Solva

Seafood, Harbour and Lower Solva

At Parc Benny on Panteg Road in Upper Solva, opposite the Memorial Hall, there is a fishmonger called Mrs Will the Fish. The name is literal. Jan started selling the catch that her husband, Will, landed from his boat, The Vital Spark, and she has been dressing crab for people who come back year after year — one 2015 review noted customers who had been buying from her for over twenty-five years. She does lobster, brown crab and spider crab, and made-to-order seafood platters with crevettes and prawns piled on. It is a counter, not a restaurant. Nine to six, Monday to Saturday, closed Sunday, and if you want the crab you go and stand in front of her and ask for it.

That is the honest starting point for Solva, because the sea is what the village is for. It sits in a steep, wooded valley on the north side of St Bride's Bay, about three miles east of St David's, and the valley was carved by meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age into a ria — a flooded coastal inlet that people who want to sell it to you compare to a Norwegian fiord. The harbour is tidal. At low tide it drains almost completely, leaving a small stream running through the mud where children catch crabs; at high tide the water comes up to a narrow strip of sand and the boats lift off their keels. The village divides into two. Lower Solva is a single long street running down the valley to the quay, its cottages painted in the colours that get Solva onto magazine lists. Upper Solva sits up on the clifftop to the west, along the A487, with the shop, the Post Office and the church. Between the two runs the Gribin, a knife-edged ridge with an Iron Age fort on top of it.

The street is where you eat. The Cambrian Inn is a 16th-century freehold pub in the heart of Lower Solva and is generally reckoned the best table in the village. The head chef is Matthew Cox, and the fish is caught daily by Solva fishermen — the menu runs to a Pembrokeshire Wagyu beef burger at around nineteen pounds, a steak and ale pie, Welsh rump steak, a Cambrian lobster roll, a Greek lamb souvlaki kebab and scallops, with Sunday roasts and a real ale on draught to go with the pie. It is CAMRA-listed, very dog-friendly, and sells dog chews at the bar, which tells you what proportion of its custom arrives having just walked the coast path. There are five en-suite rooms upstairs if you want to eat there and not drive.

Pubs and Cafes by the Harbour

The Ship Inn stands at the head of the harbour with a riverside beer garden fenced along the water so that children and dogs can be let loose in it. Simon and Kathie Green have run it since 2017; the pub was first recorded in 1784 as one of only two alehouses in the village. The kitchen sources its meat from grass-fed stock in the foothills of the Preseli Mountains and does a Thai green monkfish curry at £19.95, beer-battered cod and chips at £15.95 and a vegan Bangkok Bad Boy burger at the same price, mains coming with mash, chips or baby potatoes. The dining room is called Auntie Matties, after Mattie Davies, a local who sold newspapers from her own doorstep; it now displays memorabilia for Solva Rowing Club's Celtic longboat, which is also called Auntie Mattie. There is a Toby jug collection and a wall of old regatta photographs.

The third pub is the Harbour Inn, at 31 Main Street, the most harbour-facing of them, with a beer garden that catches the boats coming in. The sturdy building was the harbourmaster's residence back when the harbour was a working lime and mining port, and it keeps its fireplaces and beams. It belongs to Marston's now, does food from half eleven till nine with a Sunday carvery and Yorkshire puddings, ran a one-pound kids' meal deal in summer, and has a pool table and a dartboard and is dog-friendly throughout. There was a fourth pub, the Royal George, up in Upper Solva on the main road with views over the bay; it closed for good on 25 August 2022 when the landlord died. It had only become a pub in 1948 — before that it was a private house. The conservation area's own records note that at least twelve inns existed in Solva at various times during the 19th century, and only three remain.

For the daytime there is a run of cafés. 35 Main Street is a licensed café by day and a restaurant by night, at the river's edge; the owner, Steve, gets singled out in reviews for greeting people himself, and the kitchen is known for homemade beer-battered fish and chips and Solva lobster and crab, with a specials board that changes according to what the fishermen have landed. Dogs get tied up at a spot the café calls the Pooch Pitch. The Old Pharmacy occupies a former chemist's shop about two hundred yards up from the harbour car park, opposite the gallery of the Cuban-Welsh artist Raul Speek; it is fitted out as a vintage tearoom, specialises in local seafood, and is best known for fresh crab sandwiches. It was in the Good Food Guide from 1999 to 2005. Café on the Quay sits on the top floor of the old Nuffield building at Trinity Quay, opened in 2003 and run by the Solva Harbour Society, so your tea and its white chocolate and cranberry tiffin help pay for the harbour itself; the balcony looks straight out over the moored yachts and the famous bend in the channel.

