Inside the Church of St Nicholas and St Teilo, propped where you can walk right up to it, is the Penally Cross — a 10th-century wheel-head Celtic cross carved with knotwork and interlace, alongside four early-medieval stones thought to be standing where they were first set. The church itself is Grade II*, C13 at the core, with a three-storey west tower added in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. In 1891 it became, reportedly, the first church in Pembrokeshire to have electric lighting installed, which for a building that had already stood six hundred years was a late upgrade.
Penally is a linear village strung along a former shoreline a mile southwest of Tenby, 848 people at the last count, sitting above the two miles of sand at the west end of Tenby's South Beach. From up here the view runs across Carmarthen Bay to Caldey Island, with the Gower Peninsula visible on the far side.
There are two pubs. The Cross Inn is Grade II listed and, by local reckoning, a newcomer — it was only built in the 1840s. Its walls carry local pictures and the shields of regiments once stationed at the training camp up the hill. The kitchen uses local Welsh beef in house-made puff-pastry pies, slow-cooked Sunday roasts and fish and chips, with two real ales kept well enough for CAMRA to list them. The beer garden looks out to sea, and there are water bowls and dog treats behind the bar.
The Paddock Inn began life as a late-17th-century farmhouse and now runs an on-site bakery alongside the pub. The menu is hand-battered cod, wholetail scampi, homemade beef lasagne, and steaks up to a 16oz prime rump, roughly £8 to £20 a head. Arthur Williams owned the place in 1827; his monument is fixed to the west wall of the parish church, a few hundred yards away.
Beyond the two pubs and a well-stocked village shop, the amenities are mostly outdoors. From the free car park at the station a path crosses the railway and threads through dunes and the golf course down to Tenby South Beach — Tenby is a 45-minute walk along the sand or a five-minute drive. Head west instead and the coast path climbs toward Giltar Point, where WWI practice trenches are still cut into the ground, with views on to Lydstep and Skrinkle Haven.
The golf is Tenby Golf Course, an 18-hole links in the dunes below the village and the oldest in Wales.
Trains still stop at Penally, just, on the Pembroke Dock branch — request stops roughly every two hours to Tenby, Whitland, Carmarthen and Swansea. The A4139 runs through for anyone driving, and the 349 bus passes as well.
St Teilo, the sixth-century monk and cousin of St David, was born here around 500, and pilgrims from Brittany and Cornwall once came ashore at Penally on the route to St Davids. In March 2014 the arrivals were briefer: a great spotted cuckoo, unrecorded in the UK since 2009, turned up having aimed for Spain and missed. The birdwatchers came for that instead.