The Old Point House sits at the end of an unmade road beside the lifeboat station, and about four times a year the spring tides cover that road for a couple of hours and cut the pub off. It has been the lifeboat crew's local since the station opened in 1868. Inside, the walls are hung with old newspaper extracts and relics; outside there's a beer garden and a separate bar and restaurant. The kitchen is serious about seafood — a crab sandwich on homemade focaccia with chips, oyster chowder, lobster dirty fries, crab rolls, pesto prawns. One TripAdvisor review is headlined "A pub on the edge." It closes for the winter, which is the kind of pub this is.
The village itself is a single street running east to west, from Angle Bay on the Milford Haven estuary at one end to West Angle Bay at the mouth of the Haven at the other. You reach it by minor roads off the B4320, about ten miles west of Pembroke, or on the seasonal Coastal Cruiser bus from Pembroke station, and it feels every one of those ten miles.
The other pub is the Hibernia Inn, family-run, with rooms and a garden and a marquee for when the garden fills up. This is the one for fish and chips, steaks and Sunday lunch, with vegetarian and gluten-free options and local beers and ciders. It fills at weekends, so book. Dogs are welcome throughout — bar, garden or marquee — with water bowls provided.
You will need the pubs, because the village shop and post office have both closed, and so has the school. What remains is an RNLI shop by the station.
West Angle Bay is the family beach: sand, rock pools, a car park and a café, safe sheltered swimming. It's a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and the rock pools are home to the rare cushion starfish, which is a lot of billing for a starfish. Above the beach stands Chapel Bay Fort, an 1890s Palmerston coastal fort — one of the first built with concrete — now a museum of weaponry and Milford Haven's defences.
The walking is the reason to come. The circular from Angle down to the surf beach at Freshwater West and back is nine to eleven miles, and once you leave the village there are no roads, houses or amenities — steep climbs, few stiles, deliberately kept wild. Boots and poles. For less commitment, the West Angle Bay loop rounds the headland past the ruined fort with views out to Thorn Island.
St Mary the Virgin is the medieval parish church, its chancel and nave thirteenth or fourteenth century. Gerald of Wales was briefly rector here in 1175. In the churchyard stands the Sailors' Chapel, Grade I listed, founded in 1447; its crypt received the bodies of drowned sailors before burial, a job it did into the twentieth century. Its restored reredos shows Christ overlooking early Angle life — fishermen on the beach, farmers in the fields, children playing, ships on the Haven.
In 1894 the lifeboat crew saved 27 men from the Loch Shiel, which was carrying 7,500 cases of Glasgow whisky. Salvaged cargo washed ashore, and one local man is said to have drunk himself to death on hundred-proof whisky.