"Change", by Arthur Machen

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a aa e ee i e ee
aa i i o e ee o
ee ee i aa o oo o
a o a a e i ee
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If you go look up Trenant and Porth on google maps, they are more like 15 miles apart, not 1.5 miles... And neither of them are directly on the coast. So it appears Machen is just using some real place names he no doubt heard of without regard for their actual real locations. Kind of a shame once you realize that.

Now there is a place called Porthcawl about 20 miles southwest of Porth that *is* on the coast, but there's no place with a name resembling Trenant in the vicinity. A mile and a half from Porthcawl gets you to Nottage, and that's about it. But, it must be said, Porthcawl and Nottage don't sound near as easy on the ears as Porth and Trenant.

As to Dragon's Head, I can identify a Worm's Head (i.e. Wyrm) at the western most extremity of Swansea, about 40 miles away from Porthcawl. That's the best parallel I could find, and it's again way out of place relative to the other locales.

From the annotations:

Meirion: the description suggests the historic county of Meirionnydd (Merionethshire), within which the coastal tourist village Portmeirion was constructed in 1925

alarums and excursions: Elizabethan stage-direction; by extension uproar or commotion

City article: financial reporting appeared in the London daily newspapers, including The Times

Pepper's Ghost: optical illusion, named after inventor John Henry Pepper (1823-1900)

Mysterious Musicians: probably a reference to a scene (set in a Welsh castle) in a popular musical comedy Florodora

De Barry: the De Barrys were an ancient Norman-Welsh family

the Darren: commonly found in Welsh place names, "tarren" or "darren" meaning "knoll" or "rock" in Welsh

Mithraic Ritual: Mithraism, an originally Iranian religion, was popular in the Roman Empire before Constantine's adoption of Christianity

Gnostic: reference to Gnostic Christianity, i.e. early Christian sects professing special, mystic knowledge.

speaking with tongues: glossolalia (from the Greek for 'speaking in tongues') refers to ecstatic, unintelligible utterance taking place, typically, at religious gatherings

The picture used is "Porthcawl Seafront Sept 2011" by welshrocker, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/).

To follow along: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604191h.html