Almost anywhere you go in Cardigan Bay – that bite out of West Wales which runs a hundred miles along the Irish Sea – the spirit of Dylan Thomas seems to go with you. The Swansea-born poet may only have lived in Cardiganshire intermittently, fleeing the bohemian bedlam of Fitzrovia during the second world war, but the time he spent there produced some of his greatest poems – among them ‘The Conversation of Prayer’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, and the beginnings of ‘Fern Hill’ – his ringing, singing recollection of a lost and longed-for childhood.

‘Much of Thomas’s real work was done on high ground, looking down on things,’ wrote biographer Paul Ferris, ‘usually the sea, usually in Wales,’ and Thomas’s wife Caitlin agreed. He wrote here, she said, ‘with a

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