Surf and turf With its Atlantic breakers, hidden coves and brimming teashops, Pembrokeshire not only resembles Cornwall but beats it at its own game, says Jeremy Seal. Conde Nast Traveller, Sept 2004
At the Dryffyn Arms at Pontfaen, deep in the thickly wooded, glacially-formed gash that is the Gwaun Valley, hung a portrait of the Prince of Wales; hardly a standard in Welsh pubs, but notable in this case since it was not even the current one. It was the then-future Edward VIII, photographed shortly after taking on the princedom in 1910, which dated this interior pretty much to the moment; a sepia parlour room sparsely furnished with a church pew and a slew of unmatched chairs, low-lit by a sickly fire, without canned music, cigarette or fruit machines, pump handles, decorative brasses or even beermats.
Wales’ westernmost county has been undergoing a make-over of late; just not in the Dryffyn. Hotels including the much-loved Druidstone and the St Brides’ Hotel, Saundersfoot have recently been refurbished. Excellently equipped properties have been added to the county’s impressive portfolio of self-catering options. Recent restaurant openings have included Williams, a light and stylish brasserie in a converted warehouse at Solva. A holiday-season renaissance of the sort that has transformed Cornwall is underway if only, as devotees of Pembrokeshire will be glad to learn, on a rather more manageable scale. Comparisons with the county’s English counterpart, another peninsula spearing into the Atlantic, are inevitable: Pembrokeshire has the same magnificent surfing and sand-castle beaches interspersed with cliffbound coasts, 180 miles of coastal path and a great many tea rooms. There are coves where neat stone villages have been wrapped round quaysides, almost as if they were expressly designed to fit on postcards; the likes of Porthgain or Little Haven are highly reminiscent of, say, Cornwall’s Boscastle, only in the low season. There are also striking Neolithic remnants such as standing stones and dolmens (stone burial chambers), and a pervasive Celtic religiosity evidenced by romantically sited chapels, holy wells and weeping yew trees. All of which has spawned a mildly alternative culture – think eco-initiatives, surfing and organics – as well as a devoted middle-class following.
The difference (unquestioned advantage, Pembrokeshire) is that the county does not suffer summer invasions on the scale of Padstow/Rock and Newquay, nor the chronic clogging that the A30 west of Bodmin is subject to. Pembrokeshire has long sheltered beyond the deterrent conurbations of Swansea and Port Talbot, remaining comparatively undiscovered. Which may explain how period pieces like the Dryffyn and the surrounding Gwaun Valley endure, and how the county’s colourful stock of historical figures have not yet been reduced to fronting lottery-funded heritage experiences; the pirate Black Bart, originator of the Jolly Roger, is remembered by nothing more than a memorial stone on the village green at Little Newcastle where he was born in 1682 .
I had walked to tiny Pontfaen from Carn Ingli (hill of the angels), a 1,000-foot rocky outcrop crowned with Iron Age barrows, hut circles and fortifications. I looked down on the vast yellow strands at Newport (not to be confused with its larger namesake in Gwent) where I had left my wife and children on this warm spring day, with daffodils, gorse, dandelions and celandines forming intense blurs of license-plate yellow. On summer days (and since Pembrokeshire is not much given to petty regulation), the same beach can resemble an open-air festival crossed with a garden fete, only stranded in a sandpit, as saloons packed with windbreaks and picnics, 4WDs hauling dinghy trailers, retired couples with stoves for making tea and with kites for the grandchildren, surfer vans and psychedelic charabancs all colonise Newport’s firm sands. Today, however, the beach was all but empty except for the faintest suggestion of distant figures that might have belonged to me.
I followed the path to the south, with the bracken-clad rumps of the Preseli Hills away to the east, crossing tracts of heather moorland before dropping into the Gwaun Valley and its dappled cover of budding ash trees and ancient oak stands. At Pontfaen, the Dryffyn’s landlady Bessie Davies served me through a sliding hatch, pouring a pint of bitter from a jug before returning to her chair near the fire. She told me that her family had lived in this isolated farming community near Fishguard since 1835. In the Gwaun, where the sun sets early and people tend to marry amongst their own – the place seems almost Appalachian in its devout introspective conservatism - the long dead prince’s portrait is not the only anachronism. The locals have somehow contrived to continue celebrating Hen Galan, the New Year, according to the Julian Calendar, on January 13th , some 250 years after the rest of Britain (the Shetlands apparently excepted) discarded it for the Gregorian Calendar that we still use today.
