The memorial clock tower in the middle of Marloes was built in 1904 for a man who had died in 1896. Members of the Pembrokeshire Liberal Association put it up in memory of William, 4th Baron Kensington, using locally quarried stone; the clock came from J.W. Benson of London. It stands at the centre of a village near the tip of a peninsula, sea on three sides.
The pub is the Lobster Pot Inn, named for the lobster and crab fishery that once kept the village in work. The kitchen does fish and chips, Sunday roasts and gammon, steaks off a specials board, and freshly caught local fish and shellfish, with a kids' menu alongside. The menu changes often enough that they suggest you phone ahead. There are draught, keg and bottled ales, local beers and ciders, and a run of gins. It's where the Skomer and Skokholm boat traffic tends to end up.
A short way off, 150 metres from the Marloes Sands car park, Runwayskiln is a farmhouse café and restaurant doing locally caught fish and seafood, light lunches, home-made cakes and loose-leaf teas. The fish tacos are the thing people order. It has five stars on Tripadvisor and a place in the Good Food Guide 2025. The name recalls both an old coastal lime kiln and the runways of the WWII airfield built across the peninsula in 1941.
Camille's Pizza and Pasta is a home-made takeaway open Thursday to Saturday evenings, pre-order to collect, and shut for a stretch in winter. The village shop carries groceries, fresh bread and fresh veg, keeps a Post Office, and runs a beach-hut café.
The walking is the reason most people come. A circular of four or five miles runs from the village around the headland via Marloes Sands, the Deer Park and Martin's Haven, cliff-top the whole way, with Skomer offshore and seals below. The Deer Park rewards the shorter one-mile loop: it was walled in the eighteenth century to hold deer, and no deer were ever put in it. Welsh mountain ponies and Welsh Black cattle graze it now.
Marloes Sands is a broad, south-facing beach under cliffs of tilted Old Red Sandstone, covered entirely at high tide, so check before you walk down. The community site calls it "every bit as tranquil as the village itself." From Martin's Haven, a five-minute drive away, boats cross to Skomer for the puffins, guillemots and razorbills; the grey-seal pups arrive in late August.
St Peter's Church is Grade II* listed and 14th-century at its core, with a total-immersion baptistry installed in a corner of the nave in 1874, first used in 1884.
In August 1485 Henry Tudor landed nearby at Mill Bay and marched off to Bosworth Field. Marloes has spoken English for around nine hundred years, part of the strip of southern Pembrokeshire long known as "Little England beyond Wales."
The nearest station is Haverfordwest, twelve miles off on the West Wales line; Edwards Bros run the 315 bus in via Milford Haven, though a car makes the lanes easier.
In the nineteenth century villagers gathered leeches from the mere for a living, sixty or seventy acres of it. These days the mere is a place people walk to in winter to watch the wildfowl come in.