The islet peninsula of Worm's Head (known locally as "The Worm") winds more than two kilometres out into the Atlantic and is Gower's most westerly tract of land. The islet itself is 1.61 kilometres long and is attached to the mainland by a 0.5 kilometre rocky causeway that is exposed for about five and a half hours at low water during calm weather.
Worm's Head really has to be Gower's most visually exciting landscape and it is easy to imagine how the little peninsula found its name. When the original Viking marauders first crossed the Atlantic towards the shore of Rhossili and this startling, twisting land mass suddenly loomed towards them like a giant serpent it must have been a truly daunting spectacle. For "The Worm" received its title, not from those small wriggly invertebrates gardeners are so prone to slicing in half with their unforgiving spades but from a from giant water dragon (the name is a corruption from "Wurm", an ancient word describing such a awesome beast).
"The Worm's" slender body covers 37 acres of land and is composed of four small hills with a truncated cliff face at its head plunging vertically into the icy depths of the Atlantic. To continue its mythological appearance, there is even a cave carved deep into its face like a hungry mouth searching the oceans for its next feast of fearful sea travelers. The inner hillock stretches 60 metres across and rises 45 metres from the surf at its feet, while its two inner hills are significantly lower tracts of land that lead to another, this time elevated causeway. This causeway lies only just above the high water mark and leads directly to "The Worm's" Head, a sharply rising cliff that falls even more directly on the opposite side into the awaiting ocean.
The nearby Rhossili Bay is supposedly haunted and Worm's Head has no small part to play in this reputation. The occasional sound of intense booming and hissing and sighing sometimes issues forth from this islet as the pounding ocean is forced up through a natural blow hole to its surface of "The Worm". This can be a devastatingly scary sound, especially when heard in the darkness of the night on such a vast and lonely beach as Rhossili.
In 1957, the vegetation on Worm's Head was badly destroyed in a great fire that blazed for several days. During this, 4/10ths of the islets soil layer was lost and fearful that more would disappear through wind and rain erosion that naturally follows such circumstances, the Nature Conservancy Council seeded the area with 36 kilograms of Danish Red Fescue Seed in the autumn of 1958. The resultant plants achieved their goal of curbing further erosion on the islet but, facing the average 20 gales the area faces per year, could not withstand the salty wind and sea which lashed at them. Within a couple of years the plants had died, but by then they had allowed "The Worm's" native strain of Fescue (Festuca rubra ssp. euruba var. genuina subva. prunosa) to re-establish itself. With a further planting of Buck's Horn Plantain on the shallower soils, disaster had been averted.
Of interest to any keen ornithologists who might wish to pay a visit, Worm's Head is a great breeding ground for sea birds with the Lesser Black-Back, Great Black-Back, Herring Gull, Kittiwake, Puffin, Shag, Manx Shearwater, Gannet, Arctic Skua and Scoter all having been recorded as having nested here.
Even on the balmiest of sunny afternoons,Worm's Head can be the catalyst for some mighty waves