Outside the Gwaun, however, the past that Pembrokeshire seems particularly loath to let go of is rather more recent. Time and again, I was reminded of my own childhood holidays in the mid-1960s. Not that I had spent them here but because the place seemed pleasantly adrift in practices and traditions from the time that high rents and excessive bureaucracy have all but killed off in Britain’s more successful holiday regions.
In Pembrokeshire, you tend to pay for your postcards and your parking (where you pay for it all) in honesty boxes. Many coastal villages, particularly North Pembrokeshire’s Newport, Porthgain and Solva still boast fishermen who will sell you locally caught seafood - dressed crabs, lobsters and even sewin (wild salmon) - from their back doors. The petrol stations are known as garages; the one on Newport’s high street has old-fashioned pumps and an on-site mechanic plus a memorable shop window adorned with such dusty delights as an eau de toilette called Cobra No 1 and an inordinate number of geisha girl statuettes. All of which lent the holiday an idyllic feel - even as it was being experienced - of the sort that I had long since assumed only a forgiving memory could achieve.
Even the dog was a winner. It found itself welcome on the majority of beaches, as if the Blytonesque notion of the family holiday – Pembrokeshire to a tee - would be incomplete without the statutory mutt. On our favourite beach of all, dune-backed Broad Haven near Bosherston (not to be confused with the more touristy Broad Haven in St Brides Bay), he ran free, oblivious to the only posted instruction which warned, sensibly enough, against the presence of poisonous-spined weever fish.
Nor were there dog bans at many of the castles including Carew, spectacularly sited on its tidal estuary near Pembroke. Our spaniel associates most castle visits with protracted stays in the car boot; he couldn’t believe his luck as he ranged happily through the gateyards and chapels, kitchens and halls of these echoing ruins. Pembrokeshire’s stock of romantic castles (other outstanding ones include Pembroke and Manorbier) are a legacy of the Anglo-Normans who settled the rich, river-veined agricultural lands in the south of the county. Arriving at the increasingly poor pasture lands to the north, they lost interest and ground to a halt. The imaginary line that marks the extent of their advance, the Landsker, divides the county culturally and linguistically, with English spoken predominantly to the south and Welsh to the north, but also geographically and scenically. Pembrokeshire is rich in variety of landscapes, not least fertile lowland and rocky moors, estuaries and wooded valleys. It also has some remarkable islands which have been given over either to religion, like Caldey Island with its community of chocolate-making Cistercian monks, or to the county’s remarkable wildlife.
I drove down to Martinshaven one day, the tiny port at the west end of Marloes Peninsula, for the mile-long boat crossing to Skomer Island. Porpoises were cruising for fish in the turbulent currents of Jack Sound, and gannets dived in their wakes. 750-acre Skomer, farmed until the 1950s, has since been a nature reserve, with only a warden and a few mainly volunteer staff as resident population. The island is home not only to seals but is also one of Europe’s great seabird colonies. As I walked Skomer’s network of footpaths, sea, sky and sheer cliffs were raucous with the island’s spectacular populations of puffins (12,000 of them) as well as fulmars, razorbills and guillemots. I saw birds of prey including peregrines, and plenty of choughs, a red-beaked crow and emblem of Cornwall where it is all but extinct; advantage, if not game, then, to Pembrokeshire in the natural history stakes.
I stayed on after the day visitors had left, which meant putting up with basic sleeping quarters and bringing my own food. I had my reasons, however, for nighttime Skomer hosts a wildlife spectacular. Britain’s avian equivalent of the Serengeti’s wildebeest migration, the island is home to some 100,000 pairs of manx shearwaters – about half the world’s population – which nest all over Skomer during the summer. Being as poorly adapted to the land as they are superb in the air, these birds take cover from the predatory black-backed gulls by nesting in burrows which they only return to under cover of darkness; despite these precautions, parts of the island, littered with their clean-picked skeletons, resemble a charnel house. I caught the very beginning of the shearwater season, but even now their nighttime mewing, like a hyped-up amusement arcade, filled the air to unearthly effect and awoke me on several occasions in the bunkhouse. ‘You should hear them on a cloudy night in high summer’, exulted the island warden Juan Brown.
