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The old sea raiders from Denmark must have liked the Gower Peninsula. They laid some of their chiefs to rest in this lush corner of South Wales, burying them in the tombs of Sweyne’s Howes on top of Rhossili Down. From that high eyrie the spirits of the departed could look out to the open sea over a magnificent beach and a promontory shaped like a westward-striking sea beast. The Vikings named it 'Wurm', or dragon.

Taking the two-mile scramble to the tip of Worm’s Head and back is not as easy as it looks. You have to read your tides right - otherwise you could find yourself stranded on the rocky causeway that connects the promontory to the mainland. Currents are fierce here in the widening throat of the Bristol Channel, and many a careless venturer down the centuries has been swept away to death as the rising tides come swirling together across the causeway.

Then there are the rocks that span the gaps between the three humps of Worm’s Head. These sharp-cornered slabs, bristling with barnacles, have been canted by ancient subterranean upheavals to an awkward, near-horizontal angle, and cut down by waves and winds over the millennia into the kind of unreasonable surface just made to snag a boot or bend an ankle.

Mist and drizzle cloaked Worm's Head this early summer morning. But even as I set off from Rhossili the green spine of the dragon was drifting clear of the murk. By the time I had got down to the causeway it stood cleanly cut against a speedwell-blue streak of sky. Doubts and difficulties melted from my mind. This is a magical place, whose air of isolation and mystery is only made more seductive by the little hurdles it sets in a walker’s way.

The rocks of the causeway lay coated with millions of mussel shells that were themselves encrusted with a camel-brown layer of barnacles. In the rock pools blennies flicked from sunlight into the shelter of weed and anemone fringes, and hermit crabs went tip-toeing hastily from one dark crevice to the next as my shadow barred the water round them.

As the falling tide seethed back from the northern and southern edges of the causeway, the pattern of the rocks of Worm’s Head became clear. Hundreds of close-packed parallel lines of strata lay upended in the floor of the sea, ground down flat on the margins of the shore, rising to show through the meagre turf of the Inner Head’s nape like cranium skin peeking between the lines of a comb dragged through thinning hair.

I crunched on over carpets of broken mussel shells, passing a big rusted ship’s anchor lying tines up, and clambered up from the causeway on to the slope of the Inner Head. A strange name, since this 150ft lozenge of grass-grown rock is so obviously the body of the Norsemen’s dragon. I checked my watch as I came ashore. Better be back here in a couple of hour’s time ...

The turf on the far side of the causeway was beautiful; lush, wind-rippled, pearled with the early morning’s mist and studded with wild flowers. I knew the nodding pink flowers of thrift, and those white ones with the bulbous base must be sea campion. But what on earth was this, with roundish leaves and tiny white flowers?

I rummaged in the backpack for my battered old Fitter, Fitter and Blamey. Hmmm ... fleshy leaves, certainly, for retaining fresh water. Hairless, too. And flowers no more than a centimetre across. Must be cochlearia - scurvy-grass. Was this what they gave wretched Jack Tars in the days of sail to prevent them falling ill through lack of vitamin C?

A disgusting disease, scurvy. 'The gums are loosed, swolne and exulcerate,' wrote the 16th-century herbalist Gerard, 'the mouth greevously stinking; the thighes and legs are withall verie often full of blewe spots.' Let's try a bit of cochlearia. Good God, it's bitter! Wonder if the Vikings knew about it. Can’t see those roaring blood-letters being made to eat up their greens, somehow ...

Rounding the corner of the Inner Head a few minutes later I had my first proper sight of Low Neck and Outer Head, the two more seaward humps of the Worm. Something I had not seen from the mainland, too: the canted arch of the Devil’s Bridge, cut by the sea clean through the neck of the beast.

The path to the Devil’s Bridge across upstanding rock plates is a case of scramble and slither, boot toe and finger tip. With a skinned palm I made it out beyond the arch. A final clamber led to the suddenly towering nape of the Outer Head. Now I took notice of a background noise which had been steadily growing as I neared the tip of the promontory: the ‘ee-wake! ee-wake!’ of kittiwakes, and the harsh chakker of black-backed gulls.

As a landfall for migrating birds, the dragon’s Outer Head is notable. As a nesting place for seabirds it is even better. All the west and north faces of the 200ft cliffs were crammed with adults and young. I could hear their row, and I could see multitudes of white and dark dots flying out over Rhossili Bay. But I couldn’t actually count them on the nest. Walkers who get as far as the Outer Head are asked not to climb so far round that they can be seen by the birds, for fear of disturbing the colony.

I found an unobtrusive niche, a little cliff garden of thrift and sea campion which gave me a vee-shaped eyrie over the water. Out with the bird book, then, and up with the binoculars.

As the birds came flashing through I did my best to hold them in the field of vision. Fulmars on stiff, pointed wings. Razorbills flapping in the sea, in the throes of ecstatic bathing. Guillemots like tubby little businessmen in white shirts, scurrying from one meeting to the next. A rapacious great black-backed gull harrying what looked like a solitary gannet, though I couldn’t have sworn to it. Puffins in a flock, skimming importantly by.

The sun stole through the cloud, warming the perch where I lay. I thought of Dylan Thomas, wandering Worm’s Head in boyhood ‘with a book and a bag of food, the gulls crying mad over me.’ Thomas had got himself marooned after falling asleep and missing his tide. ‘I stayed on that Worm’, he recalled, ‘from dusk to midnight, sitting on that top grass, frightened to go further in because of the rats and because of things I am ashamed to be frightened of. Then the tips of the reef began to poke out of the water and, perilously, I climbed along them to the shore.’

If you don’t want that to happen to you, said my tyrannical watch, you’d better start back now. Oh, come on, time, you bully ... just ten minutes more lazing in this sun-warmed cradle, OK? ... Oh, all right, then, I'm coming ...

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