At high tide the road across the ford floods, and the only way to reach the Cresselly Arms is by boat up the Milford Haven estuary. At low tide, stepping stones cross the river at the quay and you can walk out onto the marsh. The village keeps these two states, twice a day, and arranges itself around whichever one is currently in force.
The Cresselly Arms is the reason most people come. It sits ivy-covered on the bank of the Cresswell River, a building around 250 years old, Grade II listed, and in the same family's hands from 1896 to 1981. Steve Adams is the landlord and freeholder now. Inside there are quarry-tiled floors, a Victorian counter, a cast-iron fireplace and panelled seating — an interior CAMRA rates as nationally important, which is a formal way of saying almost nothing about it has changed.
It serves no food. This is a beer-only pub, and it commits to the position. Four cask beers: Hancock's HB, Draught Bass, Glamorgan Jemima's Pitchfork, and a rotating guest that might be Bluestone Bedrock Blonde or Wye Valley Butty Bach. Some of it comes to you by jug, poured straight from the cask. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "a diamond pub right off the beaten track." In summer the landlord sometimes fires up a riverside barbecue at the weekend, and drinkers take their pints out to the quayside garden, where the river is close enough for crabbing.
There is no shop, no church, and no playground. The parish church, St Jeffrey & St Oswald, stands a little away at Jeffreyston, on a circular churchyard that marks a very early Christian site; an 8th-century carved stone is kept in its porch. Cresswell Quay itself is a hamlet, and a small one.
It was not always this quiet. Between 1768 and 1828, more than fifty small pits worked the ground inland from the quay, and coal from Reynalton, Loveston and Yerbeston was loaded onto barges here and taken down to Lawrenny for the larger ships. Vessels up to eighty tons were filled at Cresswell, and the coal went as far as Sussex and Brittany. The trade was fading by the 1820s. The last commercial cargo came in 1948 — a load of culm landed from Hook — and after that the quay went quiet. Limekilns from the old lime trade still stand along the shoreline.
Half a mile upriver is Cresswell Castle, a ruin on private land. A 13th-century Augustinian foundation, it was later held by the Barlows of Slebech; William Barlow made it his home, enlarging it into a quadrangular house with corner towers, stables and fishponds, before it was abandoned late in the 17th century.
The walking is the other draw. A 4.9-mile circular links Cresswell Quay with Carew, its castle and its restored tidal mill, following two tidal creeks past salt marsh and millponds over about two and a half hours. Otters work the water, oystercatchers and redshank pick over the mudflats, and barn owls hunt at dawn and dusk.
There is no station and no useful bus; Kilgetty, six or seven miles off, is the nearest railway, reached by narrow lanes off the A477. You come here by car, or by boat, and you check the tide before you set off.