Newgale

Storm Bank and Sands

Between the road and the sand at Newgale sits a bank of pebbles thrown up in a single night. A storm on 25 October 1859 heaped the shingle ridge that now backs the beach, and it has served as a sea defence ever since, though not a reliable one. The waves still breach it and wash rocks across the main road. In the January 2014 storms they picked up a Richards Bros bus and carried it off the road into the next field.

Behind that ridge is nearly two miles of flat sand, one of over forty Blue Flag beaches in Wales, with car parking, public toilets, camping and two caravan parks strung along it. On a rising tide it's about as forgiving as Welsh surf gets, which is why beginners come. Newsurf, on the beachfront, hires out boards, kayaks, wetsuits and stand-up paddleboards, runs lessons and coasteering, and is open dawn til dusk seven days a week with hot showers round the back. The Sands Café operates inside it.

A Pub Lost, a Bar Found

The village has one pub, or had one, or is getting one back. The Duke of Edinburgh Inn sat directly across from the pebble bank until the early hours of 16 January 2024, when fire burned through the roof of the two-storey building. Plans are approved to rebuild it, folding the old letting rooms upstairs into extra bar and restaurant space. Before the fire it poured Felinfoel Dragon and was known for its fish and chips and its Glamorgan sausages, exposed brick, wooden beams and a real fire.

In the meantime the drinking has moved to the Landsker Line, a small bistro bar made by converting a former public convenience. It is named after the boundary it stands on.

Boundary and Coast Path

The Landsker line is the old frontier between English-speaking south Pembrokeshire — "Little England beyond Wales" — and the Welsh-speaking north. At Newgale the marker is Brandy Brook, the small river running through the village into the bay, which Richard Fenton noted as the dividing line in his Historical Tour of 1810. Cross the brook and, historically, the language changed.

The Pembrokeshire Coast Path runs straight through. North it's about four miles of undulating clifftop to Solva, a harbour village with pubs and galleries. South is an easier walk to Nolton Haven, past the headland of Rickets Head and the ruins of Trefrane Cliff Colliery — a chimney and engine-house foundations on the cliff, the westernmost edge of the Pembrokeshire Coalfield. It opened in the 1850s, employed thirty-six people by 1896, and worked galleries that ran out under the sea. Coal was loaded onto ships beached on the sand.

Ancient Shore and Connections

At low sand-levels the beach gives up something older. Peat and tree stumps surface on the strand, branches dated to around 4300 BC. Gerald of Wales saw them in 1191, after a storm laid the shore bare, and wrote of "the trunks of trees cut off, standing in the very sea itself."

Haverfordwest, the county town and nearest station, is about nine miles east; St Davids, Britain's smallest city, seven miles the other way. Richards Bros buses run the coast road between them.

Boxing Day on the Beach

On Boxing Day the village walks the beach. It always has.