Walking in Pembrokeshire. Dennis Kelsall
Walk 17 Dinas Island
Walk 18 Ceibwr Bay and Pwllygranant
Walk 19 Foel Eryr
Walk 20 Foel Cwmcerwyn
Walk 21 Carn Menyn and the ‘Bluestones’
Walk 22 Foeldrygarn
Walk 23 Cresswell Quay and Lawrenny
Walk 24 Landshipping Quay
Walk 25 Little Milford Wood and the Western Cleddau
Walk 26 Minwear Wood
Walk 27 Blackpool Mill and Slebech Church
Walk 28 Carew Castle and Mill
Walk 29 Kilgetty
Walk 30 Canaston Wood
Walk 31 Llawhaden
Walk 32 Great Treffgarne Mountain
Walk 33 Treffgarne Gorge
Walk 34 Llys-y-frân Reservoir
Walk 35 Ffynone Falls and the Dulas Valley
Walk 36 Cwm Gwaun
Walk 37 Coed Pontfaen
Walk 38 Mynydd Caregog and Carn Ingli
Walk 39 Pentre Ifan Nature Reserve
Walk 40 Cilgerran and the Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve
Appendix A Route summary table
Appendix B Useful information
The hillside below Holgan Fort is covered in gorse (Walk 31)
INTRODUCTION
The view across Cwm-yr-Eglwys bay (Walk 17)
Like the Finisterre of Galicia and the Land’s End of England, Pembrokeshire (or Pen-fro) has the same meaning for the Welsh, ‘the end of the land’. The southwestern-most tip of Wales, it presents a similar outline to the open seas as its more southerly namesakes, with ragged peninsulas reaching out towards the setting sun. Settled in the earliest times, these drawn-out strips of habitation share other things too: the roots of their Celtic culture, vividly portrayed in the enigmatic remains of ancient settlements and sacred sites; the commonality of native language and a passion for storytelling, legend and song. Pembrokeshire is a place of great dramatic beauty, where land and sea stand in hoary confrontation, with bastions of craggy cliffs pushed back behind sweeping bays, and innumerable tiny coves separated by defiant promontories.
But not everywhere is the demarcation clear. Tidal estuaries and twisting rivers penetrate deep into the heartland, where steep-sided valleys and sloping woodlands climb to a gently undulating plateau. The countryside is chequered with a myriad of small fields and enclosures bound by herb-rich boundaries of stone, earth and hedge. Even higher ground rises in the north, not true mountains perhaps in the expected sense, but bold, rolling, moorland hills from whose detached elevations the panorama extends far beyond the confines of the county’s borders.
The legacy of the past
Today, much of Pembrokeshire basks in rural tranquillity with few major roads or large towns, yet it proudly boasts a city, the smallest in the land, which grew around the memory of David, the patron saint of Wales. Predominantly, however, the county is a landscape of small villages and scattered farming settlements, their history often told in ancient churches, ruined castles and the relics of abandoned industry and transport. Even more ancient are the remnants of prehistoric earthworks and enigmatic standing stones, while clues to the past can also be found in the very names of places and landscape features.
St John’s Church at Slebech (Walk 27)
Until the beginning of the last century, Pembrokeshire was less ‘land’s end’ and more ‘gateway’, not on the periphery but rather at the hub. Before the coming of the railways it was a maritime land, connected by sea routes to Britain’s great ports, Ireland, northwest Europe and far beyond. Despite the dangers and vagaries of the sea, its unpredictable weather and rudimentary navigation, travel by boat around the coasts was relatively commonplace, and for bulky or weighty cargoes it was the only economically practical means of transport. This allowed the exploitation of Pembrokeshire’s natural resources such as slate, stone and coal, as well as its rich farming land, and many landings and coves around the coast and along the tidal inlets were once hives of industrial activity.
Over five thousand years ago there was an established trade with Ireland, bringing precious gold and copper from the Wicklow Mountains to the main centres of Bronze Age civilisation in southern Britain on Salisbury Plain. For the Celts, too, the sea was a highway, encouraging migration, the spread of ideas and the exchange of artefacts and produce. After the Romans left Britain, Christendom established itself along those very same routes and Pembrokeshire assumed an importance comparable with other notable devotional centres around the land, such as Iona off Mull and Holy Island off the Northumberland coast. Indeed, St David’s headland is one of the places from which it is claimed that St Patrick embarked on his Christian mission to Ireland in AD432, and by the early centuries of the second millennium, such had become its importance that two or three pilgrimages to St David’s had the same spiritual standing as a journey to Rome or Jerusalem.
The Vikings were less welcome visitors, but the Welsh never lost the thread of their independent culture, even with the later settlement in at least part of Pembrokeshire by the Normans. Under them, important trading ports developed such as Tenby and Pembroke, protected by great castles that sought both to establish authority over the land and define a frontier line of defence. Political quarrels with Spain and, later, France saw the strengthening of coastal fortifications, most spectacularly around the vast inlet of Milford Haven, where naval dockyards exploited one of the world’s finest natural harbours, and which Nelson considered second only to Trincomalee in present-day Sri Lanka.
Manorbier Castle (Walk 2)
The 19th-century heralded a period of massive and fluctuating change. The industrial upsurge elsewhere in Britain created a seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials, which immediately provoked a dramatic upsurge in quarrying and mining right around the coast. But hard on its heels came the development of the railways and the advantage of coastal access rapidly diminished in favour of places served by the new arteries. Quarries such as Porthgain and the coal mines of the upper Daugleddau quickly boomed but then declined, unable to compete with the previously unimaginable speed, ease and low costs of rail transport. But, while much of this corner of Wales was ignored, the early railways found in Pembrokeshire the quickest route from London to the western seaboard. It created a link from the first landfall