Lawrenny

Eating at Lawrenny Quay

The Lawrenny Arms sits at the bottom of a half-mile lane, on the banks of the Cleddau estuary, with its own pontoon so you can moor against the pub and walk straight up to the bar. It looks south over the water, which forks upriver in two branches towards Cresswell Quay and Carew Castle. Inside there's an L-shaped bar with a pool table and a Sports TV area, Hancock's HB and Sharp's Doom Bar on the pumps, and a marquee out on the riverside for functions. The food is home-cooked and reasonably priced, with traditional Sunday roasts you'll want to book for in season. Walkers and sailors both end up here, which tells you what the village is for.

A few steps along the quay is the Quayside Tearoom, opened by Andrew and Fiona in 2004 and since collecting a shelf of awards. It's a calm room of chapel chairs and pine floorboards, with a large low-walled terrace looking over the Daugleddau. The baking is done on site each day. Alongside the sandwiches and freshly baked baguettes there's Roast Lobster, Wild Mushroom Tart, Smoked Mackerel Pâté and locally caught crab, which is more ambition than most tearooms bring to a Tuesday.

Village life and the Secret Waterway

The village shop is community-run and automated — members can let themselves in and buy essentials at any hour. It was on ITV Wales news in 2016, and there's a mobile post office too.

Lawrenny sits on a peninsula where the estuary narrows between steep wooded banks, a stretch known locally as the "Secret Waterway." The village runs downhill to Lawrenny Quay, now a busy yacht station, and people put out from here to sail, kayak, wind-surf and fish on the sheltered water.

Woodland circuit and medieval church

The walking follows the same shoreline. A 2.8-mile circular from the quay takes about an hour and a half through reasonably level woodland and along the foreshore, passing St Caradoc's Church and Garron Pill — though the foreshore stretch is impassable within an hour of the highest spring tides, so check before you set off. The woods here are among the best-preserved ancient woodland in the Milford Haven valley, mostly sessile oak, with over 200 lichen species and bluebells underfoot in spring. Herons, kingfishers and dippers work the river.

St Caradoc's Church was founded in the 12th century and dedicated to a local early-medieval saint. The four-storey west tower went up in the 15th century; the whole thing is a cruciform of limestone rubble, Grade II* listed.

Castle ground and racing memory

There used to be a castle. The Lort-Phillips family built Lawrenny Castle, a castellated mansion, in the 1850s — magnificent to look at and, by all accounts, very hard to live in. It was demolished around 1950, and a National Park picnic site and viewpoint occupy the spot now.

The village once produced a Grand National winner. In 1905 the racing stables here turned out Kirkland, ridden by Frank Mason, the first Welsh-trained horse to win at Aintree. The stables are long gone; the population has fallen from 422 in the 1830s to about a hundred today.

Getting to Lawrenny

Pembroke is twenty minutes away by winding lane off the A4075, with Pembroke Dock the nearest station. But most people come to be on the water, and in the evening the pontoon fills with boats that have come in for a roast.