Newport

Pubs, Coast and the Marcher Town

The Royal Oak on Bridge Street is an oak-beamed country pub with a tiled bar that also, all day, serves Indian curries. It has kept its traditional real ales and its original name, and at some point it added a curry house, and both halves appear to be doing fine. It is one of four pubs left in Newport. At the start of the nineteenth century there were more than twenty; an 1812 licensing record lists eight alehouse keepers. The rest — the Rose and Crown, the Globe, the Angel, the Mason's Arms, the Britannia — became private houses, or in a couple of cases something else. The Mason's Arms is now the restaurant Llys Meddyg. The Britannia is now the PWNC café. Loss here is mostly a question of what a building does next.

Newport sits at the mouth of the River Nevern, on the north Pembrokeshire coast, below a mountain called Carn Ingli. The town climbs away from the water toward the mountain; the estuary opens out beneath it; across the river mouth is Newport Sands, a mile and a half of dune-backed beach, and a short walk down from the centre is the Parrog, the old port, where fishing boats sit beached on the mud at low tide. The population is 1,161. It was the medieval capital of the Marcher Lordship of Cemais, which is a grander thing to have been than it is to be.

The Golden Lion, on East Street, has been at this since the 1600s, when it opened as a coach house. It was the Green Dragon until someone renamed it by 1830. The signature dish is the Golden Lion beef burger — smoked bacon, cheese, gherkins and onion relish in a brioche bun, £17.50 — alongside tempura-battered haddock, a Thai green chicken curry, and a puy lentil cottage pie under a potato rösti. There is a Sunday roast and a specials board, a good choice of real ales, thirteen rooms, live music some nights, and a garden. Dogs are welcome in the bar; one visitor noted the staff bringing water for theirs.

Inns, Kitchens and Cafés

The Castle Inn, further along Bridge Street, has been run by Glyn and Alison since 2016. It is a nineteenth-century stone building with a log fire, three letting rooms named Y Parrog, Bettws and Cwm, and local lore about secret passages once used by King Charles. The kitchen does basket bar meals, seared sea bass and Italian sharing platters, and Tripadvisor has it ranked first of Newport's twenty-five restaurants, which for a pub with a large beer garden and free parking is a reasonable place to end up. The Llwyngwair Arms, the fourth pub, serves no food at all — ales, cider, gins, pool, darts and televised sport, and nothing to eat. It takes its name from Llwyngwair Manor, a mile east, once the seat of the Bowen family, who at various points entertained John Wesley.

For a proper dinner there is Llys Meddyg, a Georgian former doctor's house run by Louise and Ed Sykes, who came back to Wales after having children. The oldest part is the Cellar Bar, a fifteenth-century mariner's tavern with a flagstone floor and an inglenook, where they serve cocktails. The kitchen is wood-fired and changes daily: home-smoked salmon, Newport Bay crab and lobster, Preseli lamb, Gwaun Valley beef, much of it foraged from the shore and hedgerows on trips Ed runs through the year. One reviewer came away talking about an elderberry soufflé. It holds two AA rosettes. Down the road, Cnapan is a listed Georgian townhouse the Cooper family have run since 1984, Judith Cooper in the kitchen from the start, cooking Welsh Black beef, Penclawdd mussels, sewin and Cardigan Bay scallops. It was in the Good Food Guide for twenty-five years; the evening restaurant has since wound down, though the guesthouse and the name carry on. The name is a medieval Welsh mob-football game, of which more shortly.

The cafés cover most of a day. Blas at Fronlas, on Market Street, is run by Martina and Jason and does quiches, salads, panini and homemade Welsh cakes under a log burner, with Welsh blankets over the chairs; it is closed Sundays. PWNC sits in the old Sessions House on East Street — a small room with a log fire, a children's climbing wall, and a menu built around house granola and a coconut dahl. The Canteen turns out stone-baked pizza, hand-made Welsh burgers and dough balls with local beer. Down at the Parrog, the Morawelon waterfront café serves cod, scampi, whitebait and butcher's pies with al fresco tables over the water, and is emphatic about being child- and dog-friendly. In the summer holidays a vintage trailer called Coney Island parks at the Parrog selling dairy ice creams and vegan gelato. For a shop, Wholefoods of Newport occupies Yr Hen Bopty — the old bakehouse — and stocks over three thousand lines, more than seventy per cent of them organic, plus fresh bread, local cheese and preserves.

