Scratch the surface of a landscape colonised by nature and you might find the mysterious remnants of human civilisation just beneath. The wild cliffs and scraggy green fields of the Pembrokeshire hide ditches that once sheltered mine trains, a perfect azure pool that was once a quarry, heavy stones heaved into situ by ancient undertakers, and neolithic-looking brick dens which turn out to be lime kilns, Industrialists ovens for burning rocks.
I wandered among this gently beguiling landscape in October 2020. It was a strange point in time: after a spring frozen by pandemic, the comparatively free summer told us things were getting better. The growing creep of lockdowns still felt like blips on an inevitable path back to normality.
I took the Wales Coastal Path, and specifically its westernmost spur: walking from the village of Penally clockwise to Fishguard. It was the first time I’d visited the area, Pembrokeshire being just a little too far for a Londoner on a short trip. The journey was a full, masked, morning; changing trains in locked-down Swansea I lurked uneasily just outside the station, the sense of danger reminding me of a Tunisian bus station I had been warned not to wander away from. At Carmarthen the passengers trooped over the rails to the train waiting opposite, which pulled out the way we had come and carried on to the colourful houses of Tenby, before trundling a couple of miles down the coast to Penally, and its military range.
I had come to Wales in mid-October fully expecting rain. Previous midsummer walking in other Celtic extremities of the British Isles – County Kerry to Kinlochewe – had taught me to expect little moral support from the elements, but rather to treat each minute of sunlight as a bonus. But I was spoiled in Wales, and after a single torrential downpour on day two I enjoyed largely uninterrupted sun. There’s a meditative simplicity to following a well-signed coastal path, on which you can never really get lost, and so stepping out Penally station I simply started walking, and didn’t really stop for ten days.
On the path I encountered a lot of gorgeous vistas and not a lot of people. I found smooth sandy beaches, which it seemed a waste to tramp across in my muddy boots, looked across high stretches of green fields well watered by autumn’s rains, and followed miles of high, jagged cliffs. Often there was an exuberant sea far beneath, sometimes a deserted white sandy beach, or a rocky one, and often a muddy little stream, meaning I had to climb down to cross, before climbing straight back up. (I got into the habit of stopping at the bottom to touch my toes for thirty seconds, to give my knees some respite.) At the most dramatic points – rounding St Anne’s Head or St David’s Head – I was surrounded on all sides by sea, surging against gaping cliffs topped with light grass, fingers of headland reaching out to explore the water, topped by joyous dog-walkers, and the occasional brooding decommissioned bunker. On the clearest days I saw across to the north coast of Devon, and I passed islands with alluring names – Skomer, Skokholm -, jet-speed currents flowing through the sounds between them and the mainland. I shared the environment with harvest mice, scurrying as they do across the way in front of me; at Martin’s Haven I met a seal pup plopped practically on top of the path leading up from the beach. Thereafter I saw the occasional distant seal, until on my final day, around Strumble Head, I saw a colony of over twenty, lying on rocks far below the cliff-top path, lazing, awkwardly pulling themselves around by the flippers, crying out, oblivious and totally unbothered by any humans walking above them.
One pleasure of a long point-to-point to walk is that it necessarily includes variety – the conventionally beautiful as well as the less disarming views. Walking out of the picturesque village of Angle on my third day, having slept within spitting distance of a fourteenth-century Pele Tower, I was confronted by the much higher towers of Pembroke Oil Refinery; along with nearby power station, it dominated the landscape over the next three days. At the same time, the scenery became flatter and muddier as I entered the Daugleddau Estuary, the high cliffs of the sea coast retreating; Pembroke Dock and Milford Haven were the largest towns I passed through on my walk, and even a charming, Victorian hilltop park looked across the water to the refinery. Industrial works in the late twentieth century displaced the villages of Rhoscrowther and Pwllcrochan, now preserved on Ordnance Survey maps and borne witness by their churches. Tucked away in a wood, I passed Pwyllcrochan’s fourteenth-century church and cemetery, now owned by the refinery, its noticeboard emblazoned with the Valero logo. But this is not to make a judgement, and I sensed no local resentment against the industrial complex: the refinery and power stations are the biggest employer in the area.
Indeed, the area around has long been busy with comings and goings. Well over a century before Texaco shipped Trinidadian oil into Pembrokeshire, slate and granite were shipped out from the bustling docks of Porthgain, now a bustling seaside hamlet, noteworthy to me for having not one but two pubs on the water’s edge – a choice! – where I had my first, delicious, portion of bara brith, a local fruit cake. Porthgain’s narrow natural harbour is further sheltered by two looping breakwaters, and the path passed towering red-brick buildings pushed into the cliff that once housed hoppers, machines crushing granite for export.
