Llangwm

Shell banks and village essentials

Crushed white oyster and cockle shells still line the muddy banks where the main street runs down to the water. They are leftovers of a trade that has all but stopped, but nobody has cleared them, and they mark the tidal inlets — the pills — that the winding street of Llangwm keeps sliding down towards. The village sits on the Llangwm Pill, off the Daugleddau estuary of the River Cleddau, about six miles south of Haverfordwest.

For a village of around 450 houses, it has held on to a surprising amount. There is a primary school, a shop and a pharmacy — the kind of trio that most places this size lost decades ago.

The Cottage Inn and Blacktar Point

The pub is the Cottage Inn on Main Street, the last one standing after the Three Horseshoes closed. It does a lamb Sunday dinner, pepper chicken, and a vegetarian mushroom and brie pie, with the chef running to steak in mushroom and garlic sauce and a pork belly that reviewers describe as generous. The ales are Brains Rev James Original and Sharp's Doom Bar. It shuts on Mondays, so plan accordingly.

The walk everyone does is the loop to Blacktar Point, about a mile and a half and easy, though it can be muddy. It follows Llangwm Pill out to the Black Tar promontory, where the estuary opens up towards Lawrenny Quay and the Daugleddau, and the birdwatching is good. Native oyster beds still lie in the Cleddau out here. Lawrenny Quay, with its National Trust woodland, is directly across the water — close enough to see, a fair drive to reach.

Oysters and the fisherwomen

Black Tar was the working heart of the old oyster trade. The Herne Bay Oyster Company had 38 boats contracted here by 1870, paying the fishermen £1 12s 6d per thousand oysters. Then the beds collapsed — from 33,000 oysters a week in the 1860s to 3,000 by 1871. Of those 38 men, 26 were "marksmen" who signed with an X because they could not write their names.

The village ran on a fishing society where women did the selling. Men and women shared the rowing and navigation, but the women hauled the catch on foot in panniers to market at Haverfordwest, Pembroke Dock and Tenby, kept their maiden names, and reportedly did the proposing. Philippa Davies, writing in nation.cymru, notes that "the Vikings sailed up the Cleddau to winter their boats on the shores at Llangwm."

St Jerome's Church

The Church of St Jerome was built in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century under the Norman lord Adam de la Roche, and roughly three-quarters of its pre-Victorian fabric survives. Its north transept was the de la Roche family chapel, built around 1350 after the Black Death, with decorated arches over the tombs of Lady Margaret de la Roche and her grandson Sir Robert. A 2016 "Talking Tapestry" installation tells their story. Two nonconformist chapels stand nearby.

Getting here and festival time

Haverfordwest is ten minutes by car, or the 308/309 bus. The village throws a festival in late June, and a literary festival each August. Many of the cottages still keep a boat or a coil of fishing gear out front, for a fleet that has mostly gone.