Wiseman's Bridge

The Inn Above the Beach

The Wiseman's Bridge Inn sits on the road just above the beach, with a beer garden that runs down to the sand and a dining room looking out over Carmarthen Bay. The Kemble family have run it for about seventy years, and it opens 365 days a year, which for a pub at the end of a narrow lane facing the sea is a fair commitment.

The kitchen does homemade chicken curry, beef lasagne, home-cooked ham with a fried egg and chips, and a fisherman's pie of salmon, smoked haddock, pollock and prawns under mash and cheddar. Reviews are generally warm about the setting, the portions, the gluten-free options and the free parking, and split about the food itself — some of it lands, some of it is called bland. Dogs go in the Old Bar side and on the beach.

Shore, Valley and Tramway

The hamlet itself is tiny, tucked between Saundersfoot and Amroth. The foreshore is wide but rocky, backed by a pebble bank, and at low tide it's good for rock pooling. Behind it the wooded Pleasant Valley runs inland along a stream, its cliffs still pocked with old ore patches and colliery levels. There are no shops here — for those you drive five minutes to Saundersfoot or on to Kilgetty.

The best walk is the flat one. The old coal tramway to Saundersfoot has been resurfaced and runs for about 1.2 miles along an elevated seawall and through three tunnels, level enough for wheelchairs, buggies and children on bikes. The three tunnels are the local landmark: once they carried carts of anthracite, now they carry walkers. For something with more effort, the Pembrokeshire Coast Path passes straight through on its way from Amroth to Tenby, and an inland loop climbs Pleasant Valley to the restored Stepaside Ironworks and back.

Coal, Iron and Operation Jantzen

That the beach is this quiet takes some explaining, because for five centuries it was working industry. Around a dozen collieries operated in the valley from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth. Near the time of Trafalgar, anthracite was loaded straight from carts onto sailing ketches beached on the sand. The Grove Colliery shaft, sunk from 1853, went down about 640 feet — described as the deepest hand-dug shaft in Wales. By 1900 the ironworks, the collieries and the harbour tramway had all fallen silent, and the ore patches in the cliffs are most of what's left.

There is one more thing the beach has done. In the summer of 1943, Operation Jantzen used these sands — along with Tenby, Saundersfoot and Amroth — for a secret D-Day rehearsal involving as many as 100,000 personnel. Churchill "is said to have watched the 'invasion' whilst seated on the wall of the pub at the Wiseman's Bridge Inn, drinking a cup of tea." The wartime publican, John Henry Mathias, was known locally as Jack the Bridge and made Coastguard for knowing the coast better than anyone.

Arriving and Getting on the Water

The nearest station is Kilgetty on the West Wales Line, walkable from here along the old railway and through the tunnels. You can also hire a kayak, a paddleboard or a wetsuit locally, which is a lot of options for a place with no shop.