When the boat returned me to the mainland the next morning, I was hungry. Reunited with the family, we set off to chow. I rather hoped the Dryffyn’s attitude to food was not typical of the county – when asked for a menu, Bessie Davies is once said to have snapped, ‘Plain. Cheese ‘N Onion’ – but I needn’t have worried. We lunched at the excellent tearooms in the refurbished boathouse at Stackpole Quay (bruschetta, crab sandwiches, mussels in white wine and tarragon), then dragged the kids along the cliffs and followed the footpath past a network of inland ponds, spectacular with waterlilies during the summer, to Bosherston. At the splendid Olde Worlde Café (look out for the adjacent wooden pavilion built by the present owner’s mother in the 1930s and all laid out with period cutlery), we sat in the garden among a cloud of chaffinches while modern sachet catering was put to the sword by a triumphant time-warp rush of brown glazed teapots, strainers, jugs of milk and scones with apricot jam.
We made time, of course, for the ancient tottering cathedral at St David’s. We marveled at Carreg Sampson, a burial chamber which stands in a field overlooking the seacliffs near Abercastle where the cows seemed casually oblivious to these 3,500-year-old stones. We became acquainted with other local heroes including Jemima Nicholas, a humble cobbler who famously foiled a botched French invasion at Fishguard in 1797; and Tom Stonecottage, the leader of the Rebecca rioters who resisted the turnpike charges in the 1830s and who lies buried in the village of Mynachlog-ddu. The family favourite, however, was Peggy Davies, commemorated on a plaque in St Mary’s Church, Tenby. A ‘bathing woman’ for 42 years to the lady visitors of this Georgian resort, the poor soul had been seized with apoplexy when in the water, and expired, aged 82, 1809.
We walked the vast beaches where Peggy Davies worked for so many years (and passed from this life). Scattered with fishing boats, they lie at the foot of low cliffs lined by handsome pastel terraces and seemed little changed. There was the same sense in Tenby that I had experienced all over Pembrokeshire; that despite the welcome restaurants and refurbishments, the place seemed enlivened, even defined by its quirky past, and was largely indifferent to the modern world.
FACTBOX
Accommodation:
Self-catering is a strong option, with Coastal Cottages of Pembrokeshire (01437 767600; www.coastalcottages.co.uk) chief among the local agencies. For the truly remote, try the Strumble Head area. Particular favourites on Coastal Cottages’ books are Gamallt, a remote stone cottage at the end of a farmtrack above Newport sleeping 4 (from £229 per week); Cable Cottage, a 2-bed clapboard curiosity at Abermawr, where an early submarine telegraph cable to Ireland terminated (from £202 per week); and Cross Cottage, near Martletwy, comfortably renovated with open crog loft bedrooms (from £229 per week).
Hotels.
The Druidstone, Druidstone Haven (01437 781221; www.druidstone.co.uk). Heavenly, eccentric clifftop family-house hotel, with 11 rooms starting from £52 per night for a small double. There is also a range of self-catering cottages in the grounds, and a recently completed eco-roundhouse which runs on solar energy and wind power and boasts superb clifftop views. Welcomes families and pets, and also has an excellent restaurant using largely organic and local produce. Gets very booked up by its many devotees in the summer months.
Twr-Y-Felin Hotel, St Davids (01437 721678; www.tyf.com). A characterful 18th century windmill conversion, informal, relaxed and good value, with large bright public rooms, simple but stylish bedrooms and good modern cooking. An ultra-superior hostel, with standard doubles from £60 B&B.
Cnapan Country House, Newport (01239 820575; www.online-holidays.net/cnapan) Spacious, bright guesthouse with a highly-regarded restaurant in the middle of Newport. From £32.00 per person B&B
Islands:
Skomer Island can be visited during the day between April and October. A £6 landing fee is charged, and the boat crossing (through Dale Sailing; 01646 603123) costs £7 return. Overnight, self-catered stays in basic bunkhouses cost £28 per person and are booked through The Welsh Wildlife Centre (01239 621600). Neighbouring Skokholm, another renowned bird reserve, offers longer summer stays with catering provided but without showers or electricity. Costs are £169 per person for three nights, £265 for a week.
