrounding fields as this one ALWAYS had horses. The grey building in the middle distance is Bryngwyn Comprehensive School, opened early in 1977 to house us Grammar School girls after our old school had burned down in an arson attack some time before. We called it home for a year before returning to our old school which was soon to become Coedcae Comprehensive.

It's easier going down than up! There are superb views overland to Glamorgan.

Ifan Richards was already an old man when I first met him as a small child. He lived like a hermit in a corrugated iron shack that was soon swallowed up by the new housing estate. Us children knew him well but our parents, confined to their neat new patches knew him just a little. In this day and age people would be horrified to learn that their children would visit an old man who lived by himself in reduced circumstances, but Ifan was a lovely, gentle old man who bothered no-one. He lived in one room with a wood burning stove and a ready supply of firewood and grew all his own vegetables in a patch about 25'x 15'. There were always chickens running around. He gave me a tortoise one day, but Mum made me take her back. She could still be alive! Ifan died peacefully in a home after an attack of appendicitis in the late 1960's. I sometimes think of him and wish I'd known more about him and his past and how he ended up where he did. According to the older residents of Llethri Road, there were other men living in similar circumstances, some with better facilities, some with less. On a recent family visit I was so surprised to see that there were still remains of his home and that his garden hadn't been assimilated into those that surrounded him. Brought quite a tear to my eyes!

The views are lovely. Worm's Head on the end of the Gower Peninsula is across the Loughor Estuary.