Posted in Blog, Coastal Tales News Item on Oct 13, 2025.
Authors: Sadhbh Horan and Cordula Scherer, Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, Sept 2025.
In June 2025, our first in-person workshop with the international team of Coastal TALES took place. Having spent the first few days of the meeting in my local Dublin, blessed with good weather and unusually high temperatures, the team were eager to begin the Welsh leg of the agenda.
I, along with the other members of the greater Coastal TALES teams from Ireland, Wales and Alaska began to make our way west along the scenic Welsh coast to meet the societal partners of our Welsh members.
View of the Welsh coast from St. Non. Photo Taken by Cordula Scherer
A cockle woman from Penclawwd
A packed and exciting program awaited us over the next couple of days and after an uneventful, pleasant evening with dinner and an early night on arrival day, we were ready for an early start the next morning. With eight of us in the minibus and the craic already mighty, we picked up the delightful Liz, a cockle woman from Penclawdd, and within a few moments, we knew we were in for a real treat. Liz is a societal partner of the Welsh contingent, a colourful storyteller and a supplier of delicious Welsh cakes. On the road to another societal partner of the Welsh team a couple of hours north, Liz kept us wonderfully entertained with her own fascinating story, marrying into a family of cockle pickers (though unbeknownst to her at the time), their first attempts at cooking laverbread and the booming business that herself and her beloved son, Spencer run to this day from Swansea market.
Shellfish such as cockles have been gathered along the south Wales coast for centuries. Though strenuous and back-breaking work, cockle picking was done exclusively by women up until recent times, Liz explained, with men only joining the profession in the last 30 or so years. Cockles were once popular in Dublin, too, but have disappeared almost completely from the Irish diet and most cockles that are farmed in Ireland today are shipped abroad.
The Coastal TALES team at St. David’s Pier, Wales. Photo taken by Cordula Scherer.
The Dear Sea
Our next stop was the scenic village of St. Davids for our team's maiden voyage. There, we were met with two lovely members of Câr-y-Môr, Owen and Fergus, to talk more about Wales’ first regenerative ocean farm.
Regenerative ocean farming is a form of aquaculture that sets out to produce food, whilst also enhancing the marine environment and local communities. Key elements of this include avoiding monocultures to mimic nature and increase resilience, and producing food without using harmful chemicals like fertiliser, maximizing the positive environmental impact of the farm.
After a short boat ride into the stretch of sea between Ramsey Island and the mainland, our skipper Owen began to tell us about their Community Benefit Society while also working to pull some of their products from beneath the waves. After a few moments, we got our first look at the variety of seaweed being grown by Câr-y-Môr. Owen explained that they had perfect conditions for growing and harvesting seaweed at St. David, the ocean currents being strong enough to prevent sediments from building up on the fronds.
Once returned to dry land, we hopped back on our bus and headed to Câr-y-Môr’s base, just down the road from the harbour. A warm greenhouse greeted us in the entrance and there we could see all kinds of seaweed that was dried and kept in large bags for use as bio-stimulants and fertilisers. Our guide Fergus, explained to us that during the harvesting season, the long greenhouse was full of hanging seaweed and temperatures could be stifling. He also led us around the farm, explaining how the community worked and why he chose to work here for little money and hard work. It was a meaningful, fulfilling job he said, where he could make a difference, live sustainably, educate and be educated.
After a strengthening and most appreciated lunch at the tranquil St Non’s and a wee dander around the holy place (assumed to be St David’s birthplace) we were ready for the journey to our final destination.
Carmarthen Coraclers
Our final stop of the day brought us to Carmarthen Coracle Museum where our fisherman friend Andrew finally got to shine. Though stoic throughout our trip in Dublin, Andrew definitely had a lot to say when it came to his river, the Tywi.
He and museum curator Malcolm Rees gave us a real insight into the history of coracle fishing in Wales; from what nets were used to what was caught. Although these days, fiberglass coracles are preferred to those made from animal hides due to changes in river depth, coracle fishing remains mostly unchanged since the Bronze age and the fishermen themselves know more about their river than anybody else alive today.
Two traditional animal hide coracles in Carmarthen Coracle Museum. Photo taken by Cordula Scherer.
These days the coraclers are facing difficulties from all sides. Between prejudices from other fishermen, the number of coracle licenses in Wales declining, and the fishermen themselves finding it difficult to recruit young people as apprentices in a dying trade, the fate of coracle fishing in Wales is not bright.
Braiding our stories
Though I think everybody in the Coastal TALES team was somewhat unclear in how our individual projects overlapped before this in-person workshop, our time together highlighted the issues that are woven into each of our societal partners' daily lives.
Continuing pressures from national politics, losing licenses for traditional practices and misguided perspectives on these practices have threatened these traditional ways of life to the point of extinction.
Our long discussions with Liz and Andrew while travelling through the Welsh countryside and previous talks with David Lawlor in Dublin, highlight the need for space for place-based knowledge in climate politics. Nobody knows the specific environment of a place better than somebody who has lived and worked in that space their entire life, and though it may be easier to create, the “one-size-fits-all" method of climate and environmental law is failing to protect the exact thing it has set out to protect and our planet is all the worse for it. Therefore, projects like Coastal TALES, realised through Belmont and UNESCO MOST Bridges, are increasingly important, as they capture and safeguard local knowledge and people’s stories to strengthen resilient coastal communities.