Mill, Ridge and Water

A mile up the valley at Middle Mill is the Solva Woollen Mill, which claims to be the oldest working woollen mill in Pembrokeshire. Tom Griffiths moved it here from St Davids in 1907; his son-in-law Eric Hemmingway took it over in 1950 and put it onto carpets. It still weaves flat rugs and runners, and there is a tea room beside the ten-foot overshot waterwheel that does drinks and home-made cakes and no hot food, which is the sort of limit a place is entitled to set. Back on the high street, Window on Wales sells Welsh gifts and crafts and was, for the record, run by the parents of the musician David Gray, who went to the school here. If you want to take Solva home in a bottle, there is Solva Gin — juniper, black tea, bergamot and gorse flower, a recipe the makers link to the goods once smuggled in off the sea. It is owned outright by a village charity, the profits go back into community projects, and it took a silver medal at the London Spirits Competition in 2020.

The walking starts at the car park. The gentlest loop is the harbour circular, a hair over three-quarters of a mile with steps and steep pinches and no stiles. For the ridge, you cross the footbridge over the river and climb the Gribin, past the old lime kilns, onto the knife-edge with its hillfort and the view down over the harbour, and then drop the seaward side to Gwadn, a pebble beach in a meltwater valley reached across stepping stones over a stream. Longer, there is the coast path west to St David's — just over six miles, past Nine Wells and along the cliffs to Porthclais and the ruined chapel at St Non's before it turns inland to Britain's smallest city. The lime kilns are the clue to what all this was: at its peak Solva burned lime in as many as ten kilns, more than any port in the county bar Tenby and Haverfordwest, and several are still there along the harbour edge.

Down on the water there is enough to fill a week. Crabbing off the harbour wall is the standing family fixture, and the sailing-club café is reachable at high tide. Solva Sailboats runs hour-long trips out of the harbour to see the caves, cliffs and islands; TYF Adventure, which pioneered coasteering in 1986 and reckons itself the most experienced operator in the business, runs coasteering and paddleboarding straight off Solva harbour. Newgale, a two-mile Atlantic surf beach, is three miles east.

History, Church and People

The history, if you want it, is mostly out at the edges. The first Smalls Lighthouse was assembled in Solva harbour in 1776 and towed out to its reef by barge; a grim episode there in 1801, when one of two keepers — Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith — died and the survivor kept the body aboard rather than be accused of murder, is why lighthouses were afterwards staffed by three men. There is no Domesday entry for any of this, because Pembrokeshire was never surveyed in 1086; the harbour first turns up on a parish map of 1578 as "Dolvath Haven" and as "Solvach" in 1748. Up in Upper Solva, St Aidan's Church is Grade II listed, built between 1877 and 1879 by John Loughborough Pearson — the architect of Truro Cathedral — in green Middle Mill granite with yellow Doulting stone dressings. It was Pearson's only new church in Wales, and it passed to him only because the first architect, Charles Buckeridge, died before it could be built. In the porch stands a pre-Norman cross-inscribed stone brought from St Elvis Farm to the east.

Solva has produced its share of people. Meic Stevens, "the Welsh Dylan," was born here in 1942 and made an album called Ysbryd Solfa, the spirit of Solva. The footballer Simon Davies, later fifty-eight Wales caps, was first spotted playing for Solva AFC. The painter Frances Hodgkins worked here in 1936, staying at the Cambrian Inn, and wrote home: "Such nice gentle people I was among at Solva, mostly bird watchers & such all terribly poor." In 2014 the village stood in for the whole of Wales when they filmed Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood here.

Arriving and Village Tradition

Getting in is simplest by road — Solva is on the A487, and St David's is six to ten minutes' drive west. The nearest railway station is Haverfordwest, about twelve miles east; the T11 bus runs from there to Fishguard through Newgale and St David's and stops at the Memorial Hall, and in summer the 400 Puffin Shuttle threads the coast.

On Easter Monday they release rubber ducks into the river up at Middle Mill and let them float down to the harbour. The winner is the first one under the footbridge in the Lower Solva car park. People stand on the bridge and watch them come.