Thousand Islands Expeditions, St Davids (01437 721721; www.thousandislands.co.uk) run a range of cruises, including landings on the RSPB’s Ramsay Island, price £20 per adult.
Restaurants
Williams, Solva (01437 720802). Med-style brasserie for lunches and dinners in bright, stylish converted grain warehouse which opened in 2001.
The Old Pharmacy, Solva (01437 720005). Popular local seafood restaurant. Dinners only.
Harbour Lights, Porthgain (01348 831549). Award-winning seafood restaurant
Fronlas Café, Newport (01239 820351). Café by day, fish restaurant in the evening; excellent crab cakes.
Tea Rooms
The Boathouse, Stackpole Quay (01646 672058). Excellent Mediterranean-style lunches, wonderful cakes and teas.
The Olde Worlde Café, Bosherston. Open for old-fashioned lunches and teas.
Pubs
The Swan Inn, Little Haven (01437 781256). Cosy old waterside pub, huge on atmosphere and does excellent soups.
Beaches:
For surfing: Manorbier, Newgale
For swimming and sandcastles: Broad Haven (Bosherston), Barafundle, Newport Sands
Walking
Pembrokeshire’s 186-mile coastal path runs all the way from Amroth in the south to Poppet Sands, Cardigan. Particularly recommended stretches include St Govan’s Chapel to Stackpole Quay, and around Dinas Head.
Attractions.
St David’s Cathedral (01437 720247; www.stdavidscathedral.gov.uk). 9-5.30 daily. Admission of £2 per adult invited.
Bishop’s Palace, St David’s (01437 720517). 9.30-5 daily. Admission £2.50 adults
Melin Tregwynt Woollen Mill, near Mathry (01348 891288; www.melintregwynt.co.uk). Mill and shop stocking the company’s wonderful range of blankets, throws, cushions etc, plus recent forays into pottery. Open every day. Admission free.
O/S Maps: Explorer OL35 and OL36.
Tourist Information Centres:
Newport: 01239 820912. Tenby: 01834 842404. St David’s: 01437 720392
For the free Pembrokeshire guide, call 08705 103103 or download it from www.visitpembrokeshire.co.uk. Another useful website is www.activitypembrokeshire.com.
Wales’ westernmost county has been undergoing a make-over of late; just not in the Dryffyn. Hotels including the much-loved Druidstone and the St Brides’ Hotel, Saundersfoot have recently been refurbished. Excellently equipped properties have been added to the county’s impressive portfolio of self-catering options. Recent restaurant openings have included Williams, a light and stylish brasserie in a converted warehouse at Solva. A holiday-season renaissance of the sort that has transformed Cornwall is underway if only, as devotees of Pembrokeshire will be glad to learn, on a rather more manageable scale. Comparisons with the county’s English counterpart, another peninsula spearing into the Atlantic, are inevitable: Pembrokeshire has the same magnificent surfing and sand-castle beaches interspersed with cliffbound coasts, 180 miles of coastal path and a great many tea rooms. There are coves where neat stone villages have been wrapped round quaysides, almost as if they were expressly designed to fit on postcards; the likes of Porthgain or Little Haven are highly reminiscent of, say, Cornwall’s Boscastle, only in the low season. There are also striking Neolithic remnants such as standing stones and dolmens (stone burial chambers), and a pervasive Celtic religiosity evidenced by romantically sited chapels, holy wells and weeping yew trees. All of which has spawned a mildly alternative culture – think eco-initiatives, surfing and organics – as well as a devoted middle-class following.
The difference (unquestioned advantage, Pembrokeshire) is that the county does not suffer summer invasions on the scale of Padstow/Rock and Newquay, nor the chronic clogging that the A30 west of Bodmin is subject to. Pembrokeshire has long sheltered beyond the deterrent conurbations of Swansea and Port Talbot, remaining comparatively undiscovered. Which may explain how period pieces like the Dryffyn and the surrounding Gwaun Valley endure, and how the county’s colourful stock of historical figures have not yet been reduced to fronting lottery-funded heritage experiences; the pirate Black Bart, originator of the Jolly Roger, is remembered by nothing more than a memorial stone on the village green at Little Newcastle where he was born in 1682 .
