Haverfordwest

Riverside Market and Quayside

Every Friday between nine and two, fifteen-odd stalls set up along the Riverside with the Cleddau running behind them, selling freshly caught fish and shellfish, lamb, beef, turkey, goat, pork, cheeses, honey and bread. It's a certified farmers' market, which means the people selling the produce are the people who raised or caught it. The river winds straight through the middle of the town, and most of Haverfordwest arranges itself up the slope above it.

Down on the water in the Riverside quarter, the Bristol Trader is a Grade II listed riverside pub with tables out on the Old Quay looking over the Cleddau. There has been an inn on this spot since at least the 1700s, back when the town was the port at the tidal head of the river. It's refurbished now, quiet in the daytime and busier for dinner, and one reviewer's verdict — "retains some character despite modernization" — covers it fairly.

Pubs and Farm-Shop Produce

The Lost Coins takes its name from a hoard of Roman coins recorded in James Phillips' 1909 History of Pembrokeshire and then lost. It does elegant pub classics and homemade kebabs, keeps famous cask ales, and has a beer garden a Tripadvisor reviewer called "just stunning — fairy lights and a warm Italian feel." There's a children's playground in the grounds. If you want live music instead, the Pembroke Yeoman runs open mic nights and streams the rugby, with a cider list to match its ales. The William Owen is the town Wetherspoon, CAMRA-acclaimed for its real ale.

For meat, Cig Lodor is a working sheep and beef farm with its own butcher's shop, low-mileage and stocking local cheese, eggs, ice cream and bread alongside.

Church and Castle on the Ridge

At the top of the High Street stands St Mary's, Grade I listed and built in the late 1100s, then largely rebuilt in the 1240s after Llywelyn the Great damaged it in 1220. Its arcades and chancel arch are Caen stone, described as cathedral quality, and the timber ceiling dates to around 1500. Pevsner ranked it, "next to St David's Cathedral as the chief architectural ornament of the county."

The castle crowns the ridge above the river. Founded around 1100, rebuilt on a grand scale by Queen Eleanor after 1289, it saw off an attack during Owain Glyndŵr's revolt in 1405 and was slighted on Cromwell's orders in 1648. A prison went up inside the walls in 1820 and now holds the town museum, though it is closed for restoration until 2028.

River and Woodland Walks

The town isn't short of walks. Fortune's Frolic follows the river through woodland, and a short riverside path runs along the Western Cleddau from near the station. Further out, Minwear Forest has a waymarked loop to a viewpoint over the estuary, and the 60-mile Landsker Borderlands Trail traces the old language boundary past the Norman castles at Llawhaden and Carew.

Rail Connections

The station is in the town, on the West Wales line, with a train roughly every two hours. It won "Anglo-Irish Best Station" in 1991 and again in 1992, which is a specific thing to be good at, and Haverfordwest managed it twice.