Free Insufficiently Welsh by Griff Rhys Jones

and swatchways I associate with Essex and a featureless English east coast shore. Gower’s reassuring hills were still there, behind my back, but, ahead, a shallow strand stretched away.
    We turned off the road and drove towards a big factory shed. Glyn was waiting for us with a wheezy laugh. He led me through his kingdom, into his offices to meet a welter of people, popping out of doors and shaking my hand, while he thrust a tin into the other. “This is what happens to our cockles,” he said.
    I looked at a flat sardine shape covered in Spanish. “We bring them ashore here, Griff, and we wash them down and then they get sent to Boston in Lincolnshire.”
    I was intrigued.
    â€œIt’s the main distribution and cleaning centre for the UK and most of the cockles that we collect get sent to Spain. Thirty million of these cans are exported every year.” Glyn had been down to Spain many times. “We can sit there in a restaurant the entire afternoon and the food and wine keep coming. But that’s what the Spanish like, you see. You know tapas. Well they love cockles as tapas. They have them on the bar, like we might have crisps.”
    We got into his Land Rover and drove back towards the village, turning left along a rough damp road.
    â€œYou’ve come at the right time, because the tide is out.”
    His team worked a piecework rate, way out on the sands. There was little to see as we drove out there. During World War Two several gun batteries were established to both the east and west of Penclawdd. Gun-barrels were calibrated and shells were fired across the salt marsh; it was that empty. We negotiated the gullies that ran across the bay, carrying Welsh rain out to the sea, digging deep, muddy culverts in the landscape. Suddenly we were rolling and yawing down a steep incline and into thick mud, changing gears and spraying and slipping sideways though black and grey gloop.
    â€œThis used to be the old road for donkey carts, you see,” Glyn went on. “My family have been digging cockles for centuries. A lot of it was done by the women in the old days.” The practice of cockle picking is very much the same as it was in the past, expect now the donkeys have been replaced by all-terrain vehicles.
    We were out of the mud and on to a relatively hard sand-mix, still pressing on, as if crossing a wet desert landscape and following barely discernible tracks left by other vehicles towards a few misty dots on the horizon. Cockle picking in Penclawdd dates back to Roman times.
    â€œWe take on different areas. There are places that we know.” He gave a wheezy cackle. “But we mark out areas and then we move on as we exhaust them.”
    It was a continual rotation process. The diggers got about six hours’ hard digging in before the tide came racing up the bay faster than a man could run, and now we could see them, a caravan encampment of pick-up trucks with bent figures, shovelling and scratching at the ground. There were men and women, wearing solid gumboots, well wrapped against the damp weather, and seemingly casually scattered over an acre or so.
    Tommy swung himself upwards from his bent position and greeted me. I was going to have a go. So he fixed me up with gloves and handed me my equipment: a sieve and a pronged hand rake, like a bent trident on a short handle. Glyn ushered me over to a patch of mud a few yards on. He leaned down to show me. “See there, that squirting, that’s them.” The water lay in shallow puddles and there were tiny jets shooting up from the surface. “They are only just below the top, so they can feed, so you don’t want to go too deep.”
    It was simple enough. I was aided by a tiny pump that worked from a car battery. It fed a hose leading from one of the deeper puddles. Water was used to keep the surface tractable. Each of the prongs on the scratching rake had a wide flat arrowhead. Glyn bent himself down from his