Broad Haven

Tide, sand and the seafront

At high tide, Broad Haven's beach is a narrow strip of sand and pebbles. Wait a few hours and the sea pulls back to reveal a vast expanse of firm golden sand, which is the version most people picture and the reason the place has been a resort since the 1800s. The bay faces west, at the south-east corner of St Brides Bay, and the sand runs to within about a hundred metres of the village.

The village has one pub, the Galleon Inn, right on the seafront. It's family-run, does homemade burgers, steak and a veggie curry, and makes a point of a vegetable burger built from real veggies — broccoli and peas — with vegan and gluten-free options and large portions. Upstairs, the Sunset View Restaurant looks out over the bay. One reviewer called it "a fine location by a broad beach with good quality pub food at very good prices," which is a fair summary. Dogs are welcome on the ground floor. Live music at weekends, quiz nights. If one pub isn't enough, three more — including the Castle and the Swan — sit a short walk over the headland in Little Haven, or a beach walk at low tide.

Shops, food and the coast path

The seafront village shop sells almost everything, which here means beach essentials: buckets, spades and a good deal of ice cream. The Beach Shop deals in handmade jewellery, ceramics and art by local artisans. The Ocean Café is open from 9am until late for breakfast through to dinner, and there's a Sand & Stone Kitchen and a Beach Café facing each other by the water near Haven Sports.

The walking is what you'd hope for on a coast like this. The stretch from Haroldston Chins is 1.8 miles and about an hour each way, level for the first 600 metres and then steeper into the village, with views across St Brides Bay from Skomer to St Davids and gannets diving offshore. The rocks along here have names worth knowing — Settling Nose, Sleek Stone, Lion Rock — and Black Point, an Iron Age promontory fort, is slowly falling into the sea. Broad Haven sits on both the 186-mile Pembrokeshire Coast Path and the 870-mile Wales Coast Path.

Up Haroldston Woods

From beside the youth hostel, a footpath climbs Haroldston Woods up a wooded valley to St Madoc of Ferns Church, which stands on the site of a religious community said to have been founded in 583 AD. It still keeps a medieval font. The Church in Wales closed it in 2022; a community group looks after it now.

The Broad Haven Triangle

In February 1977, fourteen pupils at the primary school reported a silver, cigar-shaped craft landing in a field behind it, some describing a silver-suited figure with pointed ears. The headmaster interviewed each child and concluded they weren't "capable of a sustained, sophisticated hoax." Sightings carried on through the spring — the Coombs family at Ripperston Farm, Rosa Granville at the Haven Fort Hotel. The MoD found nothing. People still call it the Broad Haven Triangle.

Arriving by rail and bus

Haverfordwest station is seven miles east; the Puffin Shuttle bus runs the coast in summer. Most days, though, the tide decides how much beach there is to argue over.