Brewery, Mountain and Ancient Sites

The beer, if you want to see where it is made, comes from three miles up the road at Cilgwyn. Bluestone Brewing was founded in 2013 on Tyriet, a working family farm in the shadow of Carn Ingli, by Simon and Kerry Turner and their daughter Amy; Tomos Dunn is the head brewer. They use the farm's own water, feed the spent grain to their animals, give the spent hops to a local gardening society for compost, and were the first brewery in the world to earn Green Key accreditation. The beers are Hammerstone IPA, Bedrock Blonde, Preseli Pils and a rotating single-hop series. Dunn is clear about the house philosophy: "We're never going to be that wacky brewery that puts doughnuts in the mash for the sake of it."

The walking starts at the front door and goes straight up. Carn Ingli — "mountain of angels" — is a 3.5-mile round trip of about two hours from College Square, steep at the start, then a scramble among the fort walls and outcrops near the top. It is an Iron Age hillfort of some four hectares, one of the largest in west Wales, with visible ramparts and hut circles and, on a clear day, views the length of the coast and back across the Preseli Hills. Ponies, sheep and long-horn cattle graze the common; there are adders in the bracken. Three outcrops on the slope are known as the Sleeping Giant. Lower down, the Parrog path runs flat and surfaced along the estuary, suitable for wheelchairs, buggies and bikes, past rock pools and beached boats. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path, all 186 miles of it, comes through the town; the twelve miles on to Fishguard are a classic, lower-cliffed section. And two miles out is Pentre Ifan, a Neolithic burial chamber about 5,500 years old, its capstone balanced on stone uprights in an open field, free to walk up to.

Borough, Church and Port

Newport was founded around 1197, when the Norman lord William FitzMartin moved his capital here from Nevern and built a castle on a spur of Carn Ingli. The castle is still there, its gatehouse converted into a private house in 1859; it is lived in and not open to visitors. FitzMartin also made this a marcher borough, and it has never entirely stopped being one. Newport is the only town in Wales that still appoints its mayor in the medieval manner, the burgesses nominating candidates from whom a choice is made, and each August the mayor performs the beating of the bounds on horseback — riding the borough's boundary, a survival with no real function beyond continuing.

The parish church, St Mary the Virgin, keeps two things from the original Norman building and no more: the square west tower, thirteenth-century, and the font. The font is older still, twelfth-century, cut from Dundry stone quarried near Bristol and shipped across the Bristol Channel, which tells you the port was working long before anyone wrote it down. The rest of the church was rebuilt in 1879 by John Middleton and Son of Cheltenham, on the old foundations. Stranger, and closer to the shops, is Carreg Coetan Arthur, a Neolithic tomb of around 3500 BC that stands among the modern houses near the Parrog road, its four-metre capstone resting on two of its four uprights. Excavations turned up pottery, stone tools and cremated bone. The name means "quoits," from the story that King Arthur pitched the stone here as a throw.

Transport and the Mountain Legend

The port itself is now mostly memory. Around fifty vessels were built at the Parrog between 1760 and 1840, the first a 22-ton sloop called the Ann and Mary; the last commercial cargo, coal on the Agnes of Bideford, came in on 19 September 1933, and after that the trade was dead. The old storehouse survives as the Newport Boat Club. In 1922 another Parrog storehouse was demolished — the record says "as the result of a wager" — and its stone was used to build the Memorial Hall, which now displays a fifteenth-century pottery kiln excavated in 2017 and thought to be the only intact one in Britain. The railway that would have connected all this never arrived: a Fishguard extension was begun in 1879, ran out of money after about a mile of earthworks, and was overtaken when the Great Western built a better line in 1906. Newport still has no station; the nearest is Fishguard and Goodwick, seven miles west along the A487, with the T5 bus running the coast road between Cardigan and Fishguard, Sundays included.

The mountain has always drawn people who wanted quiet. The sixth-century Irish saint Brynach is said to have built a cell up among the crags and talked with angels there; when he died, the story goes, the angels carried him off from the summit. His bird was a cuckoo, which was supposed to arrive at Nevern each spring and sing before anywhere else in West Wales — so that the parish waited for it, and knew the season had turned when it came.