Roch

Castle and Brewhouse

Roch Castle sits on a crag of Precambrian rhyolite, a single D-shaped tower about thirty metres tall that you can see from miles off as you come up from Haverfordwest. It has crowned the rock since roughly 1200, and it now operates as a five-star hotel, which is a considerable arc for a building that was once recorded as "shattered" by lightning and later burned by Parliamentary cannon.

The pub is the Victoria Inn, an eighteenth-century building that has been serving as a pub since 1851 and brewing its own beer on site. There are at least seven ales from the Brewhouse — IPA, porter, amber, blonde, pale — and if none of those appeal, the bar also keeps Estrella Damm, Veltins, Duvel and De Koninck, which is a lot of Belgium for a village of 463 people. The kitchen does home-made Welsh dishes, well-regarded Sunday roasts, and a signature Brewhouse beer-battered cod and chips that one reviewer called "absolutely excellent." Another simply titled their review "Best pub and food in Pembrokeshire." Dogs are welcome inside and in the garden, where a chef has been known to hand out free treats, and the beer garden looks out over the coast toward St Brides Bay.

Village Life and Paths

That garden view is worth dwelling on, because the pub is more or less the village's centre of gravity now. The shop and post office closed in 2022 after fifty years of trading, so the Victoria carries the load.

The walking makes up for the missing shop. A footpath winds just under a mile and a half from the castle down through the fields to Newgale Beach, past Pinch Cottage. Newgale itself is two miles of flat sand behind an enormous storm pebble bank, given over to surfing, coasteering and bodyboarding — the family day out sits here. Closer to the village, the Brandy Brook circular runs 3.4 miles through a wooded valley below Rhyndaston Mountain, with buzzards riding the thermals and bluebells in spring. It has stiles, including a ladder stile, and is signed as unsuitable for dogs, so plan accordingly.

The Landsker and St Mary

The Brandy Brook is not just a stream. It marks the Landsker Line, the medieval boundary between Anglo-Norman "Little England beyond Wales" and native Welsh territory, and Roch sits at its northern end as one of a chain of border castles.

St Mary the Virgin, the parish church, was probably founded in the thirteenth century by the same Adam de Rupe who built the castle. It holds three stained-glass windows made by Morris & Co. between 1913 and 1925 to designs by Edward Burne-Jones, given by the Viscount St Davids who then owned the castle.

The Adder Legend

Roch's best story is older and grimmer. Adam de la Roche was told by a witch he would die of an adder's bite within a year, so he shut himself in the top room of the tower to wait it out. An adder came up hidden in a bundle of firewood, and he was found dead the next morning.

The Road Through Roch

The A487 St Davids road runs straight through the village, with the T11 bus along it and Haverfordwest station five and a half miles down the line. Most people arrive to see the castle on its rock and leave having found the pub.