Protecting Gower - Gower - page 297

FIG 166. Memorial to two of the early founders of the Gower Society, Stephen Lee and Gwent Jones, on Port-Eynon
Point. (Harold Grenfell)
THE DESIGNATION OF THE AONB
Duringtheearly1950stheGowerSociety,togetherwithGlamorganCountyCouncilandtheGowerRural
District Council, kept pressing the National Parks Commission to give special consideration to Gower.
The Commission's first job, as reflected in its title, was the National Park designation programme, and it
was not until that was largely out of the way in the middle of the decade that the Commission began to
concentrate on AONBS , which were intended to complement the National Parks. In this climate lobbying
by the local authorities and the Gower Society finally paid off and on 9 May 1956 Gower was designated
as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the first of these 'miniature National Parks' in Britain.
There was concern from local people in Gower, once the area had been designated, about the availab-
ility of resources for the maintenance and improvement of the landscape. At the time, the National Parks
Commission proposed an extensive series of grants for landscape management, which would be available
to Gower farmers and landowners to enable them to conserve their part of the designated area. Sadly this
aspirationwasnotrealisedanditwasonlyinthe1990sthattheTirCymenandTirGofalagri-environment
schemes provided the type of widespread support for sustainable land management that was envisaged
in the year of Gower's designation. In the intervening period many of the traditional field boundaries of
hedges, stonefaced banks and stone walls had been neglected due to pressures on traditional farming, but
this situation is not unique to Gower and thanks to these schemes much restoration work has now been
carried out.
ThedesignationofGowerasan AONB ,despiteitsstatus,actuallyhadlimitedeffects.Whileitcertainly
meant that planning was tightened, it was essentially restrictive and did not ensure resources or a focus
onpriorities. ToquotefromthereportoftheHobhouseCommittee in1947,'There aremanyareas offine
country and coast in England and Wales which are not included in our selection of National Parks but yet
possess outstanding landscape beauty, are often of great scientific interest and, in many cases important