Hotel Hit Squad: Inside Penally Abbey, Pembrokeshire – where children travel back to the world of the Famous Five

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about parenthood, it’s that trying to recreate treasured childhood memories with your own progeny is always a disaster. This is particularly so if large portions of your youth were spent in Wales. Cockle picking in the drizzle: “Is this akshully a punishment for something?” Country walks: “I’m akshully properly dying of tired.” Laver bread: “Are you akshully trying to poison us?”

So it was with some foreboding that we drove, two children aged seven and four in tow, to Penally Abbey, a small family-owned hotel perched atop a hill, with views across dunes to the Pembrokeshire beaches where I played as a kid.

For Penally is not a child-friendly hotel in the big-budget, bells and whistles sense. There’s no kids’ club, pool, or staff gurning in garish character costumes. Its style is more sincere and small-scale, a home from home (assuming yours, too, is worthy of The World of Interiors).

There are just 11 bedrooms in this Strawberry Hill Gothic house about a mile south west of Tenby, plus: a dining room that glows with seaside light; a rose-hued, fire-warmed sitting room; a cosy bar; a pretty conservatory; and gardens that tumble in tangles of green towards the sea.

Lucas and Melanie Boissevain run all this with their grown-up children and a tight gang of local friends. Their son Jacques, acting as barman, knows the best secret beaches and will tell you how to find them. Lizzie, who runs reception, is a graphic designer, former primary schoolteacher and “general fairy godmother”, says Melanie. She made the hand-drawn guides in each bedroom, illustrating the things to do locally should you find yourself “in rain” (surely not), “sunshine”, “with children” and more.

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She cuts two wedges of the “daily cake” (placed on the bar, so hungry, beach-walking guests can take a free slice), then perches on the steps, facing out to sea, and tells the children stories about Manorbier Castle. Just down the road, it was the setting for Cair Paravel in the BBC’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and if you sit in a particular spot – she says – you can make a wish. “I’d wish to live here forever,” says the four-year-old, already sold.

We walk down the hill, over the tracks of Penally (surely the world’s tiniest train station), to the long, sheltered, and almost deserted beach. A half-hour walk along the shingle brings us to Tenby, where pastel-coloured homes teeter on the cliffs, ice cream vans park on the sand, and shops swell with lilos, spades, fudge and fridge magnets bearing the meaning of your name.

We get temporary tattoos and ice creams before heading back to the hotel where our rooms are ready. The top floor has just been renovated and is now a haven for families. Up in the eaves, the interconnecting bedrooms and two marble bathrooms are linked by arched doors with a Moorish feel.

An interior designer, Melanie found all the hotel’s furniture in local antique shops and French markets. We have wicker chairs, a warm and worn linen sofa, a wardrobe that might lead to Narnia, window seats overlooking the sea, soft beds that swallow us up and old botanical charts on the walls.

And – oh! – the bathrooms. They’re sanctuaries in grey and thick marble slab, with flannel dressing gowns and big bottles of REN toiletries. This is not Welsh holidaying as I remember it. It is a souped-up, nostalgia-hued, infinitely more luxurious version. Some things do improve with time.

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So I wave a cheerful goodbye to battered sausages and opt for the six-course taster menu, informed by head chef Jerry Adam’s love of foraging and fermenting (he puts on a wonderful, locally sourced kids’ menu, too).

I consign cornflakes in Aunty Myra’s caravan to the past, and replace them with wild flowers and handmade ceramics on the breakfast table, croissants, granola and wild Welsh honey from local company Coedcanlas, which also makes a jam specially for the hotel.

The children, meanwhile, are unshakeable in their conviction that they have travelled back to the world of the Famous Five. Caldey, clearly visible just two miles across the waves, is Kirrin Island; the ruined chapel in the hotel’s garden hides pirates, and the panelling in its reception must slide to reveal tunnels…

After dinner, they sprawl on the huge Persian rug in the sitting room, playing board games and drawing pictures with some retired guests who, like us, seem ecstatic to have stumbled across the place. It’s not the done thing for a reviewer to be so fawning. But the truth is, I’m loathe even to share this place with you. It’s just so, properly, akshully lovely.

A room with sofa beds, for a family of four, cost from £265 a night, B&B, in low season and £315 high season.

Read the full review: Penally Abbey, Wales