The Wiseman's Bridge Inn has a beer garden that runs down to the beach, and in the summer of 1943 the man watching from the wall of it, cup of tea in hand, was Winston Churchill. The beaches here and at Saundersfoot were being used to rehearse the D-Day landings — up to 100,000 troops, landing craft and amphibious vehicles, in an operation called Jantzen. Churchill "is said to have watched the 'invasion' whilst seated on the wall of the pub," according to aroundtenby.co.uk, drinking his tea while the coast pretended to be Normandy.
The inn is a short walk from Stepaside proper, along Pleasant Valley, and it opens 365 days a year. Real ales, bar snacks, evening meals; dogs are welcome in the Old Bar and on the beach but not in the dining room. The wartime owner was John Henry Mathias, known as Jack the Bridge, who knew the coast well enough to be made local Coastguard and was exempted from the 10pm curfew. He entertained the soldiers with stories of a ghostly monk said to haunt the tunnels between here and Saundersfoot.
Stepaside itself is a quiet holiday hamlet six miles north of Tenby, where wooded valleys run down to Carmarthen Bay. Old stone miners' cottages sit alongside bungalows and conversions like The Old School. It is quiet now partly because the modern A477 bypass took the through-traffic away.
It was not always quiet. From 1849 the Pembrokeshire Coal & Iron Company ran the Stepaside Ironworks here — two blast furnaces, coke ovens, workshops and lime kilns, fed by iron ore from the cliffs between Saundersfoot and Amroth. No pig iron was made after 1874 and the works closed in 1877. Grove Colliery sat alongside it, one of around twelve collieries working the valley. The ironworks and colliery ruins now stand conserved in woodland as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, part of the Stepaside Heritage Park.
The walking follows the industry. The old Dramway, a horse-drawn railway built in 1835 to carry anthracite down to Saundersfoot Harbour, closed in 1939 and is now a flat, wheelchair-friendly path of about 2.5 miles to the harbour. Pleasant Valley takes you through the woods to the beach — "an easy walk to Wiseman's Bridge beach through the picturesque Pleasant Valley," as the Amroth & District Community Association puts it. A short circular loops the ironworks themselves.
The village has kept the Stepaside Inn, a traditional pub with real ale and a 9.0 rating on BeerIntheEvening. The shops have mostly gone — the school, post office, garage, cobbler and tailor are all in the past tense now, and the nearest shops are a mile away in Kilgetty, which also has the nearest railway station on the Pembroke Dock line.
The parish church, St Elidyr at Amroth a mile off, is Grade II* listed and 12th century, with a square Norman font sculpted with foliage and a three-storey tower in the local unbuttressed style.
As for the name, one tradition holds that Cromwell, passing through on his way to Pembroke Castle, told the people in his path to step aside. The likelier story is a narrow bridge where you simply had to.