Dylan Thomas drank at Brown's Hotel most nights, often with his wife Caitlin, and gave out the hotel's phone number as his own. Brown's is still there on the main street, built in 1752 as a private house and turned into a hotel in the nineteenth century. It sells Penderyn single malts and Brecon Gin from the nearby Welsh Whisky Distillery, and its restaurant draws diners from some distance. For two years in the mid-2000s it was owned by Neil Morrissey, of Men Behaving Badly and Bob the Builder, who sold it in 2006.
Across the road is the New Three Mariners Inn, only yards from the castle. It does pub food and Sunday lunches, keeps a log-burning stove going, hangs work by local artists on walls full of sailing artefacts, and runs a weekly quiz. The two pubs have long had close connections, which in a town this size mostly means the same people walk between them.
Laugharne has about 1,100 residents, and the castle, the Boathouse and the two pubs carry most of the visitor economy. There isn't a butcher or a deli to point you to. What there is instead is the estuary of the River Taf, mudflats and tidal light, with the River Corran running directly beneath the castle. The town was originally called Abercorran — "mouth of the Corran" — before it settled on the name it has now.
The castle stands on a low cliff above the water. The Normans built it in 1116, the de Brian family rebuilt it in stone, and its curtain walls and two round towers survive from the late thirteenth century. Turner sketched it from the south-west in 1795. In its grounds is the summerhouse where Thomas and the novelist Richard Hughes wrote.
Thomas first came in 1934 and called Laugharne "the strangest town in Wales." He lived here on and off until his death in 1953, at the Boathouse set into a cliff on Cliff Road, bought for him by a patron for £3,000. He wrote much of his major work here, including "Under Milk Wood," whose fictional Llareggub owes something to the place. The Boathouse is now a museum with a tea room and terrace over the estuary; his writing shed is nearby.
The walk to do is Dylan's Birthday Walk, a couple of miles uphill to the shoulder of Sir John's Hill. Benches and signs along the way carry lines from his "Poem in October," each fixed at the spot he wrote it, and the views take in the Boathouse, the Gower, Caldey Island, Tenby and, on a clear day, north Devon. Herons wait on the tide below.
He and Caitlin are buried at St Martin's Church, a fourteenth-century parish church with old yew trees and a ninth-century Celtic cross-slab inside. The grave is marked by a plain white-painted wooden cross, his name on one side, hers on the other. She outlived him by about forty years.
Carmarthen station is half an hour away by the 222 bus, which runs every couple of hours; the town is reached by the A4066 off the A40 at St Clears. The Corporation, meanwhile, is still led by a Portreeve who wears a chain of golden cockleshells, one shell added for each term of office.