Nolton Haven

The cove that shipped coal

The flat grassy terrace above the beach, where people now sit with flasks and watch the tide, was once a coal yard. Nolton Haven is a cluster of houses and a pub beside a shingle-and-sand cove, halfway along the coast of St Brides Bay, and for a long time it was not a holiday beach at all but a working port. Coal from the Trefrane Colliery, inland over the hill, was hauled down by trolley and later a tramway, then loaded onto small ships that beached directly on the sand. This carried on until 1905, and then it stopped, and the cove has been quiet ever since.

The Counting House, where the mine's accounts were kept in the late 1800s, is now a holiday cottage. Coal trucks used to pass it on the way to the jetty. Someone extended it into a house around 1900, and now you can rent it.

Seafront food and practicalities

The pub is the Mariners Inn, on the seafront beside the beach car park, an old smugglers' inn that now also houses the independently run Haven Brasserie. The brasserie side is the newer, tidier operation — tapas to share, pork croquettes, cockle gratin, mains of sea bream and red snapper and beef madras, and an 8oz burger topped with chorizo and local brie in a ciabatta on the specials board. For pudding there's chocolate fudge brownie or lemon posset. If you want fish and chips instead, they do that too. There's a picnic area next to the seafront and regular live music nights. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it the "Best kept secret in Nolton Haven," which, given the size of Nolton Haven, is not an enormous field.

There is no village shop, butcher or deli. The nearest facilities are at Hilton Court Gardens to the north, or in Haverfordwest, about fifteen minutes away by road. Haverfordwest is also the nearest station, roughly five and a half miles off. The lanes here run off the A487 between Haverfordwest and St Davids; you will want a car.

Walking out along St Brides Bay

The Pembrokeshire Coast Path runs straight through the village and across the beach, so the walking starts at your feet. North takes you to Druidston Haven, about two and a half miles, reached across the fields of Nolton Stables — a quiet beach used for horse riding. South, it's 3.8 miles to Broad Haven, which you can make into a roughly eight-mile circular by looping back along the Welsh Road country lane. Newgale, with its two-mile beach and pebble bank, is about five minutes' drive.

St Madoc's at Nolton

St Madoc's Church sits up at Nolton proper, a kilometre inland. Its medieval fabric was heavily restored in 1876–77 by E H Lingen Barker for £411 — old walls kept, sash windows swapped for stone tracery, the roofs rebuilt at a steeper pitch. The vaulted south porch is nearly identical to the one at St Mary's, Roch, which is the church the same founding family, the de Rupes, built up the road.

Coal beneath the cliffs

At the base of the cliffs, in the boulders, you can still find veins of anthracite and the fossilised remains of plants. The coal never entirely left; it just stopped being anybody's job.