Little Newcastle

Black Bart and the Vanished Motte

On the village green at Little Newcastle there is a memorial stone to a pirate. The inscription, in Welsh and English, records that Bartholomew Roberts — Barti Ddu, Black Bart — was born here in 1682. He took over 400 ships in his career, wrote a Pirate Code, flew an early version of the skull and crossbones, and was killed by grape-shot off West Africa in 1722. He left the village at around ten or thirteen and never came back. A blog account puts it plainly: he "made little impact on his village home in the thirteen years he spent growing up there." The village has since made a good deal of him.

The green he was born beside is not really a green. Until 1965 it was a Norman motte — a low mound about 150 feet across, thrown up in the twelfth century by Adam de Rupe, the lord who also gave the church away. That autumn the local authority bulldozed it, without any archaeological investigation, and flattened it into the open space you now walk across. The Gatehouse Gazetteer describes the council responsible as "tidy minded." A dry summer in 1914 had briefly exposed the old stone foundations beneath the soil. Nobody looked properly then either.

Hills, Spring and Church

This is a small inland village, sat on a tributary of the River Cleddau between Fishguard and Haverfordwest, on the edge of the Preseli Hills. There is no pub in it, and no shop — no butcher, no deli, nothing to buy a pint of milk from. What Little Newcastle offers is a starting point. The Preseli Hills rise straight off the village, which puts open upland walking and the Neolithic bluestone country within reach on foot. A strong spring, recorded locally as the Golden Well, still runs near where the motte used to be.

St Peter's Church adjoins the green. The present building was rebuilt in 1875 on the site of the medieval one, a small three-celled church with open timber roofs and a solid pine screen to the vestry that is described as unusual. The best thing in it is much older: a twelfth-century font, a scalloped square bowl with the corners chamfered off. The church's Elizabethan chalice is no longer here — it is on permanent loan to St Fagans. The 1996 stained glass runs through the nativity, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, in that order.

Adventure at Sealyham

For anything more active, the Sealyham Activity Centre sits about four miles off near Wolfscastle, a Georgian mansion with 100 acres of grounds, ancient woodland and its own river valley. It has been running family adventure days since 1986 — kayaking, coasteering, high ropes, archery, dinghy sailing and the rest.

Roads to Town and Coast

You will need a car. The nearest station is Clarbeston Road, six miles southeast; Haverfordwest is nine miles south, reached off the A40 via Wolf's Castle and Letterston. Fishguard, seven miles north, has the harbour, the ferry, and the coffee shops and restaurants the village itself does without.

Fairs and Defoe's Visit

The parish once held fairs twice a year, on the 6th of May and the 10th of July. Daniel Defoe came through in 1724 and talked to people who still remembered Roberts as the dark-haired boy who went to sea.