There is a small wooden table in the Royal Oak on Market Square with a plaque on it. The plaque explains that the terms of the French surrender were signed on this table on 23 February 1797. The Royal Oak served as Lord Cawdor's headquarters during what turned out to be the last invasion of mainland Britain, and it is still a pub, still doing food lunchtime and evening, still pouring real ale. The table is just there, in the corner, holding drinks.
The invasion is worth explaining, because Fishguard has never quite got over it and has no reason to. In February 1797, 1,400 French troops — many of them released from prison for the occasion, and going by the name La Légion Noire — landed at Carregwastad Point under the command of an Irish-American colonel called William Tate. They surrendered within two days. Local legend credits Jemima Nicholas, a cobbler, with rounding up around a dozen of them armed with a pitchfork. She was given a pension of £50 a year and the name Jemima Fawr, Jemima the Great, and she is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's with a handsome tombstone. The whole episode is retold across a 100-foot embroidered tapestry, made for the bicentenary in 1997 and hanging in its own gallery upstairs at the Town Hall, in the manner of Bayeux.
The town comes in three parts. There is the main town on the hilltop, the old harbour of Lower Town down at the water where the River Gwaun comes in, and Goodwick across the bay. Between them the Parrog spreads out into a wide beach and flat marshland. All of it sits inside the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.
Lower Town is where you want the Ship Inn. It dates from the 1780s, which makes it around 270 years old, and it is tiny, low-beamed, hung with seafaring clutter and warmed by a log fire. Meriel, the landlady, keeps Bass, Felinfoel Double Dragon and Hancocks HB on the pumps — regulars that, by all accounts, never change and never need to. There is a curry night on Saturdays. Richard Burton and Gregory Peck both drank here, back when Lower Town was standing in for the fictional Llareggub in the film of Under Milk Wood and, earlier, for the harbour in Moby Dick.
St Mary's Church, up on The Square, was built in 1855 to a design donated free by a holidaymaker, Thomas Clark, after the professional plans came in too expensive. It has stained glass by John Petts and, unusually for an Anglican church, a baptistery pool set into the floor.
The Marine Walk is a mile and a half around the headland and back through town, with the harbour and breakwater in view for most of it. For something longer, the coast path runs the 11.7 miles to Newport, or west past Strumble Head and its 1908 lighthouse.
At Goodwick, next to the ferry that sails twice a day to Ireland, is the Ocean Lab, where a small aquarium keeps pipe fish, lobster, jellyfish and an octopus. The beach beside it shallows out so gently that toddlers can wade a long way before anything gets serious.