Well, things don’t get any better at Whitesands hey? On the back of a badly designed and sited beach café and a car park paved with shards of glass comes another example of quantity (and coin) over quality.
I refer, of course, to the ever expanding excrescence that is the ‘campsite’ in the fields above the car park.
Quite why anyone would want to camp here is beyond me – to be sure the views are very fine (as long as you divert your gaze from the car park and the café), but in order to enjoy them you need to lash yourself to a large and firmly secured tent peg otherwise you’ll slide downhill towards the sea.
For this campsite has not a single level surface. You’d think that might be a fairly basic requirement of any campsite, but hey, this is Whitesands, where quality counts for feck all when there’s money to be made.
Add to that virtually zero readily accessible facilities and I’m at a total loss as to why anyone would choose to spend their holidays here unless they were using it as a training programme for bivvying on the north face of the Eiger.
I’d be pretty hacked off if I’d paid my £6 per night in advance having read the website’s claim that all the fields have ‘flat areas’ – if you’re Jemima Puddle-Duck and Peter Rabbit heading off for a wild weekend in a tent the size of a pocket handkerchief you might find a flat area, but anyone arriving in a decent sized family tent or motorhome in August will be bloody lucky to say the least.
And maybe it’s just me, but as I wander along the coast path from Whitesands to Porth Melgan I find something very anachronistic about walking within touching distance of campervans and tents in the field beside the path – so much for the ‘wilderness experience’!
I am not privy to the planning protocol that allows totally inappropriate terrain to be given over to a campsite, but this being a National Park and all you might think that the impact this latest development has on the ‘Queen of Pembrokeshire beaches’ (yes, that’s how I once heard Whitesands described) might be a consideration.
Apparently not. Get the cash in the bank while the tourists are in town is clearly the driving factor and bollocks to a quality visitor experience.
It just looks tatty and cheap and spoils a once lovely view. It’s as if the real queen took to sporting tats and a vajazzle – fortunately she hasn’t (well, not as far as I’m aware – there again, how would one know?) but Whitesands is looking more and more like a worn out old slapper on the make these days.