Narberth

Inn Kitchens and High Street Delis

The Angel sits on the High Street in an 18th-century coaching inn, and the couple who run it, Louise and Lyndon, have a one-word tagline: "nothing pinged." They mean it literally. Even the pasta for the oxtail lasagne is made in-house. The beef, pork and chicken come from the award-winning butcher a few doors along the same street, the vegetables from local farms, the fish from the waters off the Pembrokeshire coast. Inside there are low beams and an open fire, a bright modern lounge, an elegant restaurant, and a fireside cwtch for coffee and homemade bakes; out the back a sun terrace catches the afternoon. The menu runs from fish and chips to steaks, pies and seafood, with vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options and an artisan range of Welsh gins, rums and whiskies. Reviewers keep singling out the chocolate brownie. One review headline reads "Exactly what Narberth needs." Dogs are welcome, but in the beer garden only.

The butcher is worth the short walk. Andrew Rees opened his shop on 3 October 1988, aged 23, having started five years earlier as an apprentice to Gordon Hughes in Whitland. He now supplies over 300 pubs, hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions, up from an original eight, and has won a shelf's worth of awards along the way: True Taste of Wales, Best Butcher's Shop in Wales, the Daily Telegraph's Best Rural Retailer in the UK, and an Alan Titchmarsh Local Hero award. It is a butcher's shop on a hilly Georgian high street in a town of a few thousand people. That is the sort of town Narberth is.

The Georgian and Edwardian buildings run in colour up a steep High Street, and the ground floors are given over to delis, galleries, boutiques and antique shops. Ultracomida, at number 7, is a Spanish delicatessen with a tapas room at the back, opened in 2005 by Paul and Shumana Grimwood as a spin-off from their Aberystwyth business. The cheese display takes in France, Spain and Wales; the shelves carry sherries, cured meats, olives, speciality oils and saffron. In the room behind, the patatas bravas are £3.95, the chorizo comes poached in Welsh cider, and a food blogger who went in for lunch came out calling it "a very, very dangerous place." Booking is advised. It fills up quickly.

Cafés, Pubs and Festival Tables

A few doors on, Fforc is a Welsh deli best known for its lobster roll in season — chunks of lobster, capers, crisp salad, good bread — and stocks Welsh sea salt and Pembrokeshire honey. Plumvanilla, round on St James Street, is a vegetarian café with an organic shop next door and a menu that changes daily, leaning Indian and Mediterranean. On Water Street, the Barley Gastrobar occupies the old Barley Mow pub, run by chef Rhys Thomas and his partner Jodie Dickinson; it does small plates, sizzling grills and seafood specials, and the sea bass gets the praise. Down at Market Square, Madtom is a seafood café-bar where Tom cooks and Samantha runs the room, sending out Tenby lobster and platters of mussels, whitebait, calamari and prawns with mini loaves of bread.

For bread proper, Rock'N'Dough took over the old NatWest at 33 High Street in May 2023, having begun as a lockdown sourdough hobby in the founders' kitchen. It opens Wednesday to Saturday from seven until sold out, and the counter runs to maple and pecan croissants, harissa and halloumi flatbread, cinnamon buns and olive focaccia. When that is done, walk up to Fire & Ice on St James Street, where Ivan and Lynn make gelato and sorbet with organic Welsh cream. The choices change daily, tasters are handed out freely, and the list includes a raspberry prosecco made with a whole bottle of prosecco, a Welsh whisky, and what the shop bills as the ultimate cider sorbet. Some of the sorbets are alcohol-infused, which is worth knowing before you hand one to a child.

Narberth once had a great many pubs. The Angel's own history reckons 31 have graced the town over the years; one man who grew up here in the nineties remembers "around twenty grizzled old pubs" on the High Street. Today the survivors are fewer and the balance has swung toward the boutique, but the drinking is still real. The Star, on Market Square, is a genuine micropub with rooms whose sign promises real ales, good wines, local spirits and a wide range of softs; a CAMRA visitor in July 2024 gave particular praise to the vegan pies, which are served, along with cakes, until six. The Ivy Bush on the High Street was recently refurbished under Steve and Sheila, has a rear snug called the Cwtch Bar, runs a quiz on Wednesdays, and drew one reviewer to call it the best pub in Narberth, with a nod to the spotless lavatories. The Kirkland Arms, tucked onto St James Street off the one-way system, is the traditional back-street local, drinks-led, with the regulars gathered round the bar. The Eagle Inn, an old coaching inn, still has its original jukebox.

