The Ship Inn has been trading since 1797 and has been in the same family, the Maddocks, for over two hundred years of it. It started as an 18th-century fishing cottage, which explains its position: just off the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, in the middle of the village, with a beer garden that looks down a green valley toward the sea. The kitchen leans on what gets landed nearby — crab, pollock and lobster from Solva and Abercastle. Sunday brings a carvery at around £10.99, Wednesday is pizza night with the second one half price, and Friday knocks fifty percent off the fish. Reviewers agree it is dog friendly with good beer. On the fishcakes, opinion is divided.
Trefin sits on high ground above the Irish Sea, a linear run of old stone cottages and former sea-captains' houses laid out in the medieval period, when it belonged to the Bishops of St Davids. Around 150 people live here, and the community still speaks Welsh.
The other place to eat is The Mill, a café attached to a handloom weaving centre. One visitor's account of it is the whole village in a sentence: called in for breakfast, caught the Strumble Shuttle, did a coastal walk, then called back for tea and cake. The Strumble Shuttle is the coastal bus, and it will take you on to Porthgain, St Davids, Strumble Head and Fishguard.
That mill and the café are not the mill the village is known for. Ten minutes' walk downhill is Aberfelin, a small sand-and-shingle cove with the ruin of a corn mill above it. The mill ground local wheat and barley for roughly five hundred years and closed in 1918, undercut by cheap imported grain. That same year the Archdruid Crwys wrote "Melin Trefin," a lament for it that became one of the best-loved poems in the Welsh language. By tradition he was lodging nearby, walked down after supper, saw the ruin, and wrote the poem back at the house by pushing the tablecloth aside.
The cove has other admirers. Cerys Matthews grew up on a cliff-top farm near here and names it as her favourite childhood haunt; she gave her daughter the middle name y-Felin, of the mill.
The walking is the main event. The Coast Path runs straight through, on the stretch between Porthgain and Abercastle. West toward Abereiddi is the Blue Lagoon, a flooded slate quarry people swim and coasteer in. East toward Abercastle is Carreg Samson, a 5,000-year-old dolmen whose enormous capstone balances on three of its uprights — Saint Samson, the legend goes, lifted it into place with his little finger.
Trefin has no church of its own; the parish church, St Rhian, is a mile off at Llanrhian, with a saddleback tower thick enough to have started life as a coastal watchtower. Its two chapels have both closed. St Davids and Fishguard are each about twenty minutes away off the A487.
A village that has lost its mill, its quarries and its chapels, and kept a poem instead.