I had walked to tiny Pontfaen from Carn Ingli (hill of the angels), a 1,000-foot rocky outcrop crowned with Iron Age barrows, hut circles and fortifications. I looked down on the vast yellow strands at Newport (not to be confused with its larger namesake in Gwent) where I had left my wife and children on this warm spring day, with daffodils, gorse, dandelions and celandines forming intense blurs of license-plate yellow. On summer days (and since Pembrokeshire is not much given to petty regulation), the same beach can resemble an open-air festival crossed with a garden fete, only stranded in a sandpit, as saloons packed with windbreaks and picnics, 4WDs hauling dinghy trailers, retired couples with stoves for making tea and with kites for the grandchildren, surfer vans and psychedelic charabancs all colonise Newport’s firm sands. Today, however, the beach was all but empty except for the faintest suggestion of distant figures that might have belonged to me.
I followed the path to the south, with the bracken-clad rumps of the Preseli Hills away to the east, crossing tracts of heather moorland before dropping into the Gwaun Valley and its dappled cover of budding ash trees and ancient oak stands. At Pontfaen, the Dryffyn’s landlady Bessie Davies served me through a sliding hatch, pouring a pint of bitter from a jug before returning to her chair near the fire. She told me that her family had lived in this isolated farming community near Fishguard since 1835. In the Gwaun, where the sun sets early and people tend to marry amongst their own – the place seems almost Appalachian in its devout introspective conservatism - the long dead prince’s portrait is not the only anachronism. The locals have somehow contrived to continue celebrating Hen Galan, the New Year, according to the Julian Calendar, on January 13th , some 250 years after the rest of Britain (the Shetlands apparently excepted) discarded it for the Gregorian Calendar that we still use today.
Outside the Gwaun, however, the past that Pembrokeshire seems particularly loath to let go of is rather more recent. Time and again, I was reminded of my own childhood holidays in the mid-1960s. Not that I had spent them here but because the place seemed pleasantly adrift in practices and traditions from the time that high rents and excessive bureaucracy have all but killed off in Britain’s more successful holiday regions.
In Pembrokeshire, you tend to pay for your postcards and your parking (where you pay for it all) in honesty boxes. Many coastal villages, particularly North Pembrokeshire’s Newport, Porthgain and Solva still boast fishermen who will sell you locally caught seafood - dressed crabs, lobsters and even sewin (wild salmon) - from their back doors. The petrol stations are known as garages; the one on Newport’s high street has old-fashioned pumps and an on-site mechanic plus a memorable shop window adorned with such dusty delights as an eau de toilette called Cobra No 1 and an inordinate number of geisha girl statuettes. All of which lent the holiday an idyllic feel - even as it was being experienced - of the sort that I had long since assumed only a forgiving memory could achieve.
Even the dog was a winner. It found itself welcome on the majority of beaches, as if the Blytonesque notion of the family holiday – Pembrokeshire to a tee - would be incomplete without the statutory mutt. On our favourite beach of all, dune-backed Broad Haven near Bosherston (not to be confused with the more touristy Broad Haven in St Brides Bay), he ran free, oblivious to the only posted instruction which warned, sensibly enough, against the presence of poisonous-spined weever fish.
Nor were there dog bans at many of the castles including Carew, spectacularly sited on its tidal estuary near Pembroke. Our spaniel associates most castle visits with protracted stays in the car boot; he couldn’t believe his luck as he ranged happily through the gateyards and chapels, kitchens and halls of these echoing ruins. Pembrokeshire’s stock of romantic castles (other outstanding ones include Pembroke and Manorbier) are a legacy of the Anglo-Normans who settled the rich, river-veined agricultural lands in the south of the county. Arriving at the increasingly poor pasture lands to the north, they lost interest and ground to a halt. The imaginary line that marks the extent of their advance, the Landsker, divides the county culturally and linguistically, with English spoken predominantly to the south and Welsh to the north, but also geographically and scenically. Pembrokeshire is rich in variety of landscapes, not least fertile lowland and rocky moors, estuaries and wooded valleys. It also has some remarkable islands which have been given over either to religion, like Caldey Island with its community of chocolate-making Cistercian monks, or to the county’s remarkable wildlife.
