91Èȱ¬

Michael Portillo travels the breathtaking rural coastline of Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire in south Wales.

From Carmarthen Bay, he tracks up the estuary and River Towy to the historic town of Carmarthen and Middleton Hall, home of Wales’s National Botanic Garden. Michael is on the trail of the quarter of a million honeybees who live in the bee garden, where the master beekeeper shows Michael their hives. Michael helps to collect honey from a frame and hears how researchers are tracking which of the estate’s 5,000 flowering plants the bees like best.

Whitland is Michael’s next stop, for Pendine Sands, where he teams up with an expert forager to comb the rock pools for tasty morsels such as seaweed, cockles, mussels, periwinkles and prawns and cooks them up for a beachfront banquet.

In the picture-postcard harbour town of Tenby, Michael tracks down a Welsh icon – the lovespoon. Michael learns from an expert how these pieces are carved from a single piece of wood and does his best with a chisel on a railway sleeper.

Pushing west from Tenby, Michael reaches Pembroke and its magnificent Norman castle. Here, he discovers the origins of the Welsh flag and the beginning of one of Britain’s greatest royal dynasties – the Tudors. Henry VII was born at this castle in 1457.