The secrets of Pembrokeshire, the loveliest county in Wales

Pembrokeshire, in the furthest west of Wales, not only gave us Britain’s sole native-born patron saint, but also Stonehenge, algebra, and the Tudor dynasty. It was here that the last invasion of Britain took place.

It is the home of Britain’s smallest city, the country’s only coast-based national park, and the ‘finest port in Christendom’.

According to legend, St David was born around 500AD in the middle of a stone circle on top of Pembrokeshire’s westernmost cliff, today known as St David’s Head, and at the moment of his birth a spring appeared that is still reputed to have healing properties.

The ruins of a small chapel dedicated to David’s mother, St Non, mark the spot. It is a wild and beautiful place and one of the oldest Christian sites in Britain.

St David died on March 1 589AD – exactly 1,436 years ago – and is buried not far away beneath the magnificent cathedral named after him. He founded a monastery there in the 6th-century, so hidden and remote that it was overlooked by rampaging Vikings, and his shrine became a place of pilgrimage.

The Normans built a small chapel over the grave but after the Pope declared that “two pilgrimages to St David’s is equal to one to Rome, and three pilgrimages to one to Jerusalem”, the shrine attracted so many pilgrims that a bigger church was needed and the building of the present St David’s Cathedral was begun around 1176.

With its quiet location, tucked into a grassy hollow on the edge of Britain’s smallest city, and with its gorgeous mauve and honey-coloured stonework, sprinkled with lichens, this crooked, rough-hewn church, redolent of the simple faith that built it, qualifies as many people’s loveliest cathedral.

St David’s and St Non’s Chapel both lie within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, covering 186 miles of ravishing coastline including rugged cliffs, sea stacks, sandy beaches, windswept islands and an abundance of historic sites.

St David’s sits just to the north of the Landsker Line, an ancient imaginary border between the Welsh-speaking natives to the north and the English-speaking lands settled by the Normans from England to the south.

Some 20 miles north of the Landsker is Fishguard, a handsome harbour town that grew up between golden Goodwick Sands and the original fishing village full of brightly coloured cottages, where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor filmed Under Milk Wood in 1971.

Above the door of the Royal Oak in Fishguard’s main square is a sign saying “The Last Invasion of Britain Peace Treaty was signed here in 1797”. A force of some 1,400 French soldiers landed on the coast north of Fishguard intending to ferment a British revolution, but were seen off by the Pembroke Yeomanry and a group of local women in red shawls and tall hats who resembled an army of redcoats.

Across from the Royal Oak, in the Town Hall, the 100-foot-long Last Invasion Tapestry, hand-woven by local women, tells the story, while a brisk two-mile walk north along the clifftops brings you to a memorial stone that stands above the beach at Carreg Y Wastad where the French landed.

South east of Fishguard are the Preseli Hills, a land of wild moorland and rocky outcrops offering spectacular views north to Snowdonia and across the sea to the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland.

The hills abound with prehistoric sites including, on its northern edge, Pentre Ifan, a megalithic burial chamber formed of a huge capstone resting on three bluestone pillars quarried from the nearby rocks of Carn Menyn. The pillars are made of the same unique bluestone as those found at Stonehenge, suggesting that the Preseli Hills were the source of the Stonehenge bluestones.

South of the Landsker are the powerful 12th-century Norman castles of Pembroke and Haverfordwest, the county town. The ruins of Haverfordwest’s castle sit on a high ridge overlooking the high street, one of the finest in Wales. It climbs steeply up from the River Cleddau and is lined with shops and houses of every age, including a fine Shire Hall of 1837.

Historic Pembroke, a pleasant town of narrow byways with Elizabethan and Georgian houses tucked in behind unbroken medieval walls, basks beneath the mighty walls of Pembroke Castle.

Begun in wood in 1093, rebuilt in stone 100 years later and occupying an almost impregnable site on a rocky promontory surrounded on three sides by water, Pembroke is one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Britain. In 1170 the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare, departed from the castle to commence the Norman invasion of Ireland while Harry Tudor, later Henry VII, was born in the castle, which then belonged to his uncle Jasper Tudor, on January 28, 1457.

Twenty-eight years later in 1485, Henry returned from exile and landed at Mill Bay below St Ann’s Head, 15 miles to the west at the mouth of the Daugleddau estuary, before marching up through Wales to meet Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where he won the Crown and launched the Royal House of Tudor.

Three miles off St Ann’s Head, Skokholm Island is the site of Britain’s first bird observatory set up in 1933 by ornithologist Ronald Lockley, who also wrote the book called The Private Life of the Rabbit, about the rabbits on the island, left over from a Victorian rabbit farm, which inspired Richard Adams’ Watership Down.

To the north is Skomer, home to one of Britain’s largest sea bird colonies of mainly puffins, guillemots and razorbills. Both islands can be visited by boat from Martin’s Haven Beach.

On the north shore of the Daugleddau estuary, which forms one of the largest natural harbours in the world, sits Milford Haven, described by Nelson as “the finest port in Christendom”.

Henry II, King John and Oliver Cromwell all sailed from here to invade Ireland, and at the end of the 18th-century the port was developed as a Royal Dockyard to provide ships for Nelson’s navy by Sir William Hamilton, husband of Nelson’s lover Emma, who inherited the land from his first wife.

Nelson’s connection to the town is recalled by the Lord Nelson Hotel on Hamilton Terrace, a smart row of Georgian houses overlooking the water, which ends at St Katherine’s Church where Sir William Hamilton is buried.

Built into the cliff-face of St Govan’s Head on the coast south of Milford Haven sits tiny St Govan’s, a 13th-century chapel constructed around a cave used as a cell by the 6th-century monk St Govan, who is thought to be buried beneath the chapel’s altar. This mysterious and magical place can be reached by descending a set of stairs that – so the legend goes – never count the same when climbing back up.

The national park ends at the pretty seaside town of Tenby, of which the artist Augustus John, born there in 1878, said: “You may travel the world over but you will find nowhere more beautiful”.

As well as golden beaches and pale-painted Victorian guesthouses, historic Tenby boasts a castle, 13th-century town walls, a 15th-century Tudor Merchant’s House, a unique 16th-century fortified barbican gatehouse of five arches and the largest parish church in Wales, where there is a memorial to Tenby-born Robert Recorde, the mathematician who wrote the first book on equations and algebra in English and, in 1557, invented the equals sign (=).

It all adds up to make the loveliest county in Wales.