COCKLING – A 19^th CENTURY INDUSTRY IN SOUTH WALES

Visiting the ruins of Llanstephan Castle in 1803, John Evans, a topographical writer and early Welsh tourist, describes the cockling industry taking place there at low tide. “At high water the sea beats violently against the rock on which the castle stands; but at ebb it retires several miles out, exhibiting the bar, and a long tract of shifting sands, which render the entrance both difficult and dangerous. The tide was now out, and numerous cocklers were busily engaged in their uncomfortable and ill-paid employment. These are poor females, wives and daughters of fishermen and others, that come here for the purpose of taking cockles….These fish bury themselves in the sands and are discovered by a small bubbling, occasioned by their breathing, upon which their pursuers immediately scratch them up, put them in sacks, and carry them to the boats, which ply for this purpose between this place and Carmarthen during high tides, at the small fare of  2d.each person. After thus toiling, and the spoil brought home, they obtain sometimes 6d. per bushel”.¹

Talking about the range of employments of women in Wales Wirt Sikes, an American journalist and writer, describes in his 1882 publication what he called the cockle-wives in Penclawdd, often young girls gathering countless tons of cockles which were dispatched by rail to all parts of England: “Women alone do this work; men are absent from the scene, and spectators are not wanted. But it is a unique spectacle when the sandbank is lined with the cockle-wives, bent over with their heads near the ground and their bright hued drapery flying in the fresh ocean breeze, scraping for cockles. The tide here recedes for as much as a mile, sometimes farther, leaving exposed acres upon acres of sand in which the cockles are embedded……the searcher for cockles finds the sand dotted with thousands of little holes about as large as if pierced with knitting needles; the cockle is there, embedded a couple of inches below the surface. The cockle-wife is armed with a scraper made from an old reaping hook, and a deft Penclawdd lassie will pick up the cockles as fast as a farmer can dig potatoes. Some of the women have little carts or pannier laden donkeys, but the majority bear the baskets on their heads. They can earn in good times three of four shillings a day.²

The two 19^th century accounts cited above are fascinating observations by two early visitors to Wales who came across in their travels an activity which goes back to Roman times and by the 19th century was a cockles and mussels industry involving hundreds of women in Carmarthen Bay and the Burry Estuary. Cockles were a free source of protein for many people and available in shallow sandy or muddy waters along the coastline. The white or brown shell is ribbed in two parts called valves which contain the soft body.

Data from 1910 estimate that at Penclawdd there were 250 cockle gatherers, 150 in the Ferryside and Llansaint district, 50 at Laugharne, 12 at Llanstephan and 50 at St. Ishmael.³ Also in the Burry inlet women from Crofty and Llanmorlais were involved in cockle gathering and were joined by women from Gowerton and Loughor. The cockle gatherers were mainly women but men could be seen also gathering during times of local unemployment. It did give women some economic independence although they may have been supporting injured or unemployed husbands or were widows raising children on their own.

Into the 20^th century the industry declined for a number of reasons including pollution from industry; dense clumps of spartina, an invasive grass in coastal salt marshes; poor spatfall (surfaces where the larvae settle); hydrographic changes in the River Loughor; increase in the population of the mollusc-eating oyster-catchers; over-fishing.

Cockle gatherers faced long and tiresome days.⁴At first donkeys would have been used for transporting the cockles from the beach which would have limited the amount gathered to 2 or 3 hundredweight for each donkey. The hoofs of the donkey were light and did little damage to the beds, but gradually the donkey was replaced by horse drawn rubber-tyred flat carts that could carry a larger amount of cockles. Starting from their homes often before dawn broke the women might walk a couple of miles across a windswept salt marsh towards the sands, sometimes in foggy weather and avoiding the pills or streams that flowed across the beach.

Cockle picking was done by hand: a small knife (a scrap) with a curved blade about 6 inches long was used to break the surface of the sand and exposed the cockle bed. A hand rake (a cram) drew the cockles together into heaps which were placed into a sieve or riddle which had a diameter of about 18 inches with a mesh of three quarters of an inch. The sieve is shaken to allow all the undersized cockles to fall through. Most of what would be needed to gather the cockles would be locally made with the crams made by blacksmiths and the baskets for carrying the cockles and for washing them would be produced by village craftsman. The sacks used for carrying the cockles would be obtained from local farmers.

The next stage was to wash the shellfish in a pill or pool near the beach and place them in sacks, sewn up to avoid spilling the cockles, slung over the donkey’s back. Procedures varied but most of the cockles were cooked and shelled ready for the market. They were boiled perhaps in a pan over a coal fire at the bottom of a garden or at numerous fireplaces with large iron or tin cauldrons along the foreshore. The boiled cockles were riddled over a table allowing the soft parts to pass through a sieve while the shells remain behind. Having been washed again in a stream or spring and heavily salted they are wrapped in white cloths, placed in baskets or tubs and sold in the village or taken to market. The railway, which came to Penclawdd in 1867, was sometimes knick-named the cockle line and eventually saved long, tiring walks.

The cockle woman lived a hard life, having to spend many hours on the beach in all weathers bending over a cockle bed. It was also dangerous work with tides always a threat. It was important to wear appropriate clothing, although many were poor and inadequately dressed. It might include an elastic edged cap covered with a shawl tied around the neck. A sack apron was drawn between the legs and pinned at the back; woollen cardigan, flannel shirts, petticoats and skirt with knee boots. One writer in 1862 has a slightly frivolous description of what he experienced on the north Gower coast: “It is amusing to witness the cockle women here, a hardy race, who earn a subsistence by gathering cockles on the shore. We have often heard their merry songs as they returned from their labours. They fearlessly wade through the water with their bedgowns kertled to the waist, barefooted and barelegged, rose cheeked and merry hearted they seem, and little do they care for the prying gaze of the stranger, who I advise not to tease them, or he may regret it, for they will certainly play a joke with him”. ⁵

NOTES

1. Evans, John, Letters written during a tour through South Wales, in the year 1803, and at other times, London, 1804, (Kindle Version)
2. Sikes, Wirt, Rambles and Studies in Old South Wales,London, 1881, Sampson Low, Marsten, Searle and Rivington, pp. 242-244.
3. Quoted in: J. Geraint Jenkins, Cockles and Mussels – Aspects of shell-fish gathering in Wales, National Museum of Wales, 1984, p.5. The quote was from a Government report written by H.L. Bulstrode containing 32 Ordnance Survey Maps of the coastal sources of cockles and mussels from Brittany to Berwick on Tweed. 
4. Much of the detail about the cockle gathering is derived from the work of J. Geraint Jenkins, op.cit.
5. Morgan, C.D., Wanderings in Gower: A Perfect Guide to the Tourist, Archaeologist, or Lover of Nature, with Glossary of the Dialect and all the Legends of the Peninsular, Stories and Superstitions, Swansea, 186), p. 117.

GRAHAM DAVIES      JULY 2025