About Gower

Gower

Gower: Journal of the Gower Society is an English-language annual magazine containing articles, photographs and news relating to the archaeology, history, natural history and landscape of the Gower Peninsula in south-west Wales. It was established in 1948 and is published by the Gower Society, the charity founded the previous year to promote the understanding, enjoyment and preservation of the peninsula west of Swansea. The Society describes the journal as an encyclopaedia of all things Gower, and it has appeared virtually every year since the Society's inception.

Few British local journals can match its continuity. A run that began in the year after the Society's foundation now extends past seventy volumes, and the journal remains the principal published record of research into one of Britain's most celebrated landscapes.

The Gower Society

The Gower Society was founded in 1947 in Swansea. It grew out of a group of researchers formerly known as the Gowermen, who were converted into a public society at a meeting recorded in the Society's first minute book. Ernest Morgan, who had just retired after a long career as the borough architect of Swansea, was elected the first chairman, and the inauguration of the Society was announced at a lecture on Gower held at the Royal Institution of South Wales, now Swansea Museum, on 7 January 1948. The Society's first trip had taken place days earlier, on New Year's Day, to Llanrhidian, for the purpose of locating certain stones.

The Society is a registered charity whose stated purpose is to promote the understanding and protection of the local landscape of Swansea and Gower, under an informal motto of guarding Gower for all its worth. It arranges lectures, visits and other events, scrutinises planning applications affecting the peninsula, and publishes its journal, Gower. Forging close links with communities across Gower is a central part of its work, and it arranges over fifty events a year, including walks and talks, alongside educational programmes, projects and grants.

The peninsula the journal serves

The Gower Peninsula, projecting west from Swansea into the Bristol Channel, is the landscape the journal exists to document. In 1956 Gower became the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty designated in the United Kingdom, after the Society campaigned for its protection. The Society's aims, as restated at its seventy-fifth anniversary, are to protect the heritage of Gower, its landscape and its historical and built environment, to protect and enhance its diverse wildlife habitats, and to safeguard its rights of way and open spaces, ensuring its common land is not encroached upon.

That breadth of concern, landscape, wildlife, history and access, is exactly the breadth of the journal's contents, which is why Gower functions as far more than a members' newsletter.

Founding and publication pattern

The journal was established in 1948, in the Society's first full year, and has been published virtually every year since. It is an annual publication, published in October; members collect a copy on Publication Night or have one posted to them soon after. Early editions are becoming rare, and the Society keeps a list of members waiting for a chance to purchase a copy of a particular year to complete their collection.

The volumes are numbered in sequence from volume 1 of 1948. An index compiled by Peter Douglas-Jones covers volumes 1 to 72, spanning 1948 to 2021, and a further written index by Gerald Gabb is also available through the Society, a sign of how seriously the journal's accumulated contents are taken by researchers.

Contents: archaeology, history and natural history

Each issue of Gower contains articles, photographs and news on the archaeology, history, natural history and landscape of the peninsula. The chronological index to the first seventy-two volumes shows the range in detail: studies of Norman Gower and its lords, of Swansea's early charters, of medieval churches and effigies, of deer parks and a medieval fish trap on the beach at Whitford, and of episodes such as the 1287 revolt of Rhys ap Maredudd and Owain Glyndwr's threat to Swansea in 1402.

Later centuries are equally well covered. The index records articles on the Rebecca Riots in Gower, on twelve ships wrecked near Whiteford in 1868, on yellow fever and cholera in Swansea in the 1860s, on Swansea races at Crymlyn, on lead mining at Brandy Cove, on copper and metal works at Llangyfelach and Penclawdd, and on memories of Gower life in the 1880s, alongside studies of the peninsula's churches, bells, tokens and place-names. Articles for consideration are invited by the Society and are sent to the journal's editorial address, with copyright-free illustrations, particularly in colour, welcomed.

The churches of Gower

The parish churches of the peninsula form one of the journal's recurring specialisms. Its pages have carried studies such as M. Gibbs's articles on the quiet churches of Pennard, Cheriton and Penmaen in volume XVIII (1967) and on Llandewi in volume XXII (1971), Peter Harrison on the tower churches of Gower and G. C. Gregor on John Myles, described as Gower's Pilgrim Father, both in volume XLVI (1995), and G. R. Orrin's work on the church bells of Gower, their inscriptions and founders, in 1988. The Society has drawn on this accumulated scholarship in its own book-length publications, including The Churches and Chapels of Gower (2007).

Digitisation and access

The magazine has been digitised by the Welsh Journals Online project at the National Library of Wales. Readers can access the journals up to volume 56, covering the run to 2005, on the Welsh Journals website, free of charge, which has opened the journal's first six decades to researchers far beyond the Society's membership. Library holdings elsewhere record the same long run: the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology library catalogue, for example, lists Gower from volume 1 of 1948 through volume 56 of 2005 in its holdings.

For current issues, the Society's own website remains the route in: membership brings the annual volume each October, and the Society maintains its waiting list for the scarcer early editions.

The journal within the Society's work

Gower is the publishing arm of a wider programme. The Society spends substantial sums annually, reported at up to £100,000, on protecting Gower through educational programmes, projects and grants, and runs a young people's group, the Gower Society Youth Action group. Its volunteers review planning applications and discuss planning policy frameworks locally and nationally for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, work that has grown into a large part of the Society's activity. The journal records the knowledge base on which that protective work rests: the surveys, histories and natural history observations published in its pages are the evidence the Society can deploy when the peninsula is threatened.

Standing and legacy

The Society marked seventy-five years of safeguarding the United Kingdom's first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 2022, and its journal has been part of that safeguarding from the start. Described by its publisher as a must for devotees of Gower, with some readers said to save its contents for a Christmas Day read, Gower occupies a distinctive place in Welsh periodical publishing: an annual, society-published journal, produced in Swansea for the peninsula to its west, that has documented one small landscape so thoroughly, for so long, that its back run amounts to a local encyclopaedia. Its continuation, volume by volume each October, is the measure of the Society's founding purpose, still being carried out in print.