Landshipping

The Quay and the Missing Pub

At Landshipping Quay there is a memorial plaque, put up by local people in 2002, with a second plaque beside it listing names and ages. It marks the Garden Pit disaster, and it is the thing most people come to the quay to find. The rest is water: the tidal Daugleddau spreading out over mudflats, oak woods on the banks, and not much else moving.

This is a quiet place now, and honest about it. Landshipping has no shop and no open pub. The Stanley Arms, near the quay at SA67 8BE, was for years "the meeting place of the village" — a country pub that served real ales and food and welcomed families and dogs. It closed several years ago and is now a private house. The nearest pint is at the Cresselly Arms at Cresswell Quay, a short drive or an estuary-side walk away, riverside and given over to real ale.

A Mining Village and Its Disaster

If that sounds thin, it helps to know what used to be here. In the nineteenth century Landshipping was a coal-mining community — the Big House history site describes "a bustling village, with schools, shops, businesses and pubs" — all of it built around the colliery, and all of it gone. Garden Pit was re-established in 1788, its shaft sunk sixty-seven yards, its workings running out under the estuary. Around 1800 it was one of the first collieries anywhere to install a steam engine for haulage and pumping.

On 14 February 1844, at about half past three in the afternoon, the river broke through the thin rock roof of those workings. Fifty-eight people were below. Eighteen got out. About forty men, women and boys drowned — the worst single death toll in Pembrokeshire mining history. The youngest was four. That is what the plaque at the quay is for.

Walking the Daugleddau

The walking is the reason to come now. Short waterside sections run along the Daugleddau from the quay, through oak woods and fields, and the 60-mile Landsker Borderlands Trail passes through with stretches along the Cleddau. Just off the village is Picton Point, where the Eastern and Western Cleddau meet, opposite the gardens of Picton Castle across the water. The estuary is full of birds — curlews, egrets, herons, shelduck, cormorants — and seals and otters work the wider reaches. Open canoes go out on the river.

Gardens, Towns and the Road In

Picton Castle and its forty acres of gardens are about ten minutes away by road. Narberth, a market town with independent shops, is fifteen; Oakwood, the biggest theme park in Wales, about the same. Haverfordwest and its station are five miles northwest, up narrow lanes off the A40. No bus comes to the village, which surprises nobody.

St Marcellus and a Plain Name

The parish church, St Marcellus at Martletwy, is largely Norman under later restoration, first mentioned in 1231. The name Landshipping is older in feel and plainer in fact: it comes from "Long Shippen," meaning long cow shed. The place has been through a great deal since then, and gone quiet again.