Ogmore-by-Sea is a seaside village on the western limit of the Glamorgan Heritage Coastline of South Wales. It has, along with neighbouring Southerndown one of the most spectacular locations for a residential area anywhere on the Celtic seaboard, and is visually very similar to Bude and Widemouth Bay in Cornwall (this is unsurprising - both locations in Cornwall have the same carboniferous cliffs as Ogmore).
Approximately 3 miles from Bridgend and about 20 miles west of Cardiff the village lies in the Vale of Glamorgan. The beaches look out on Tusker Rock, have sand at low-tide, and sharp rocks at high-tide.
The River Ogmore estuary is flanked by Ogmore beach on one side and the dunes of Merthyr Mawr on the other. The estuary makes bathing unsafe from most of the beach. The rocky shoreline is well-known as a rock climbing location. It is an interesting place geologically with a variety of fossils clearly visible. Many people use the car-park by the estuary to the River Ogmore, which is just as you enter the village, others move on to Southerndown.
Just like its counterparts in Cornwall, Ireland and Brittany, the west-facing beach and coast was notorious as a graveyard for ships during strong on-shore winds (i.e south-westerly winds from the Atlantic). Many ships in particular were destroyed on Tusker Rock, a brutal reef slightly out to sea that is totally covered at high tide. Also prevalent at Ogmore (and all across the Vale of Glamorgan coastline) was organised shipwrecking; similar to tales in Cornwall where lanterns would be tied to a bull/cow at night resting onto top of a cliff; passing ships would mistake a flickering light as a lighthouse and be lured to destruction.
