The Farmers Arms does not take bookings. You turn up, and if the place is full you wait, which in summer is often the arrangement. It sits in the middle of the city near the cathedral, pours a wide range of local cask ales at prices that have not caught up with the postcode, and does home-cooked pub food where the dearest steak is around £18.95. One reviewer complained the prices were "more expensive than London," which for a village at the far end of Wales is a particular kind of achievement. The beer garden at the back looks straight over the cathedral, and it is described locally as one of the sunniest in Pembrokeshire. Dogs go anywhere, inside or out, and water bowls are dotted around to make the point. Somewhere on the menu is an Angry Dog Burger and a jug of Pimms. It is repeatedly called the best pub in St Davids, and it earns this without appearing to try very hard.
That is the thing to understand about St Davids first: it is a city, officially, and it is very small. The population at the last count was 1,751. The whole urban area covers roughly a quarter of a square mile. Its city status was granted entirely on account of the cathedral, lost in 1886, and restored in 1995 by royal charter at the Queen's request, which makes it Britain's smallest city by a comfortable margin. Its Welsh name is Tyddewi, David's house. Arriving, you see a low huddle of stone houses gathered around Cross Square, and no cathedral at all — the tower only appears when you reach the lip of the valley, because the whole thing sits down in a hollow, out of sight.
Cross Square is the middle of it, named for the medieval preaching cross that still stands at its centre, the old market place and gathering point. On one corner is The Bishops, an eighteenth-century building directly opposite that cross, with a large outdoor area on the square and a cosy fire inside. The name is a small trap: it comes not from the ecclesiastical office but from the Bishops, a group of rocks two miles west of Ramsey Island. The kitchen runs to Welsh Cawl and Glamorgan sausages, interesting burgers, and a signature fish pie packed with cod and salmon, mussels and prawns. In season the specials board carries locally landed lobster, crab and mackerel. Also on the square is The Cross Hotel, where dogs are welcome in the bar and the beer garden but firmly not in the dining room, and The Grove, a hotel bar in a building that started life as a coaching inn.
The food climbs a long way above what a place this size has any right to sustain. On the edge of the city, inside a converted nineteenth-century windmill called Twr y Felin, is Blas, which is Welsh for taste. It holds three AA rosettes and a place in the Michelin Guide, and the kitchen — run by a duo, Dan Slipakiv and Gareth Evans — leans on local and foraged ingredients, particularly fish. Reviews name Solva crab, pan-roasted halibut, Welsh lamb, and a hen of the woods starter one diner called one of the best they had ever eaten. The windmill it occupies was built in 1806 to grind corn, lost its sails in 1904, and served as a U-boat lookout in the war before anyone thought of putting a restaurant in it.
On the High Street, in a listed Art Deco building, the Really Wild Emporium is a restaurant, a shop and a foraging school run by a couple, Julia and John. Julia is an award-winning archaeological conservator; John is described as a born educator and outdoor specialist. Seaweed, wild garlic and Pembrokeshire's marine algae turn up in most dishes, and the six-course tasting menu is the thing people single out. Their line, verbatim, is: "We love to use what nature gives us, so we want to look after nature in return." They lead hedgerow walks along ancient trackways and the shoreline, covering which wild plants you can eat and which you can wash with. It is, admittedly, quite expensive.
No.16 on Nun Street, run by a man named Neil, does a Solva crab and cockle crumpet, Welsh beef short rib with a bone-marrow crumb, a smashed burger with salami jam, and a baked rarebit made with ale from the Old Farmhouse Brewery just up the road — which is the sort of small loop that a place this size makes possible. That brewery sits on a working family farm at Upper Harglodd and made its first beers in November 2020, using home-grown grain, the farm's own well water, and honey from its own hives. Its Cwrw Clos took two gold stars at the 2022 Great Taste Awards.
For something less formal, Grain does handmade pizza and craft beer, mostly outdoors in cabin booths strung with fairy lights. It came out of a collaboration between Ben Washbrook, Byron Rees and Bluestone Brewing Co, and the pizzas carry names like Strumble Head and Y Ddraig Goch, topped with things like smoked mackerel, Pant y Sgawn goats cheese and Trealy Farm nduja. The partitioned booths let dogs settle at your feet. And roughly ten minutes out by car, at Dr Beynon's Bug Farm, is Grub Kitchen, which opened in 2015 as the UK's first edible-insect restaurant. It is run by the chef Andy Holcroft; the farm is run by the ecologist Dr Sarah Beynon, who bought back her family land in 2013. The signature dish is a Gourmet Bug Burger, full of crickets, grasshoppers and mealworms, which one guest reported to be moist and tasty.
