Coast path beginnings
Amroth
A flat sandy beach beneath wooded hills, with seafront pubs, inland heritage and the southern end of a 186-mile National Trail.
- Best for
- Beach time and coast-path walking
- Give it
- A beach visit with time for a pub or inland detour
- Don't miss
- The drowned forest at the lowest tides
Photo: welshbabe · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A beach village at the trailhead
Amroth pairs a half-mile sandy beach with the southern point of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
Come for low-tide sand, rockpooling and coastal walking, then choose between two seafront pubs or head inland to St Elidyr's Church.
Where to go
Places in Amroth
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesThe New Inn
A 16th-century family-run pub serving pub classics, fish and beach-side dining.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 75 minutes
- Locality
- on the seafront next to the beach
Amroth Arms
A traditional pub and restaurant known for generous home-cooked meals, Sunday roasts, fish and chips and real ales.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 75 minutes
- Locality
- on the seafront in the heart of the village
Amroth to Wiseman's Bridge and Saundersfoot Walk
A coastal route following an old coal-tramway trackbed through headland tunnels, with coastal views after the initial climb.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 150 minutes
- Locality
- from Amroth via Wiseman's Bridge and Coppett Hall to Saundersfoot
- Access
- The route begins with a steep climb and passes through low, dimly lit former tramway tunnels.
Food & drink
1 placeWiseman's Bridge Inn
A coastal inn known for food, drink and sea views; its Churchill story is local folklore with no official record.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 60 minutes
- Locality
- at Wiseman's Bridge, a neighbouring hamlet
Walks & outdoors
1 place
Amroth Beach
A flat sandy beach with a pebble bank, a huge expanse of sand at low tide, rockpooling and seasonal lifeguards.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- along the seafront
- Access
- The drowned forest emerges only at extreme low tides.
History & heritage
1 place
Church of St Elidyr
A Grade II* cruciform church of 12th-century origin with a late Norman foliage-carved font and a three-storeyed tower.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- about one mile inland from the seafront village
No places match this filter. Choose All places to reset the list.
Three ways to explore Amroth
Signature outings
The forest under the sand
At the lowest tides, stumps from a forest drowned around 7,000 years ago emerge on Amroth Beach.
A Norman font on older stone
St Elidyr's late Norman font is carved with foliage and stands on the inverted basin of an earlier font.
An inn on the coastal route
Wiseman's Bridge Inn sits between Amroth and Saundersfoot, pairing food and drink with sea views.
The village story
Amroth Village Guide
From a National Trail terminus and low-tide sands to tramway tunnels, an inland garden and a medieval church.
Trailhead and shoreline
The Pembrokeshire Coast Path begins on the seafront here. Or ends, depending on which way you're walking. Amroth is the official southern point of the 186-mile National Trail, which means the village spends a good part of the year watching people either set off looking fresh or arrive looking otherwise.
The village is strung along the shore beneath wooded hills, a half-mile of flat sandy beach with a pebble bank, much of it held back from the houses by a seawall. At low tide the sand goes out a long way. It's a Blue Flag beach, awarded in 2020, with lifeguards through the season, and it does the things a beach like this is for: rockpooling, beach games, safe bathing.
Seafront food and provisions
Two pubs sit on the seafront. The New Inn dates to the 16th century and puts you right next to the sand — gammon with egg and pineapple, mac 'n' cheese bake, ham with a jacket potato, and fish eaten within sight of where it might once have swum. A few doors along, the Amroth Arms trades on generous home-cooked portions and Sunday roasts, with burgers and traditional fish and chips, and vegetarian and gluten-free options for the rest of the table. It's on CAMRA's WhatPub for its real ales.
Shops are another matter. Amroth is small, and for provisions you go to Saundersfoot or Kilgetty, both a short drive off.
Tramway tunnels and woodland
The walk everyone does heads east. Amroth to Wiseman's Bridge to Saundersfoot is 3.5 miles one way, following the trackbed of an old coal tramway built in 1835 to carry iron from the Stepaside works to Saundersfoot harbour. Part of the route runs through low, dimly lit tunnels cut through the headlands for the trams. There's a steep climb to start, then coastal views the rest of the way. At Wiseman's Bridge, a mile and a half along, the inn there claims that Winston Churchill "is said to have watched the 'invasion' whilst seated on the wall of the pub at the Wiseman's Bridge Inn, drinking a cup of tea." This was the 1943 D-Day rehearsal, Operation Jantzen, staged along this coast that summer. There's no official record of his visit, which is generally how these stories work.
Inland, three-quarters of a mile up a wooded valley, is Colby Woodland Garden — a National Trust place with a walled garden, rhododendrons and seasonal family trails, reachable on an accessible path that suits most walkers.
Church stones and drowned forest
The church, St Elidyr's, sits a mile inland where the original village was, a scatter of farms before the seafront was built up in the 1850s. It's Grade II* listed, 12th century on the site of an older Celtic llan, with a late Norman font — square, carved with foliage, standing on the inverted basin of an even earlier font.
At the lowest tides the beach gives up something stranger: the stumps of a forest drowned when sea levels rose 7,000 years ago. People have found fossilised antlers, nuts, bones and Neolithic flints in the sand where the children build castles.
Stay around Pembrokeshire
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Pembrokeshire, linked directly to their property pages.
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Amroth Beach - geograph.org.uk - 3301426.jpg — photograph by welshbabe; Amroth Beach by welshbabe. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
- File:St Elidyr Church, Amroth - geograph.org.uk - 2973198.jpg — photograph by welshbabe; St Elidyr Church, Amroth by welshbabe. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Amroth Beach — visitpembrokeshire.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The New Inn — camra.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Amroth Arms — camra.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Amroth to Wiseman's Bridge and Saundersfoot Walk — walescoastpath.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Church of St Elidyr — heritage.churchinwales.org.uk other published source
- Wiseman's Bridge Inn — wisemansbridgeinn.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation