The Globe Inn is the only pub left in Maenclochog, and it doesn't do food. What it does is drink — real ale, CAMRA-listed, good beer at reasonable prices, and a Welsh spiced rum called Barti that reviewers keep singling out. It's fourth-generation family-run and holds 4.8 out of 5 on Google, which for a village of around 730 people is the kind of score most town-centre pubs would like to have. If you want lunch, there's a café across the road. The staff will point you to it.
That café is not the only thing here. For a village this size, Maenclochog is startlingly well equipped: two general stores, an agricultural supplier, two petrol stations that both do MOT testing, an art gallery, an electrical wholesaler and a carpenter. Whole towns manage with less.
St Mary's Church stands on a substantial green, which is itself unusual for this part of Pembrokeshire. The building you see was entirely rebuilt around 1790 and restored again in 1880–81 for £836, roofed in Rosebush slate over a nave of teak. Inside are two inscribed stones from the fifth or sixth century — evidence of early Irish migration, and a good deal older than anything else on the green.
A mile up the road at Rosebush is Tafarn Sinc, the highest licensed pub in Pembrokeshire and built entirely of corrugated iron. It went up in 1876 as the eleven-bedroom Precelly Hotel, a scheme to draw tourists in on the new slate railway. The tourists never quite came. The pub stayed. When Brian and Hafwen Davies retired in 2017 after twenty-five years behind the bar, more than 500 shareholders bought it as a community concern. The kitchen leans unexpectedly vegetarian — Mediterranean vegan tart, five-bean chilli, Moroccan nut roast, sweet potato roulade.
The walking is the main event. The Golden Road runs along the Preseli ridge for about eight miles, a track thought to be 5,000 years old, past the bluestone outcrops at Carn Menyn and Carn Goedog — the same stone that ended up at Stonehenge, 150 miles away. Foel Cwmcerwyn, the highest point in historic Pembrokeshire at 536 metres, sits on the northern skyline. There's a prehistoric stone circle at Gors Fawr for anyone who hasn't had enough standing stones by then.
The railway that carried the slate is gone; the nearest railhead now is Clunderwen, on the West Wales main line. The village sits on the B4313, with rural buses to Narberth and Haverfordwest. Pembrokeshire lay outside the reach of the Domesday surveyors, so there is no medieval valuation to quote — the earliest written form of the name appears on a parish map in 1583.
The name itself means noisy stone. Local legend records bell-stones near St Mary's Well that rang when struck, until treasure-hunters convinced they hid gold smashed them apart in 1811.
In 1943, Barnes Wallis tested a bouncing bomb in the old railway tunnel here, and the Great Western Railway laid on a special train from London to bring him. The tunnel is quiet again now.