Food Ambition and Woodland Routes

Much of the town's food reputation comes together twice a year. The Narberth Food Festival has run on the fourth weekend of September since 1998, drawing celebrity chefs and filling the Town Moor with stalls, guest kitchens and live music. Narberth is twinned with Ludlow in Shropshire, and the two towns share a food festival between them. The Hwb, on Moorfield Road, is a craft-beer and street-food hall built into the town's former Victorian primary school, run with Tenby Brewing Co. The Guardian, in 2014, called Narberth a gastronomic hub for west Wales and one of the liveliest, most likeable little towns in the country.

If you want a proper meal out, the Grove is fifteenth-century Welsh longhouse turned five-star country hotel just outside town, and its restaurant, The Fernery, holds four AA Rosettes and a Michelin listing under Douglas Balish, a chef from Ayrshire who won a star at the Tudor Room in Surrey before coming here. The tasting menus are five courses at £120 or seven at £145, and the vegetables come from the hotel's own gardens.

The walking starts at the Town Moor, the park behind the Hwb, which was given to the town in perpetuity by the Elliott family in the eighteenth century and now holds the playing fields, the playground and the pay-and-display. From there a footpath drops down Carding Mill Lane — named for a long-gone wool-carding mill — into Canaston Woods, some 420 acres of ancient mixed woodland with streams good for dogs, plenty of shade, and a mountain-bike track through the middle. The short, official loop from the Town Moor runs about 3.7 miles out to Blackpool Mill and back, mostly easy going. The mill itself is a Grade II* Georgian building at the highest tidal reach of the River Cleddau, named for the deep dark pool beside it; it ground flour until 1958 and reopened in 2023 as a heritage restaurant. The pool is a good place to watch for otters. For a bigger day there is a fourteen-mile circuit over Narberth Mountain, borrowing sections of the Knight's Way and the South of the Landsker Trail, the sixty-mile long-distance route that traces the old England–Wales frontier through inland Pembrokeshire. This border, the Landsker Line, is the reason the town exists where it does.

Family Days and Layered History

Families do not have to go far. Heron's Brook, in Narberth itself, combines an eighteen-hole golf course with an animal park of deer, pygmy goats, pot-bellied pigs, donkeys, miniature ponies and otters, plus mini tractors and a double toboggan run. Within a short drive are Oakwood, Wales' largest theme park; Bluestone, a lodge resort with a covered water park of flumes, wave machine and lazy river; Folly Farm near Kilgetty; and Wild Lakes Wales at Martletwy, billed as Pembrokeshire's only wake park, with a bouldering wall that stays open all year. Tenby, walled and beach-lined, is about twenty-five minutes off; Saundersfoot and its harbour closer still.

The history sits underneath all of this, mostly quiet. Narberth Castle, first mentioned in 1116, was raised in stone by Andrew Perrot in the thirteenth century, granted in 1516 to Sir Rhys ap Thomas — the man some credit with killing Richard III at Bosworth — and finally slighted by Cromwell's forces in the Civil War. Excavations on the north side turned up more than twenty graves from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hinting at a church there before the castle. It reopened to the public in 2005 with a children's play staged in the ruins. On the High Street, the Town Hall of 1833 combined a lock-up and a courthouse; its ground-floor cell is still called Rebecca's Cell, after the 1839–43 tollgate riots in which men in women's clothes tore down the gates, the first attack coming at nearby Efailwen. Emmeline Pankhurst addressed the crowds from these steps in 1908. Narberth Museum, a few streets over, occupies the old Bonded Stores, a building designed to keep people out: for over a century the firm James Williams Ltd blended and bottled whisky and port here duty-free, behind a door with two padlocks, one opened by the revenue inspector and one by the manager.

The parish church of St Andrew keeps its medieval Pembrokeshire tower — tall, slender, a little over five metres square — while the rest was rebuilt in 1879–82. In 1796 the tower was struck by lightning that, in the parish's own words, first hit the weathercock, descended the tower and exploded in the body of the church, "carrying away every Pane of Glass in the Windows and demolishing every Pew in the Chancel, melting even the Nails in them." The Domesday surveyors never reached any of this; the 1086 survey did not cover most of Wales, so Narberth, like the rest of Pembrokeshire, has no entry at all.

Myth, Memory and Civic Week

For all its Norman castle and Georgian street, the town's oldest story is older still. In the Mabinogi, Narberth — Arberth — is the chief court of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and the mound outside it, Gorsedd Arberth, is where he first saw Rhiannon ride past on her magic horse. The mound is usually identified with Camp Hill, an Iron Age enclosure just south of the centre, though there is nothing to see there now: the fort is buried under a grassy field, its outline showing only from the air.

The last full week of July belongs to Civic Week, a hundred-year-old run of tea dances, children's sports, a dog show, swimming competitions and welly-wanging that ends with the Carnival Day parade. Somewhere in there, a town that once counted its pubs in the dozens still finds an afternoon to throw a wellington boot as far as it will go.