The Freshwater Inn sits on Jason Road with the sea laid out in front of it, and for most of the twentieth century it was not a pub at all. It opened in 1912 as the Grotto Country Club, which tells you the sort of clientele Freshwater East once expected. These days it does award-winning fish and chips, Sweet Chilli Chicken, vegan options and portions that reviewers keep describing as generous. The regular cask beer is Felinfoel Double Dragon, a 4.2% session bitter from up the coast, with two more that change. Dogs are welcome, the garden looks out over the water, and as of mid-2025 it was reported temporarily closed — worth checking before you set your heart on the fish and chips.
That is more or less the whole village. Freshwater East is a small cliff-top place of around 250 people, with a café, some toilets and a car park for the beach. There is no row of shops. For a supermarket you go to Lamphey, two miles north, or Pembroke, seven miles on.
The beach is the point. Golden sand backed by dunes, a south-facing sheltered bay, a stream running out at the southern end and low cliffs folding into small coves to the east. It holds a Green Coast Award and sits inside the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. At low tide, as Coastal Cottages put it, "the sea exposes an abundance of sand for all those family ball games." Behind the sand lies The Burrows, a 90-acre nature reserve of dune grassland and woodland with a boardwalk laid across a reed marsh.
The dunes here have a history of being fussed over. Rabbits kept them cropped until myxomatosis arrived in the 1950s, inter-war plot development chewed at them, and building was only halted when the area became a National Park in 1952. The Park Authority has been reclaiming them ever since.
The walking is the reason most people stay. Head east along the Wales Coast Path and it is 3.2 miles of clifftop to Swanlake Bay, roughly an hour and a half. Swanlake can only be reached on foot, so it is nearly always empty; it has a raised beach from a pre-Ice Age sea level, and Stone Age flint chippings have turned up in the sand. West takes you into the Stackpole estate — Barafundle Bay, Broad Haven South, and a full circular of about 9.4 miles with 1,269 feet of climbing if your legs are willing.
The village earned its name from a stream that watered ships, and it appears on a 1578 parish map as a coastal watering place. In the eighteenth century it did a quiet trade in smuggling, with contraband stashed in the cliffs. In 1860 the Pembrokeshire county horse races were run along the beach.
Lamphey has the nearest station, a request stop on the Pembroke Dock line, and the Coastal Cruiser bus loops through to Pembroke. Lamphey also has the ruined Bishop's Palace, a Grade I Cadw site with a 25-metre great hall, once ringed by fishponds and deer park.
The musician Euros Childs, of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, grew up around here. It is that kind of coast — quiet, sandy, and slightly stranger than it looks.