The Castle Inn is the only pub in Manorbier, an 18th-century place five minutes' walk from both the beach and the Norman castle. The burgers are ground from meat off the local butcher, the steaks are Welsh, and the chilli and curry are made from scratch. Pizzas and flatbreads come out of an in-house bakehouse — a Korean chicken flatbread one reviewer called "massive and very tasty," a harissa veg one, salt and pepper squid, the Kahuna burger. There's a real open fire, a dog-friendly dining room, a large beer garden with very little in the way of heaters, and Sky Sports on for the football. Real ale comes on both hand pump and gravity dispense, usually Welsh, with Cornish Doom Bar as the reliable outsider. The quiz is Sunday at half eight.
The village itself is a handful of narrow residential streets running down a valley to the sea. The castle sits on one side of the combe, the church faces it across the gap, and the houses fill the space between. A stream runs down the valley to Manorbier Bay, a sandy cove that faces south-west and picks up enough clean surf to be a surfers' beach. The bay is dog-friendly all year, the rockpools fill with wildlife at low tide, and the coast path runs along the cliffs above it.
For daytime eating there's a spread that outsizes the village. The Potting Shed café sits inside Manorbier Garden Centre, open nine to four, serving its own coffee blend and a ploughman's it calls the Potting Shed Platter — Pembrokeshire ham, cheese, a Scotch egg, pork pie, salad, pickles and chutney. There's cawl, quiche, fish-finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream. Dogs get treats. Up at the castle, the tea room occupies the original 13th-century Guards Room and does cream teas and home-baked things on a terrace over the grounds. And Castlemead, a family-run restaurant with rooms at the head of the village beside the church, cooks a daily-changing menu from as much home- and locally grown produce as it can manage; in the off-season you phone ahead or you don't eat.
The village shop is a Nisa Local combined with the Post Office, which covers the essentials and the stamps. Opposite the pub, the building that was Beach Break Tearooms — run for years by two sisters, Zoe and Anne, and sold with a guide price of £525,000 — is now Manorbier House, doing breakfast, lunch and tapas evenings with a small gift shop of beachwear and inflatable toys at the back.
A mile up the road at Jameston, still inside the parish, the Swanlake Inn is a 16th-century pub with some of its walls still wattle and daub, visible in the bread oven by the open fire. It was bought a few years ago by a Jameston local, Damian Brown, and does homecooked food and Sunday roasts — lamb, chicken curry, turkey and lamb roasts with plenty of vegetables — with Gower Gold and Wychwood Hobgoblin on as regulars.
Almost every walk here is a spur off the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, which runs straight through the village. The shortest drops from the beach car park down to the sand and climbs the eastern cliff to King's Quoit, a Neolithic dolmen that has stood on the Priest's Nose headland since around 3000 BC — its capstone four metres by two and a half, resting partly on rising ground and partly on two uprights. A longer circular of about three miles takes in Rook's Cave and Priest's Nose itself, a curved headland that juts into the sea under a more or less permanent traffic of cormorants and gulls. There is a deep, concealed fissure on Priest's Nose; the coast path authorities would rather you kept to the paths. West of the village the path runs just under four miles to Freshwater East, passing Swanlake Bay roughly halfway — a belt of sand reached only on foot across farmland, which is what keeps it empty in August. Eastward it's about eight miles to Tenby past Skrinkle Haven and Lydstep.
The stream is worth a look on a wet day. Nearly all the dark grey pebbles in its bed carry fossils — crinoid fragments, the odd coral or brachiopod — and they show up best in the rain, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a family activity in Pembrokeshire. The cliffs around the bay are Old Red Sandstone tilted almost to the vertical, row after row of strata standing on end from the shore up to the clifftop. For quieter beaches there's Church Doors Cove, named for two high arched caves that resemble the doors of a church, with a tunnel you can scramble through at low tide into Skrinkle Haven, an empty stretch of fine sand. Both are reached down a long steel staircase and neither suits a toddler. YHA Manorbier, a converted MOD building at Skrinkle with sixty-nine beds and glamping pods, sits a few minutes' walk from both, with a café that doubles as a rainy-day fallback.
