Spell it backwards. That was Dylan Thomas's joke when he named the village in Under Milk Wood - Llareggub - a small piece of profanity disguised in Welsh-shaped letters and hidden in plain sight for decades. He had to be looking at somewhere when he wrote it, and the place he was looking at most often, the place where he wrote the first half of the play and gathered the characters who fill it, was New Quay. The town sits in tiers of pastel houses climbing the slope above a small stone harbour, painted in pinks and creams and pale blues that catch the afternoon light the way the watercolours of seaside guidebooks always promise but rarely deliver.
In 1907 a local newspaper made a boast that turned out to be true: New Quay had more retired sea captains living in it than any other town of its size in Wales. By the 1840s the place had three shipyards turning out smacks and schooners and ocean-going vessels bound for Australia and the Americas. Half a dozen blacksmith shops, three rope-works, three sail makers, a foundry - the harbour roared with the trade of building ships, and the men of the town went away in them. The 1939 War Register recorded fifty-eight sailors living in New Quay, of whom thirty were master mariners. The little harbour, walled by a £4,700 stone pier built under the New Quay Harbour Act of 1834, was busier in 1850 than it has been at any time since.
Dylan and Caitlin Thomas moved into a cliff-top bungalow called Majoda on 4 September 1944. The place was made of wood and asbestos, had no electricity, no gas, no running water, and the lavatory was outside. They stayed ten months, through one of the coldest Cardiganshire winters on record. Caitlin called it cheaply primitive. Dylan called it, in a letter, 'in a really wonderful bit of the bay, with a beach of its own. Terrific.' His first biographer would later describe these ten months as a second flowering - the most fertile period of Thomas's adult life. The Majoda poems, including the beginning of Fern Hill, made up nearly half of Deaths and Entrances, published the year after he left. He wrote four film scripts here. He wrote Quite Early One Morning, a radio piece about walking around New Quay that scholars now call a storehouse of phrases and rhythms he would later strip-mine for Under Milk Wood.
Walk down Church Street and you walk past the addresses of half the people in the play. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard is the surnames of two real Church Street women - Mrs Ogmore Davies and Mrs Pritchard-Jones - combined. Willy Nilly the postman, who opens letters and spreads the news, was Jack Lloyd Evans, the actual New Quay postman who also served as Town Crier. Thomas himself wrote in a worksheet: 'Nobody minds him opening the letters and acting as kind of town-crier. How else could they know the news?' Tom-Fred the donkeyman was Dai Fred Davies, who worked the fishing vessel Alpha out of New Quay harbour. Even one of the names of the people of Cockle Street - Cherry Jones - is the name of a real New Quay resident Thomas knew. Jack Patrick Evans, landlord of the Black Lion, watched the poet 'always with a pad on his knees, making notes of any local characters who came in.' The pub still stands. The pad sits in the National Library of Wales.
Today New Quay's harbour is busy with a different kind of trade. Boats run out into Cardigan Bay to find the resident bottlenose dolphins - the largest such pod in the UK, more than 300 strong, drawn by the food-rich currents that sweep along this coast. From the Ceredigion Coast Path, which threads north toward Aberaeron and south toward Llangrannog, you can watch them surface and roll. The Cardigan Bay Regatta has been held in New Quay nearly every August since the 1870s. The Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre interprets the bay's ecology in a small building near the pier. The lifeboat station, founded in 1864, still answers the maroons. About 1,045 people lived in New Quay at the 2021 census. The town is small. The names on its streets remain mostly unchanged. If you arrived knowing nothing, and walked from the harbour up Towyn Road and asked at the Black Lion who Cherry Owen was, you would still get an answer.
New Quay is at 52.21 degrees north, 4.36 degrees west, on the Ceredigion coast of mid-Wales, about 20 miles south-southwest of Aberystwyth. From the air, look for the J-shaped stone harbour and the bright tiers of pastel houses climbing the southwest-facing slope of the bay. Cruise altitude 2,000 to 3,000 feet AGL gives stunning views of the bay arc and, in calm conditions, occasional glimpses of the resident bottlenose dolphin pod. Nearest airports: Aberporth (EGFA) 10 nm south, Haverfordwest (EGFE) 50 nm south, Caernarfon (EGCK) 60 nm north. Note: the MoD Aberporth Range Danger Area covers approximately 6,500 square kilometres of Cardigan Bay from sea level to unlimited - check NOTAMs before transiting.