Pembrokeshire’s relative proximity to France and Ireland, and the easy access inland along the Cleddau river, long gave it strategic importance. Excited notice boards at Carreg Wastad pointed out the site of the last – French – invasion of Britain; it seems it was a fairly drunken and unplanned attempt, led by an American, and that the hero in putting it down was local woman Jemima Nicholas, who was armed with a pitchfork. In the 1800s more effort went into building defences, and walking towards Pembroke Dock it seemed that every island going had a Victorian fort on it. I was even able to spend the night at Dale Fort, which holds a youth hostel (one of very few that was open mid-pandemic) and had the vibe of a geography field trip – while clearly maintaining the layout, architecture, and fortifications of a military defence.
Within an hour of leaving Dale Fort, I passed by the unassuming and sheltered Mill Bay; this, I learnt, was where Henry Tudor landed after his exile in Brittany, keeping out of the way of what was then Dale Castle. Just a few weeks later Henry, whose Tudor ancestors originated from Anglesey, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and became Henry VII. I had already seen where, in Pembroke Castle, where he was said to have been born – an unassuming tower room with figurines set up much like a nativity. The affection that Henry received in Pembrokeshire in the 15th century, when he was welcomed and defended on his return from France, seems to have lingered a bit, and I later walked past a Welsh-language school called Harri Tudor.
Long before the Tudors, Pembrokeshire was a place of pilgrimage. St David, patron saint of Wales, was born at St Non’s, now the ancient remains of a chapel in a verdant field perched above a rocky bay, not far from where Pembrokeshire tips furthest west into the ocean. St Non was St David’s mother, and the site also contained a sacred spring. I enjoyed this evidence of how a pre-Christian holy site had been taken up and developed into the birth-story of the local saint. However, an information sign told me I was wrong: the holy spring wasn’t pre-Christian at all, but had in fact miraculously appeared precisely at the moment of St David’s birth.
St Non’s is a stop on the old pilgrimage route to Britain’s smallest city, St David’s, while lies a couple of miles inland. I reached it via the exhilarating coast of St David’s Head, probably the most dramatic part of my walk, and one of the few places where I suddenly found myself surrounded by lots of other walkers. I couldn’t help but take a detour to scramble up Carn Lidl, the highest hill in the area, giving me wide views across the coast and out to Ramsey Island beyond. After losing the path on the descent I took evasive action (think backpack thrown down to help preserve balance); I wandered into St David’s in the late afternoon. The city is very much the size of a village, with one main road, one supermarket, no sprawl, and a population just under 2,000. The complex around the cathedral – which provides city-status – is not much smaller than the town-centre. An arch through an imposing, if pocket-sized, guard tower leads to a grassy hill cradling the cathedral, and beyond it the 14th-century ruined bishop’s palace, more or less the same size as its holier neighbour. I returned for evensong, a favourite activity of mine, as it’s a chance to enjoy any cathedral serving the purpose it was designed for. Here, the bishop led the service in a soothing mix of English and Welsh, and instead of a choir, a socially distant cantor sang preces and responses alongside the organist. St David’s doesn’t feel at all far from the more numerous spires of Oxford at such times. I put my head back and lost myself in the criss-crossed vaulting of the wooden ceiling.
Most ancient of all, if we discount the hills themselves, are the pagan sites that decorate Pembrokeshire’s landscape – reminding me of end-of-the-world stone circles in Atlantic Ireland. I passed the most impressive, Carreg Samson, on my final day: after leaving the delightful, temporarily deserted, clifftop village of Trefin, I wandered along quiet lanes, turned right at a farmhouse, and found it in the middle of a field, one massive horizontal rock balancing one top of six enormous upright ones. I find such monuments peaceful: they are profoundly unbothered by my presence, or by the farm, fields, cows, or civilisations that pass them by.
There was an elemental wind that day and I kept further than usual from the cliffside edge, seeing not a single person until I rounded the headland into Fishguard Bay, its piers, upper and lower towns, sealife centre, and train station opening up beneath me. The Coast Path casually transformed into a perfectly suburban street named Harbour Village, and beneath me the A40 appeared, ex nihilo, ready to flow all the way from Fishguard Harbour to St Paul’s Cathedral.
I instead took the train back to the metropolis, and onwards into lockdown, and haven’t really left either since. As I sit and wait, ever so slightly cooped up, it’s reassuring to know that, hopefully not too far in the future, a few hours on the rails will plunge me back to the opposite coast of this island, a historic land, where I can wander and forget it all.