I drove down to Martinshaven one day, the tiny port at the west end of Marloes Peninsula, for the mile-long boat crossing to Skomer Island. Porpoises were cruising for fish in the turbulent currents of Jack Sound, and gannets dived in their wakes. 750-acre Skomer, farmed until the 1950s, has since been a nature reserve, with only a warden and a few mainly volunteer staff as resident population. The island is home not only to seals but is also one of Europe’s great seabird colonies. As I walked Skomer’s network of footpaths, sea, sky and sheer cliffs were raucous with the island’s spectacular populations of puffins (12,000 of them) as well as fulmars, razorbills and guillemots. I saw birds of prey including peregrines, and plenty of choughs, a red-beaked crow and emblem of Cornwall where it is all but extinct; advantage, if not game, then, to Pembrokeshire in the natural history stakes.
I stayed on after the day visitors had left, which meant putting up with basic sleeping quarters and bringing my own food. I had my reasons, however, for nighttime Skomer hosts a wildlife spectacular. Britain’s avian equivalent of the Serengeti’s wildebeest migration, the island is home to some 100,000 pairs of manx shearwaters – about half the world’s population – which nest all over Skomer during the summer. Being as poorly adapted to the land as they are superb in the air, these birds take cover from the predatory black-backed gulls by nesting in burrows which they only return to under cover of darkness; despite these precautions, parts of the island, littered with their clean-picked skeletons, resemble a charnel house. I caught the very beginning of the shearwater season, but even now their nighttime mewing, like a hyped-up amusement arcade, filled the air to unearthly effect and awoke me on several occasions in the bunkhouse. ‘You should hear them on a cloudy night in high summer’, exulted the island warden Juan Brown.
When the boat returned me to the mainland the next morning, I was hungry. Reunited with the family, we set off to chow. I rather hoped the Dryffyn’s attitude to food was not typical of the county – when asked for a menu, Bessie Davies is once said to have snapped, ‘Plain. Cheese ‘N Onion’ – but I needn’t have worried. We lunched at the excellent tearooms in the refurbished boathouse at Stackpole Quay (bruschetta, crab sandwiches, mussels in white wine and tarragon), then dragged the kids along the cliffs and followed the footpath past a network of inland ponds, spectacular with waterlilies during the summer, to Bosherston. At the splendid Olde Worlde Café (look out for the adjacent wooden pavilion built by the present owner’s mother in the 1930s and all laid out with period cutlery), we sat in the garden among a cloud of chaffinches while modern sachet catering was put to the sword by a triumphant time-warp rush of brown glazed teapots, strainers, jugs of milk and scones with apricot jam.
We made time, of course, for the ancient tottering cathedral at St David’s. We marveled at Carreg Sampson, a burial chamber which stands in a field overlooking the seacliffs near Abercastle where the cows seemed casually oblivious to these 3,500-year-old stones. We became acquainted with other local heroes including Jemima Nicholas, a humble cobbler who famously foiled a botched French invasion at Fishguard in 1797; and Tom Stonecottage, the leader of the Rebecca rioters who resisted the turnpike charges in the 1830s and who lies buried in the village of Mynachlog-ddu. The family favourite, however, was Peggy Davies, commemorated on a plaque in St Mary’s Church, Tenby. A ‘bathing woman’ for 42 years to the lady visitors of this Georgian resort, the poor soul had been seized with apoplexy when in the water, and expired, aged 82, 1809.
We walked the vast beaches where Peggy Davies worked for so many years (and passed from this life). Scattered with fishing boats, they lie at the foot of low cliffs lined by handsome pastel terraces and seemed little changed. There was the same sense in Tenby that I had experienced all over Pembrokeshire; that despite the welcome restaurants and refurbishments, the place seemed enlivened, even defined by its quirky past, and was largely indifferent to the modern world.
