Two squat stone drums sit on the waterfront at Pembroke Dock, one of them on Front Street, each built of dressed Portland stone in the 1850s and each fitted with three 32-pounder guns mounted to swing a full circle. They were meant to defend a Royal Navy dockyard. The dockyard is gone, disarmed by 1882, and the towers now watch an estuary that mostly carries the twice-daily ferry to Rosslare.
This is a planned town, laid out on a grid of wide streets after the Navy arrived in 1814, lined with Georgian and Victorian stone terraces. One of them, the Terrace, was built for dockyard officers. The whole place has, in the words of the listing, "a coherent historic character rarely matched in other Welsh towns," which is a formal way of saying it looks like what it was.
The pubs cluster near the water and the station. The Shipwright Inn is a corner pub on Front Street with estuary views and a beer garden, handy for the ferry terminal. It does a Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding and thick gravy, steak pie, fish pie, curries, and a home-baked cheesecake. Tripadvisor has it at 4.5 across 361 reviews, one of which calls it a "Lovely homely restaurant on the sea front."
The Ferry Inn, along the river, leans into the nautical theme and specialises in seafood, with a terrace over the water. The menu runs to Sunday roasts, steaks, hand-cut chips, and southern-fried-chicken-and-bacon dirty fries, which is a lot of adjectives for one plate of chips. They pour Felinfoel ales.
The Station Inn is exactly what it says: a pub in the railway station building. Trains still leave from alongside for Carmarthen and Swansea while you drink. It keeps three real ales on, Young's Bitter a regular, with a new beer every Tuesday, and live music on Saturday nights. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path runs straight past the door. Up in a residential street near the fire station, the Red Rose Inn is a converted cottage with exposed beams, weekend music, and occasionally a German beer.
The walking is waterfront. From Front Street you can follow the Milford Haven waterway past the two gun towers, the graving dock and the old building slips, out to the Hobbs Point causeway and Carr Jetty, both listed, for views across to the Cleddau Bridge.
The town did not exist before the dockyard. This was farmland called Paterchurch, and there is no Domesday entry because there was nothing here to survey. Over 112 years the yard launched 263 warships and five royal yachts, then closed in 1926 despite a petition to the Prime Minister. The RAF took over for flying boats; by 1943 it was the largest operational flying-boat base in the world.
Later, in 1979, someone built the full-scale Millennium Falcon here for The Empire Strikes Back, in secret, on a site that had already been a dockyard, a garrison and an air base. You can read about all of it, the Sunderlands and the Falcon together, at the Heritage Centre in the old Garrison Chapel.