Pembroke

Waterside Pembroke and Main Street

The Watermans Arms stands just over the mill bridge, right on the edge of the Mill Pond, with Pembroke Castle filling the view across the water. Dogs are welcome in the bar, where they are given treats and, in warm weather, ice cream. The landlady is Hannah Clode, the food is home-cooked from local ingredients — rump steaks, beef lasagne, burgers with gluten-free buns if you ask, chicken nuggets for the children — and one reviewer described the steaks as the best they'd had in ages. It is ranked first of the thirty-four restaurants in Pembroke on TripAdvisor. If you sit by the window long enough, an otter sometimes surfaces on the pond.

That pond is the thing to understand about Pembroke. The town sits on a limestone ridge almost surrounded by water, at the head of the Cleddau estuary in the south of the county — the English-speaking part below the old Landsker line that William Camden, in 1586, recorded as "Little England beyond Wales." The Mill Pond wraps around the base of the castle, which is not so much next to the town as the reason for it. A single long, narrow Main Street runs out from the castle gate through the line of the medieval town walls, and almost everything worth eating or buying is on it.

Start at the far end and work back. Brown's Café, at 51 Main Street, has been frying fish since 1928, when Constance Brown and her husband Syd cleaned and chipped the potatoes by hand and cooked them over a coal fire, and a bag of chips cost half a penny. Syd died in 1964. Connie kept going — with her son Hilton, his wife Glenys, and grandson Steve — for over eighty years, living above the shop. She was given the MBE in 2006, which she called the biggest day of her life. For her hundredth birthday she was taken out in a horse-drawn carriage; for her hundred-and-second she put on leathers for a motorbike tour and then went for a spin in a Ferrari. She died in January 2010. The café still has its 1950s dining room with leather booths, and still serves Welsh lamb cawl and full breakfasts.

Cafes, local food and cider

A few doors along, Will's of Pembroke is a licensed café run by Richard Day, with Jane front of house, doing full Welsh breakfasts, eggs Benedict, strawberry pancakes and a tuna-melt jacket potato. It is the sort of place that keeps dog beds behind the counter and has been known to cook a visiting dog its own sausage and bacon. Café ROSE, at number 28, is Turkish — shakshuka, spicy garlic-beef toasties, shawarma wraps, chai latte — and books up at busy times. If it is raining and you have children, Waterloo House does board games alongside its coffee and five-pound toasties. For bread there is the Long Meadow Bakery at number 73, additive-free artisan loaves and pastries, open Tuesday to Saturday until two, with a blog it has for some reason named "The Lazy Mare."

Pembroke feeds itself better than a town of seven and a half thousand needs to. There are two Indian restaurants on Main Street — Mehfil's at number 11, whose Tandoori Thali is said to feed three people, and Pembroke Tandoori at 48, doing jhalfrezi, rogan josh and Peshwari naan. Rowlies, at number 2, is the other chippy, where large cod and chips comes in around twenty-two pounds for two. Mott's Butchers and Delicatessen, at 56, has traded here for over twenty-five years — the trading name is M.C. & V.A. Mott — and is known for its sausages and a deli counter of cheeses, chutneys and jams.

The town has its own cider, too. The Pembrokeshire Cider Co., founded in 2016 by three locals — Chris, Dave and Jon — makes it on Commons Road under the castle walls, and names the bottles after the fortress's history: a medium-dry Henry VII at six per cent, a Marshal's Reserve for the earl who built the keep, a dry Cromwell 1648 for the siege. The apples, they say, come partly from a secret medieval garden hidden a stone's throw from the castle. They also make a Fire Cider Sauce with the Pembrokeshire Chilli Farm.

Pubs, pond walks and days out

For pubs beyond the Watermans, the Old Kings Arms sits at 13 Main Street, less than two hundred yards from the castle. Its deeds go back to 1522, it has taken in travellers since the sixteenth century, and it calls itself Pembroke's only coaching inn — it was the Bunch of Grapes in Victorian times, and George Wheeler ran it from 1957 to 1998. The restaurant, the Welsh Kitchen, has wood and slate floors and an open fire. The Hope Inn, over on East End Square, is a stranger and more likeable thing: a tiny front bar that doubles as a coffee shop, a three-metre sports screen, and a rear room that Dai, who runs it, turns into a cinema on Mondays and Tuesdays, showing children's films at five o'clock — one review recalls him putting on the BFG for a small girl in the coffee lounge. It describes itself as one of the smallest pubs in the world with the largest beer garden, a big terrace with a play area looking out over St Daniel's Hill. Dogs get a bowl of water without asking.

