Qualla: Pendine Sands

Pendine Sands: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Dingley, CC BY-SA 3.0. At low tide the beach reveals itself like an unrolled scroll, seven miles of sand so firm and so flat that, in the right light, you can see the curve of the earth bending away toward Gilman Point. Motor Cycle magazine called Pendine 'the finest natural speedway imaginable,' and in the 1920s the men who hunted the land speed record agreed. They came here because the public roads of Britain had run out of room for their ambitions, and the broad shelf of Carmarthen Bay offered something no racetrack could match: a measured mile straight enough to swallow 170 miles per hour, with sand soft enough at the edges to forgive a mistake. Most of the time, anyway.

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Image: Andy Dingley | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pendine Sands: The Finest Natural Speedway

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thruxton, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pendine had been hosting motorcycle races since the early 1900s, and from 1922 the annual Welsh TT brought riders to the bay. By the middle of the decade, the beach had become something stranger: the temporary capital of an arms race fought in tenths of a mile per hour. Malcolm C...

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Image: Thruxton | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pendine Sands: Babs and the Last Run

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Dingley (scanner), Public domain. Parry-Thomas was an engineer first and a driver second, a Cambridge-trained inventor who had bought a derelict Higham Special from the estate of the late Count Louis Zborowski and rebuilt it himself. He renamed the car Babs. In April 1926 he drove her to 171.02 mph, the fastest a...

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Image: Andy Dingley (scanner) | Public domain

Pendine Sands: The Long Quiet

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. After Parry-Thomas died, Babs was buried in the dunes near where she had rolled, at his family's request. The sand kept her for forty-two years. In 1969 a Welsh engineering lecturer named Owen Wyn Owen, who had carried the story with him since boyhood, won permission to dig her u...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pendine Sands: Sand, Shells, and Live Ordnance

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Ministry of Defence acquired Pendine during the Second World War as a firing range, and they have never given it back. Signs along the dunes warn of unexploded munitions. Weekdays, part of the beach closes when the range is hot; you can sometimes hear the distant thud of test...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pendine Sands: What the Tide Knows

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Tomlinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk the beach at dawn, when the tide has just turned and the sand is still mirror-smooth, and Pendine is one of the quietest places on the Welsh coast. Gulls. A few dog walkers near the village. The faint outline of Worm's Head on the eastern horizon when visibility holds. It is...

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Image: Jeff Tomlinson | CC BY-SA 2.0