Beside the old Village Pound stands a chimney with no house attached to it. It once rose from a single-storey thatched building scarcely wider than the chimney itself, until that was demolished in the early twentieth century and left the chimney standing alone. It's Grade II listed and described as the last surviving example of its kind in the area. People call it the Flemish Chimney, on a theory popularised by the artist Charles Norris in the early nineteenth century that south Pembrokeshire's architecture came over with Flemish settlers. St Florence in particular, the theory went, was a Flemish village.
The settlers were real enough. After the Normans took south Pembrokeshire in the twelfth century, the king brought in Flemish families whose own lands had been flooded by the sea, as a buffer between the Normans of the south and the Welsh of the north. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings still stand here, several with the same distinctive chimneys.
There are two pubs. The Sun Inn is the older one, an eighteenth-century inn that describes itself, on itself, as "a proper Welsh pub, as it should be." The ceiling is decorated with objects that each have a story behind them. The kitchen runs Tuesday to Saturday, six till nine, doing a Steak and Ale Pie with peas and gravy, a Curry of the Day with rice and mango chutney, and tempura-battered cod and chips. Thursdays at half past eight there's an open mic hosted by Tom Tenby.
On the north side of the village is the Parsonage Farm Inn, larger, with open log fires and a beer garden. The portions are large and the prices reasonable, and dogs are always welcome — there's a designated area and fresh water. Cod and chips, vegetarian curry, steak and ale pie, gluten-free options noted.
There's no shop. The nearest full shopping is Tenby, three miles off, where the beaches and the Caldey Island boats are.
The walking is the reason to come inland. A public footpath near the old Greenhills Hotel follows an ancient drovers' road and the River Ritec through belts of ancient woodland, past Ritec Fen, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. One writer on Pembrokeshire.Online described entering "a mini-world of greens of every shade, where moss-covered trees formed arches over the narrow and often waterlogged path." A separate circular from Tenby drops you into the village along a tree-lined stream and out again by East Tarr Farm.
The Ritec was once navigable by small boats as far up as St Florence, giving the village an inland wharf, until the river silted up in the nineteenth century and the wharf stopped being one.
The church of St Florentius is Grade II* listed with a twelfth-century core, first mentioned in 1248. Inside is a memorial to Robert Ferrar, Protestant Bishop of St Davids, burned at the stake at Carmarthen in 1555.
Manorbier station is a mile and a half southwest, though most people arrive by car off the B4318. On the edge of the village that road passes Manor Wildlife Park, fifty-two acres of reindeer, tapir, bison and meerkats bought in 2008 by the television presenter Anna Ryder Richardson.
Every Easter the village holds a duck race on the river for charity. The last one raised just over two thousand pounds.