The Mill Pond loop is the walk everyone does — roughly three miles around what was once the castle moat, flat, buggy- and wheelchair-friendly, with swans, ducks, herons and the occasional otter, and the castle in view for most of it. For something longer there is the Monkton Circular, 5.1 miles from the free car park at Monkton Church, taking in the Milford Haven waterway, woodland and the Victorian sprawl of Pembroke Dock. The Upper Mill Pond, just above the town, is a Wildlife Trust reserve that only exists because the railway builders threw up an embankment across the valley in the 1860s and dammed it by accident; kingfishers work the reedbeds, and at dusk three species of bat — Daubenton's, pipistrelle and noctule — hunt over the water.

You can also get out onto the pond itself. Paddle West, based at the Boathouse below the castle, hires rowing boats from ten pounds for half an hour, and you row directly under the castle walls. In town, Pembroke Gardens has ponds with goldfish and a couple of tortoises and a small play area for the youngest children, with a larger enclosed playground and parking right next door. Further afield, the National Trust's Stackpole Estate is five or six miles south — the Bosherston lily ponds and Barafundle Bay, which turns up on lists of the best beaches in Britain with tiresome regularity. Carew Castle, a quarter-hour northeast, has a one-mile flat circuit around its millpond past the only fully restored tidal mill in Wales, a Nest Tearoom, and dogs allowed even inside the castle. Freshwater West, out on the west coast, is the wide surf beach that stood in for locations in the Harry Potter and Robin Hood films.

Castle discoveries and town history

The castle runs free daily tours, and has a great round keep, a dungeon tower, and the world's largest map of Wales laid out in the grounds; in the school holidays it runs Knight School, falconry displays and living-history days. It is one of the largest and best-preserved castles in Wales, and the only one in Britain built over a natural cave. That cave, Wogan Cavern, is turning out to be the more remarkable half of the story. Excavations between 2021 and 2024 found it almost undisturbed, and the University of Aberdeen has begun a five-year dig there. The bones already pulled from it belong to mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, wild horse and hippopotamus — the hippo about a hundred and twenty thousand years old — along with stone tools left by early humans forty-odd thousand years ago. Dr Rob Dinnis, who leads the project, calls it "a truly remarkable site … a once-in-a-lifetime discovery." Pembroke Museum, free, is up the street in the old Town Hall courtroom, and Manor Wildlife Park, with its tigers and lemur walkthrough, is a short drive out.

The history above the ground is nearly as busy. Arnulf de Montgomery threw up the first fort here around 1090, on a loop in the river; Henry I granted the town a charter in 1100 and drew settlers from west England and Flanders. In 1189 the castle passed to William Marshal, who rebuilt it in stone with that domed keep. On 28 January 1457 it was the birthplace of Henry Tudor — Henry VII, the only Welsh-born king of England — delivered to a mother, Margaret Beaufort, who was barely fourteen. Uniquely among the Anglo-Norman castles of west Wales, Pembroke never fell to the Welsh. It came closest to ruin in 1648, when the unpaid Parliamentarian garrison mutinied, declared for the king, and forced Cromwell himself to sit outside for six weeks, cut the water supply, and starve them out. He slighted the castle afterwards and had the ringleader, Colonel John Poyer, shot in London. The town lost its status as county town to Haverfordwest in 1543 and never quite got over it, though Daniel Defoe, passing through in the 1720s, still thought it "the largest, richest, and at this time the most flourishing town in all of south Wales."

Arriving in Pembroke and the Michaelmas Fair

Getting here is a two-hourly train from Swansea, a shade under two hours, into Pembroke station — a ten-minute walk from Main Street, parking for seventy-five cars, the next stop being Pembroke Dock. The A4139 runs along the Mill Pond and out toward Tenby; the 387 Coastal Cruiser bus loops round every beach on the peninsula and will stop for you anywhere on the country stretches if you flag it down.

Every autumn the Michaelmas Fair comes to Main Street, as it has for more than seven hundred years, opened by the Town Crier reading the Cry of the Fair — the same street, the same words, the waltzers set up where the market stalls used to be.