A haven with a long memory
St Brides
A tiny coastal hamlet above a rocky cove, where medieval fabric, eroding graves and the Pembrokeshire Coast Path meet.
- Best for
- Coast walking, rockpooling and medieval history
- Give it
- A half day, or longer for a peninsula walk
- Don't miss
- The exposed stone coffins near the limekiln
Photo: welshbabe · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small cove carrying centuries of history
St Brides brings a rocky, low-tide haven, a largely medieval church and a remarkable eroding cemetery into one compact coastal setting.
Come for the cove and coast path, then look more closely: stone-lined graves emerge from the red sandstone cliffs, while St Bridget's Church retains a medieval font and rare carved screen. Longer walks continue towards Musselwick and the Marloes peninsula.
Where to go
Places in St Brides
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesSt Brides Haven
A small rocky cove, sandy at low tide, where families come to paddle and rockpool beneath low red sandstone cliffs.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- St Brides Haven
St Brides Haven cist cemetery
Stone-lined cist graves have eroded from the cliffs for centuries; a 2011 excavation revealed more than 35 early-medieval graves.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 25 minutes
- Locality
- in the cliffs near the limekiln at St Brides Haven
The Lobster Pot Inn
A traditional family- and dog-friendly inn serving freshly cooked pub classics, local beers and ciders, with a children's menu and large beer garden.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Marloes
- Access
- Well-behaved dogs on a lead are welcome in the bar.
Walks & outdoors
2 placesSt Brides Haven and Martin's Haven circular
A coastal route with scurvy grass, primroses and snowdrops early in the year, bluebells in late spring, then red campions, foxgloves and sea thrift in summer.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 3 hours
- Locality
- south past Musselwick towards the Marloes peninsula
Skomer Island
An island reached from Martin's Haven by a 20-minute boat crossing for puffins, seals and seabirds.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 3 hours
- Locality
- reached by boat from Martin's Haven
History & heritage
1 place
St Bridget's Church
A Grade II-listed church with a medieval core, a square limestone font on an upturned second font and two rare bays of late-medieval carved screen.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 35 minutes
- Locality
- above St Brides Haven
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Three ways to explore St Brides
Signature outings
Coffins in the sandstone
Look for the exposed stone-lined coffins near the limekiln, where the sea continues to erode the early-medieval cemetery.
A rare medieval survival
Inside St Bridget's Church, a square limestone font and two bays of carved late-medieval screen survive.
Clifftops towards Martin's Haven
Follow the coastal route south from St Brides Haven past Musselwick, with scurvy grass, primroses, bluebells, red campions, foxgloves and sea thrift along the way.
The village story
St Brides: graves, haven and headland
Stone coffins erode from red cliffs beside a medieval church, while the coast path leads towards wildflowers, wildlife and the Marloes peninsula.
The coffins and the cove
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.
Church and inn
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.
Clifftop walks and castle history
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.
Coast-path words, transport and seals
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.
Stay around Pembrokeshire
Make a longer stay of it
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
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- File:St Bridget's Church - St Brides - geograph.org.uk - 4876840.jpg — photograph by welshbabe; St Bridget's Church - St Brides by welshbabe. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- St Brides Haven — visitpembrokeshire.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St Bridget's Church — cadwpublic-api.azurewebsites.net other published source
- St Brides Haven cist cemetery — coflein.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- The Lobster Pot Inn — thelobsterpotmarloes.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- St Brides Haven and Martin's Haven circular — pembrokeshirecoast.wales other published source
- Skomer Island — welshwildlife.org other published source