FACTBOX
Accommodation:
Self-catering is a strong option, with Coastal Cottages of Pembrokeshire (01437 767600; www.coastalcottages.co.uk) chief among the local agencies. For the truly remote, try the Strumble Head area. Particular favourites on Coastal Cottages’ books are Gamallt, a remote stone cottage at the end of a farmtrack above Newport sleeping 4 (from £229 per week); Cable Cottage, a 2-bed clapboard curiosity at Abermawr, where an early submarine telegraph cable to Ireland terminated (from £202 per week); and Cross Cottage, near Martletwy, comfortably renovated with open crog loft bedrooms (from £229 per week).
Hotels.
The Druidstone, Druidstone Haven (01437 781221; www.druidstone.co.uk). Heavenly, eccentric clifftop family-house hotel, with 11 rooms starting from £52 per night for a small double. There is also a range of self-catering cottages in the grounds, and a recently completed eco-roundhouse which runs on solar energy and wind power and boasts superb clifftop views. Welcomes families and pets, and also has an excellent restaurant using largely organic and local produce. Gets very booked up by its many devotees in the summer months.
Twr-Y-Felin Hotel, St Davids (01437 721678; www.tyf.com). A characterful 18th century windmill conversion, informal, relaxed and good value, with large bright public rooms, simple but stylish bedrooms and good modern cooking. An ultra-superior hostel, with standard doubles from £60 B&B.
Cnapan Country House, Newport (01239 820575; www.online-holidays.net/cnapan) Spacious, bright guesthouse with a highly-regarded restaurant in the middle of Newport. From £32.00 per person B&B
Islands:
Skomer Island can be visited during the day between April and October. A £6 landing fee is charged, and the boat crossing (through Dale Sailing; 01646 603123) costs £7 return. Overnight, self-catered stays in basic bunkhouses cost £28 per person and are booked through The Welsh Wildlife Centre (01239 621600). Neighbouring Skokholm, another renowned bird reserve, offers longer summer stays with catering provided but without showers or electricity. Costs are £169 per person for three nights, £265 for a week.
Thousand Islands Expeditions, St Davids (01437 721721; www.thousandislands.co.uk) run a range of cruises, including landings on the RSPB’s Ramsay Island, price £20 per adult.
Restaurants
Williams, Solva (01437 720802). Med-style brasserie for lunches and dinners in bright, stylish converted grain warehouse which opened in 2001.
The Old Pharmacy, Solva (01437 720005). Popular local seafood restaurant. Dinners only.
Harbour Lights, Porthgain (01348 831549). Award-winning seafood restaurant
Fronlas Café, Newport (01239 820351). Café by day, fish restaurant in the evening; excellent crab cakes.
Tea Rooms
The Boathouse, Stackpole Quay (01646 672058). Excellent Mediterranean-style lunches, wonderful cakes and teas.
The Olde Worlde Café, Bosherston. Open for old-fashioned lunches and teas.
Pubs
The Swan Inn, Little Haven (01437 781256). Cosy old waterside pub, huge on atmosphere and does excellent soups.
Beaches:
For surfing: Manorbier, Newgale
For swimming and sandcastles: Broad Haven (Bosherston), Barafundle, Newport Sands
Walking
Pembrokeshire’s 186-mile coastal path runs all the way from Amroth in the south to Poppet Sands, Cardigan. Particularly recommended stretches include St Govan’s Chapel to Stackpole Quay, and around Dinas Head.
Attractions.
St David’s Cathedral (01437 720247; www.stdavidscathedral.gov.uk). 9-5.30 daily. Admission of £2 per adult invited.
Bishop’s Palace, St David’s (01437 720517). 9.30-5 daily. Admission £2.50 adults
Melin Tregwynt Woollen Mill, near Mathry (01348 891288; www.melintregwynt.co.uk). Mill and shop stocking the company’s wonderful range of blankets, throws, cushions etc, plus recent forays into pottery. Open every day. Admission free.
O/S Maps: Explorer OL35 and OL36.
Tourist Information Centres:
Newport: 01239 820912. Tenby: 01834 842404. St David’s: 01437 720392
For the free Pembrokeshire guide, call 08705 103103 or download it from www.visitpembrokeshire.co.uk. Another useful website is www.activitypembrokeshire.com.
