The Quay

Stand in the garden of Island House at low tide and you are standing on a waterfront. The house sits at the edge of the old town of Laugharne, on the gravelly ground where the little Coran stream once met the tide, just outside the medieval walls and in the shadow of the castle. For centuries this was not a garden at all but a working edge of the sea — a place where the estuary reached in, and where boats could come alongside.

That is no longer a guess. Between the 2020 season and the recent digs — commissioned by Island House Restoration Ltd and supervised by Ken Murphy for Heneb, the Trust for Welsh Archaeology (formerly the Dyfed Archaeological Trust) — the trenches beside the house gave up the waterfront itself. The archaeologists found a stone quay first built in the twelfth or thirteenth century, set on a tidal inlet outside the town walls; as that inlet silted, later quays were built further out, so the ground reads as a sequence of shorelines retreating from the house across the medieval centuries. This is the find that carries a genuine national first: the first medieval quay to be archaeologically excavated in Wales.

The quay did not stand alone. The same ground held a large, high-status medieval hall house — a hall open to its roof, with a central fireplace and the smoke finding its way out high above. In the 2020 season the diggers traced a watercourse that the town and castle had used as a midden from the twelfth century, its layers left undisturbed. And among the finds came the imported pottery — the clearest proof of reach. Ceramics that began life in Bristol, on the French coast, and further south still speak of a household plugged into long-distance trade.

Here honesty earns the story its weight. That pottery tells us where goods came from, not how they travelled. The evidence points to continental wares reaching this creek largely through Bristol — the great English entrepôt just across the water — with, at most, a small direct run to France and no sign of ships sailing in from Iberia. The everyday cargoes of such a Taf-estuary creek were the plain ones: grain, oats, coal and stone. Set beside the Georgian house that later served the marine trade under the Skyrme chandlers, the picture holds at both ends — a medieval trading quay, and centuries on a marine-supply house on the same plot. One waterfront, two ages.

Solid, and publishable as fact: the excavated quay, the hall house, the stratified midden and the imported pottery — all from the excavator's own record.

Genuinely contested: the scale. To call this a busy port, or the principal quay of the Taf, goes beyond the evidence — a reading questioned in recent work (Brewer, 2023), and complicated by at least two other named landings on the same estuary, the “Old Wharf” by the ferry and Fern Hill’s “Old Quay.” The discovery is real; its primacy in traffic is not settled.

And kept clearly as tradition, not fact: the old tale that ships from Virginia once landed tobacco here — a single, self-hedged memory recorded by Mary Curtis in 1880 — along with the lore of the sea-steps and the lost bridges.

A note on the house’s own timbers: a roof beam has been dated by dendrochronology to 1437, but that is an earlier phase, not the building’s birthday — the standing front range has been re-dated to the 1650s–70s by RCAHMW’s isotopic work. The formal excavation report and finds catalogue are still to be published; when they come, this account should be read against them.