The Sloop Inn has been serving drinks at the edge of this harbour since 1743, and its walls are hung with the leftovers of everything Porthgain used to do for a living: quarrying tools, brickmaking odds and ends, shipping tackle. There's a corner where fishing tales get told in English and Welsh, and a real fire for when the coast path turns unpleasant. It was originally the "Step In," because at high tide boats moored right alongside and crews could step straight from the water into the bar. The water no longer reaches the door, but the name explains itself.
The kitchen leans on what comes off the boats. Fresh Porthgain crab arrives with hard-boiled egg and warm Pembrokeshire new potatoes for £14.95; there's a 10oz ribeye topped with creamed leeks and mature cheddar, and a burger called the Angry Dog — 6oz of local steak mince and Monterey Jack in a floured bun. Felinfoel Double Dragon and Sharp's Doom Bar are on the pumps, with guest ales from Bluestone and Evan Evans rotating through. Food runs noon to three and five to nine daily. Dogs and walkers are both expected.
Down on the quay is The Shed, a fish and chip bistro in the former machine shop that once serviced the slate-quarry engines. There's a log burner the size of a small car. The fish is landed on the quay in front of you and served within hours — hake, cod and haddock, cooked either straight or off an à la carte menu. Book ahead in summer.
For crab and lobster to take away, the red house sells both. The old quarry works manager's office is now the Harbour Lights Gallery, showing local art.
The harbour itself is tiny and nearly enclosed, framed by two stone piers, ruined brickworks, and a row of roofless stone hoppers that are now a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Fishing boats, pleasure craft and a rowing club still use it. The rowing club is based in the old Ty Mawr brickworks.
The Coast Path runs along both sides of the harbour. Walk south-west and a three-mile circular takes you past Traeth Llyfn — a beach reached by steep steps, good for paddling but not swimming, with rip currents and a habit of vanishing at high tide — and on to the Blue Lagoon at Abereiddi. This is a flooded slate quarry, turquoise and deep and very cold, edged by craggy rock. People coasteer here, jumping off cliffs into the sea between tides. Coasteering was invented in Pembrokeshire, and this is one of its leading spots.
None of this looks like industry now, but for sixty years it was. Slate went through from around 1850, then bricks made from slate waste, then crushed roadstone shipped out at up to 40,000 tons a year for roads across Britain. When the work stopped, local residents and the National Park bought the whole complex in the 1980s rather than let it be redeveloped.
Getting here means minor lanes off the A487 between St Davids and Fishguard; the Strumble Shuttle bus links the village to both. The nearest trains are at Fishguard, the mainline at Haverfordwest.
Buzz Magazine once called the Sloop "a cosy hideaway for weary travellers," which is roughly what most people off the coast path are after.