There are stone coffins in the cliff at St Brides Haven. They have been eroding out of the low red sandstone beside the church for several hundred years, and you can still see exposed ones near the limekiln. A 2011 excavation by the Dyfed Archaeological Trust uncovered more than 35 early medieval graves, with coffins thought to date from the sixth to tenth century; the finds included an iron knife and a lead bead. The sea is still taking the graveyard, slowly.
The haven itself is a small rocky cove, sandy at low tide, backed by those red cliffs and the limekiln. It was for a long time the only safe landing on this stretch of coast, which is why the church stands where it does. Families come to paddle and rockpool. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path runs through.
St Bridget's Church sits above the cove, Grade II listed and largely medieval underneath a careful nineteenth-century rebuild — about 85 percent of the fabric predates the Victorians. Inside there is a square limestone font from around 1200, standing on a later octagonal base that turns out to be a second font, upturned. Two bays of carved late-medieval screen survive against the nave's east wall, described in the listing as a very rare survival. The nave roof and windows were given in memory of the Kensington family.
The village has no pub of its own. For that you go about a mile and a half south to Marloes, to the Lobster Pot Inn, a family and dog-friendly place that also does rooms. The menu is not vast — fish and chips, scampi, gammon, burgers, lasagne, a vegetable curry, Sunday roasts, all cooked to order — and reviewers treat the shortness as the point. The whitebait and the scampi come recommended. There's a large beer garden, a pool table, and it does a steady trade in people waiting for the Skomer boat.
The walking is the reason to be here. The clifftop circular south past Musselwick towards the Marloes peninsula runs through scurvy grass and snowdrops early in the year, bluebells in late spring, then foxgloves and sea thrift by summer. A longer loop of nearly seven miles circles the eighteenth-century walled Deer Park, which has never held a single deer and is instead grazed by Welsh mountain ponies and Welsh Black cattle. From there you look out to Skomer and across Jack Sound, where porpoises come through.
Behind the church stand the wooded grounds of St Brides Castle, a castellated mansion built up in 1833 and enlarged for the Barons Kensington. From 1923 it was Kensington Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium, before becoming holiday accommodation in 1991. Rowland Laugharne, the Civil War soldier who fought first for Parliament and then for the King, was born here around 1607.
The blogger Tish Farrell wrote that the church "stands beside the Wales Coast Path looking down on St. Bride's Haven, a rocky cove with a long, long history."
Nearest stations are Haverfordwest and Milford Haven, twelve miles off by the B4327 and then minor roads through Marloes; the buses are the limited rural sort. Come spring, roughly fifty grey seal pups are born on the beaches along the peninsula, and people walk out to Martin's Haven just to stand on the cliffs and count them.