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Literary Passion · Laugharne, Carmarthenshire

Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Laugharne

The cliff-side home of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, whose passionate, tempestuous, hard-drinking marriage was as famous as his verse; the writing shed overlooking the estuary is preserved as if he had just stepped out.

StatusDocumented history
Date1949–1953
The peopleDylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas (née Macnamara), Margaret Taylor
The siteThe Boathouse, Dylan's Walk, Laugharne (Carmarthenshire CC)
Coordinates51.77220, -4.45620 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Thomas lived at the Boathouse, on a cliff ledge above the Taf estuary at Laugharne, from 1949 to 1953, writing in a shed on the cliff above. Laugharne became Llareggub in Under Milk Wood — a name that reads backwards as "bugger all", a joke he planted deliberately and editors later fussed over. The play's bawdiness is glorious and unembarrassed: Polly Garter and her dead lovers, lecherous Mr Waldo, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and her two henpecked ghosts. His marriage to Caitlin Macnamara, met in 1936 and wed in 1937, was passionate, drunken and violent on both sides — "raw, red bleeding meat", she called it — and documented with unflinching honesty in her own memoirs, Leftover Life to Kill and Double Drink Story. He died in New York in 1953, aged thirty-nine; Caitlin outlived him by forty years and was buried beside him here. The Boathouse is run by Carmarthenshire County Council.

More stories at this spot

The five-pound shed

The writing shed at Laugharne — where Thomas worked amid balled-up drafts, pinned-up pictures and empty bottles — had begun life as a garage for a car, built onto its cliff ledge in the 1920s. It is one of literature's great small rooms, and it survives, preserved as he left it. From its window he watched the herons and the tide over the estuary that runs through the late poems like a pulse.

A widow's request, refused

Two years after Dylan's death, Caitlin wrote to the Home Office asking that his body be moved from what she called a "bleak extension" of Laugharne churchyard and reburied in the Boathouse garden, "facing the water that he loved and wrote about". She never paid the fee, and the plan lapsed. In the end she joined him where he already lay — the reunion happening on his terms, not hers, one last time.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Literary Passion5 Cwmdonkin Drive (Dylan Thomas's birthplace)Swansea, Swansea · Wales

The steep Uplands semi where Dylan Thomas wrote two-thirds of his poems in a bedroom the size of a confession box — the sensuous, rolling voice of 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' formed here before London, Caitlin and the Boathouse. Pair with Laugharne for the marriage.

Documented historyTragic RomanceTintagel Castle (Tristan & Iseult)Tintagel, Cornwall · England

The wave-battered headland bound by legend to Tristan and Iseult — the knight sent to fetch his king's bride, the love-potion drunk in error, the doomed passion that medieval Europe told and retold. Folklore, and labelled so; the drama of the place is entirely factual.

LegendBohemian & LibertinePortmeirion (Noël Coward writes Blithe Spirit)Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd · Wales

Clough Williams-Ellis's Italianate folly-village on a Welsh estuary — a place built purely for pleasure — where Noël Coward, taking rooms in 1941, wrote 'Blithe Spirit' in five days. The village's flamboyant unreality has drawn the theatrical, the artistic and the amorous ever since.

Documented history

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