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.
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.
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.
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.