Qualla: Burry Port

Burry Port: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lewis, CC BY-SA 2.0. At twenty minutes to one on the afternoon of 18 June 1928, a Fokker tri-motor seaplane named Friendship dropped out of fog and cloud over the Loughor estuary in south Wales and came down on water none of its crew had ever seen before. Pilot Wilmer Stultz had been flying for nearly twenty-one hours. Co-pilot and mechanic Louis Gordon had spent much of that time wrestling with the engines. In the back, with no radio and not much to do, sat a 30-year-old Boston social worker named Amelia Earhart. She was the flight's commander but not its pilot. When the Friendship came ashore at Burry Port Harbour a few hours later - tide and refuelling and weather having all conspired against the original plan to fly on to Southampton - Earhart stepped onto Welsh soil as the first woman to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean by air. The whole world wanted to talk to her. She had not, by her own admission, done very much.

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Image: David Lewis | CC BY-SA 2.0

Burry Port: The Surprise Arrival

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew17899, CC BY-SA 4.0. Burry Port had no idea the Friendship was coming. The Fokker FVIIb 3m had taken off from Trepassey, Newfoundland, on the morning of 17 June, bound for Southampton. The crew had no working radio for most of the crossing. Visibility was poor over the Atlantic and got worse as the p...

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Image: Andrew17899 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burry Port: A Night at the Ashburnham

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hywel Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. The crew spent the night at the Ashburnham Hotel, a Burry Port landmark. The next morning Earhart sat up in bed surrounded by reporters - the press had arrived in numbers by then - and spoke to Alice Jones, the hotel's proprietor, in words that newspapers across Britain and Ameri...

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Image: Hywel Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0

Burry Port: The Near-Miss

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Hughes, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Friendship departed Burry Port Harbour around eleven the next morning, 19 June 1928, bound finally for Southampton. Among the spectators that morning was a quiet, white-haired man named Sir Arthur Whitten Brown - the same Whitten Brown who, with John Alcock, had completed the...

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Image: Alan Hughes | CC BY-SA 2.0

Burry Port: The Monument

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 8 August 1930, Sir Arthur Whitten Brown unveiled a monument to the Friendship landing on Stepney Road in Burry Port. It is a stone column surmounted by a weathervane shaped like the Fokker seaplane, with small water fountains at each corner of the base. The inscription reads: ...

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Image: Jaggery | CC BY-SA 2.0

Burry Port: Coal, Copper, and the Quiet Harbour

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rose and Trev Clough, CC BY-SA 2.0. Burry Port is a modern town by Welsh standards - early records as a settlement appear only around 1850. It grew up around docks built from 1819 onward to ship anthracite coal from the Gwendraeth Valley mines down to the sea. Pembrey New Harbour, opened in 1836, was renamed Burry ...

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Image: Rose and Trev Clough | CC BY-SA 2.0

Burry Port: The Men of Little Hatchets

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Puzzlement at wts wikivoyage aka. User:(WT-shared) Hypatia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before any of this - before the copper works, before the dock, before Amelia Earhart - Pembrey Burrows had a darker reputation. The sand dunes and shifting channels of the Burry estuary were a known hazard to shipping coming up the Bristol Channel, and many vessels ended their vo...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Puzzlement at wts wikivoyage aka. User:(WT-shared) Hypatia | CC BY-SA 4.0