The castle is the reason the village is here, and it's open to visit — grounds, waxwork figures, a tea room, gardens laid out in the inner ward. It is one of the best-preserved Norman castles in Wales, largely because almost nothing ever happened to it. Odo de Barri was granted the land in 1093 and threw up a timber-and-earth fort; his son William rebuilt it in stone. In its entire history the place was stormed exactly twice — once in 1327 by Richard de Barri, claiming it as rightfully his, and once in 1645 when Cromwell's troops seized and slighted it. The rest of the time it passed quietly from family to family, spent a good stretch of the 17th and 18th centuries working as a farmhouse, and was pulled back from decay by a Victorian named J.R. Cobb, who restored the chapel, gatehouse and round tower and laid out the gardens from 1880.
Its most famous son was born inside it around 1146: Gerald of Wales, Giraldus Cambrensis, grandson of Odo and one of the great scholars and chroniclers of the medieval world. He tutored the future Richard the Lionheart and King John, became Archdeacon of St David's, and rode the length of the country in 1188 recruiting for a crusade, writing it up afterwards in a way that has earned him the title of Wales's first travel writer. He was fond of home. "In all the broad lands of Wales," he wrote, "Manorbier is the most pleasant place by far." As a boy of about seven he had been hidden inside the village church during local unrest — a first-hand account that ties the fabric of the place to him directly. His father called him "my bishop."
That church, St James's, faces the castle across the valley and is Grade I listed. It's remarkable for barrel vaulting through most of the interior and a slender local-type tower with a bellcote. The nave is 12th-century, the chancel around 1250 and deliberately misaligned — a "weeping chancel" leaning to the right of the nave. There are medieval ceiling paintings in the porch, a 14th-century de Barri effigy taken to be John de Barri, who died in 1324, two fonts of which one is possibly Norman, and the royal arms of William IV painted on boards. The churchyard is circular, which is the physical trace of a much older site — a 6th-century Celtic monastery linked to St Pyr, the hermit-saint whose name is the village's own: Manorbier is the Manor of Pyr.
A hundred metres from the castle stands a medieval dovecote, circular, with a corbelled domed roof and tiers of nest boxes curving into the stone for around 240 birds. Cadw calls it the best-preserved of its kind in South Wales. There's a watermill down a side lane toward the beach and a restored lime kiln in Mud Lane behind the castle. Between them they are what's left of the working de Barri manor: the mill ground its corn, the dovecote fed the household, the kiln burned lime for mortar and the fields.
The village kept drawing writers long after Gerald. Virginia Woolf summered here from 1904 and in late August 1908 stayed alone at a cottage called Sea View, working on her first novel, The Voyage Out; the cottage was renamed Blue Dolphins after the war. Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem called "A Ruined Castle" here in 1924 while staying at Skrinkle with Walter de la Mare. George Bernard Shaw turned up too, once Cobb's restoration had made the castle worth turning up for.
For thirteen years the village also had an airfield. It opened in 1933 and by 1937 was an anti-aircraft gunnery school flying the de Havilland Queen Bee — a pilotless, radio-controlled version of the Tiger Moth trainer — as live targets for the guns to shoot at. When the grass runways flooded, the station acquired catapults to launch the Queen Bees off the clifftops instead. The airfield closed in 1946 and the site is now a Royal Artillery range, the only one in the country used for the High Velocity Missile in the anti-aircraft role. The coast path is diverted around it, so the red flags don't come as a surprise.
Getting here is a request stop and an hourly bus. Manorbier station, a mile north of the village and nearer Jameston, sits on the Pembroke Dock branch of the West Wales Line; trains stop on request roughly every two hours, west to Pembroke Dock, east to Tenby, Carmarthen and Swansea. The First Cymru 349 runs Monday to Saturday, about hourly, twenty minutes into Tenby, with no service on Sundays. By road it's minor lanes off the A4139, Tenby four to six miles east and Pembroke about eight west, and the beach car park is where you actually want to arrive — the village lanes are narrow and short on parking.
When the sun's out, an ice-cream van parks at the beach. Reviewers keep calling it some of the best ice cream they've had, which is a lot to ask of a van, on a beach, at the bottom of a valley that Gerald settled the argument about eight hundred years ago.