The everyday supplies are handled just as well. Davies the Butcher does wonderful sausages and sometimes fresh seafood. St Davids Food & Wine bills itself as the best deli in Pembrokeshire and makes baguettes to order. CK's Foodstore on New Street covers the ordinary grocery run. MamGu Welshcakes — MamGu is Welsh for grandmother — moved in 2024 into a fourteenth-century listed building adjoined to the cathedral, part of the ruins of St Marys College, and puts a Welsh cake into nearly everything it serves, including the cooked breakfast, which arrives with two leek and cheese Welshcakes on the side. The Mill on New Street does a Welsh breakfast with cockles and laverbread oatcakes and will slip a stray sausage to a visiting dog. On Thursdays from March to October a country market takes over Cross Square with bakes and plants and crafts.
And then there is Gianni's, on the corner opposite City Hall, an ice cream parlour run by a husband-and-wife team, Jo and Gianni, who make Italian-method ice cream with fresh milk from Caerfai Farm just down the road. Gianni offers hundreds of flavours that change daily, because he keeps experimenting.
You come here for the coast, and the coast starts more or less at the front door. The waymarked City walk is three miles and takes about ninety minutes, past the cathedral and the Bishop's Palace, along the little River Alun, and out to the prehistoric outcrop of Clegyr Boia. The full peninsula circular is 17.2 kilometres, moderately challenging, with seventy steps and unfenced cliff edges where care is genuinely needed, and seals, dolphins and seabirds seen along the way. St Non's, a mile out on the cliffs, holds a ruined chapel said to mark the birthplace of St David and a holy well reckoned to have healing water. Porthclais, a sheltered National Trust harbour, has been a working port since at least 1385. Two miles west is Whitesands Bay, a Blue Flag beach widely rated the best beginner surf beach in Wales, with a surf school and summer lifeguards; behind it rises Carn Llidi, 181 metres, the highest point on the peninsula, and near its top sits Coetan Arthur, a collapsed Neolithic burial chamber from around 3000 BC with a capstone six metres long. Arthur is supposed to have thrown the stones from the summit.
At St Justinian's, a couple of miles west, boats leave for Ramsey Island, an RSPB reserve and the only RSPB-owned island in Wales. Thousand Islands Expeditions, established in 1975, holds the sole landing rights; other operators run circumnavigations past the sea caves for grey seals, porpoises and, in autumn, hundreds of seal pups. Those Bishops rocks off the point earned a grim joke from the Elizabethan antiquary George Owen of Henllys, who wrote that "The Bushop and those clerkes preach deadly doctrine to their winter audience" — a reference to the ships they wrecked. TYF Adventure, which pioneered coasteering here in 1986, will take a whole family out to jump off the rocks together.
For a wet afternoon there is Oriel y Parc, the National Park discovery centre, free to enter, with changing exhibitions from Museum Wales and a picnic area. The Bug Farm has a tropical bug zoo and handling sessions. The grassy ruins of the Bishop's Palace — roofless since Bishop Barlow stripped the lead from the roof in 1536 and never replaced it — make a good place for children to run about, with dungeons for hide-and-seek. The rugby club runs street-food trailers on weekends in season, next to a skate park.
The history, when you get to it, is mostly the cathedral. The present building was begun in 1181 on the site of the monastery St David founded here in the sixth century, set down in the valley hollow deliberately, to hide it from Viking raiders coming off the sea. The floor slopes nearly four metres from one end to the other and the building is still shifting. The Irish oak ceiling of the 1530s carries twenty-two carved hanging pendants, each about a metre and a half tall, and is described as the only cathedral ceiling of its kind in Britain. From 1123 the place was worth two pilgrimages for the price of one — a papal privilege made two journeys to St Davids equal to one to Rome, which turned it into one of the great pilgrimage centres of the West. The composer Thomas Tomkins was born here in 1572. Asser, the monk who tutored and wrote the life of Alfred the Great, came from here.
The railway never did. A line to St Davids was proposed in 1904 and still being talked about in the 1920s, but nothing was ever built. The nearest station remains Haverfordwest, sixteen miles off, reached by the A487 and the T11 bus roughly eight times a day. The one lasting monument to the line is a pub: the City Inn is said to have been built as the railway station for a railway that never came.
Nobody minds. On a warm afternoon the queue outside Gianni's runs down the pavement, and somewhere in it is a dog waiting for its own small ice cream, which the shop makes specially.