Sun, Dunes, Mates & Surf. Chillout at Hillend Campsite, Gower

Before leaving our last site, a couple of round-the-world bikers popped over, picked us up and treated us to a slap-up meal at the Plough and Harrow in Murton, the best gastropub in Wales according to their website. How lucky are we?! We know these guys, having met Clare and Sam while in Southern Tunisia on the second year of our first long tour, back in the winter of 2013. They were off to Libya and then down through Africa on their motorbikes, on an adventure in a different league to ours. Tunisia was a serious stretch to us, but the equivalent of a weekend in Brighton for them.

These days they live in the Mumbles with their beloved pooches. At least they do when they’re not off reporting on Extreme E, knocking about with a knight of the realm who is mates with Ranulph Fiennes, setting up a magazine or a business or starring in Adventure Bike TV. They’re a cracking, energetic, inspirational couple and hilarious to boot. Clare’s self-confessed bonkers, her brain working at double the rate mine does, but with the odd unintended consequence. When they dropped us off at the site I pointed out a sign saying they sold dog ice cream in the shop, her synapses cracked and fizzed: “what, made from dog milk? no!?” We howled, a hilarious end to a great evening. Thanks guys, happy adventuring!

Onwards and acrossways, over the peninsular a few miles to Hillend (N51.594966, W4.289819). It turns out Hillend Campsite on Rhossili Bay used to be something of a free-for-all. A local chap Alan, parked alongside us in his self-converted campervan, told us it used to have a festival atmosphere, especially on summer weekends. A line of dunes separate the site’s cropped grass fields from the sea, which has a reputation as the best Welsh surfing outside Pembrokeshire. Hoards of surfers would descend on the place (and many still do to be fair), filling every spare inch, kicking off an outdoor party when they’d done with the waves. “You’d open your door in the morning and find a tent right next to you” Alan told us, “there was nowhere to stand!”

Our Welsh mate Jamie, who’s also been coming here for decades, told us a similar story “there was all sorts kicking off, blokes juggling fire, people playing guitars, a real relaxed atmosphere”. Those days are over it seems, or seriously curtailed at least. When we arrived at the site, after squeezing our way down the Gower’s narrow lanes (if you’re the driver of that Brakes Brothers lorry – thanks again for reversing!), a chap in a golf cart escorted us to the World’s Biggest Pitch, marked out on the grass with white lines like a mini tennis court. “Park at least 2m from the lines please”, and off he went, with us staring at this huge patch of land. The fields are all on a slight slope, so we shuffled about a bit, trying different angles with our ramps until we were completely flat, putting in a bit more effort than usual knowing we’d be here for four nights.

Since the pandemic the entire site’s segregated into these white-lined parcels, most not quite as huge as ours (we’ve been on aires with three other vans on land this big). A list of rules announces strictly no music, no fireworks, no evening driving, no excessive drinking, no touring caravans (we guess the latter is down to the entrance roads being too tight). Alan told us he saw it coming anyway, regardless of COVID. He told us disgruntled locals would arrange for spotter planes to photograph the site at busy times and then count how many tents/vans were in here, to prove the site was over its licensed capacity.

Over dinner, our biker friend, Sam had told us how house prices are crazy high around here. Lots of folks from London have second homes on The Gower (Ju just looked up a nice 3 bed house up the road with some land, just shy of £1m). Many of these same ‘locals’ are a tad posh, pronouncing the peninsular as ‘The Garr’. We’ve no idea whether that’s true (the spotter planes), but trying to get hundreds of cars down the single-track-in-places roads on a Friday evening must have been ‘interesting’. These days groups of disgruntled young-uns (which for me includes anyone under 30 these days) leave 1 star reviews on Google, complaining they weren’t allowed in, just for being young.

We booked our spot here online, £35 a night for the two of us without electric, not cheap but hey, the site’s in a cracking location and we feel we’ve our money’s worth with this Gibraltar-sized pitch. The fridge has reformed itself and started working again on gas, saving us another fiver on hook-up. (As well as parcelling the pitches up, a ton more electrical hook-up points were installed in 2020/21, so there were easily enough pitches for us to move if we had to). We’ve also brought the Jackery and SolarSage panels with us for a play, and after a (very) quick test, I reckon it’ll run the fridge on mains (via a hook-up cable plugged into its built-in inverter) for 6 to 8 hours, more with the sun shining. We know it stays frozen for 4 or 5 hours even if it loses all power (having forgotten to switch power sources in the past), so we’d be OK for maybe 12 hours even if the gas failed and we couldn’t get hook-up.

Apart from being so close to the dunes and the sea, we were attracted to the fact the site isn’t quite in the middle of nowhere. There’s an on-site café, Eddy’s, which it turns out is more of a restaurant, posh enough for folks to have their wedding receptions here, with matching prices. As you might imagine, we’ve not spent a great deal of time in there having blown it all on site fees (update: we couldn’t help ourselves and have just had some of their gourmet chips – very nice they were too). A site shop flogs pretty much anything and everything, easily enough to allow us to stay a few weeks if we wanted to.

A mile inland there’s the village of Llangennith with the (around here) famous King’s Head pub, where we enjoyed a shared, top-notch scampi and chips. From the pub’s beer terrace we looked over the old church and PJ’s Surf Shop, the view framed by the heights of Rhossili Down with its remains of a WW2 radar station. If you’ve a pooch (on the long list of ‘not allowed things’ at Hillend) or fancy shelling out half the nightly fee, there’s a Certified Site at Llangennith as long as your rig isn’t over 6m. A couple of miles along the beach there’s also Rhossili with its pubs and small shops. All in all, Hillend has a nicely remote feel, while being in striking distance of shops, restaurant and pubs, if you can/don’t mind driving or walking a few miles.

We arrived on a Friday morning with hardly anyone on the sprawling patchwork of fields. Come the evening we were sharing the site with an array of campervans (plenty of VW Transporters, quite a few self builds on other chassis), a few other ‘fridge freezers’ like us and some unfortunate souls trying to put tents up in the wind and spitting rain. By Saturday afternoon our field, designated for non-families, was packed. Sort of. With all the white lines and 2m rule, it filled up with what must be a tenth of the punters it used to take.

Maybe that’s why it ain’t cheap, and some local surfers are complaining they can’t even afford the car park the site owns down by the dunes. When I say it’s not cheap, it’s a steal compared with the town-sized gathering of mobile homes adjacent the camping fields. Ju looked ’em up and you’re looking at £1,600 a week to rent one, in May. Sheesh. Anyway, even full the site was silent and we kipped like kings, lulled by the gentle roar of waves.

Saturday and Sunday the sun flexed its muscles, a couple of early summer days, absolutely perfect. A couple of surf schools based at the car park were doing a good trade. Ju ran the beach and paths out to Worm Head, an island accessed along a rough, wet tidal causeway, rewarded with a couple of playful seals peering up through the clear water. Our mates Celia and Jamie drove over from their place north of Cardiff with their 9-year-old Jacob and we mucked about on the beach and the site’s playground, picnicking on our (did I mention) giant pitch, catching up and getting a bit sun burned. We’ve been really lucky these past few days with the company, the site and the weather, it’s been bob-on!

Where next? Dunno. West over to Pembrokeshire at some point tomorrow, but we’ve not yet decided where. It ain’t a bad life folks. Each time we’re on a popular site like this and it empties out on a Sunday afternoon we’re reminded just how lucky we are.