Wiston

Castle Heights and Village Life

The castle motte has 46 steps to the top, with a handrail, and from the shell-keep at the summit the land opens north toward the Preseli Hills. It is one of the best-preserved motte-and-bailey castles in Wales: a conical mound about 50 metres across and rising seven to nine metres, crowned by a stone shell-keep whose outer face is built from eighteen short polygonal sections with an arched entrance on the south side. It is free, open all year, maintained by Cadw, and you can climb it whenever you like.

That is more or less the centre of things, because Wiston has no pub. Not a permanent one, anyway. Village social life has retreated to the Wiston Meeting Place on Water Lane — a community room that seats thirty, with a small kitchen, a woodburning stove and a garden with a large lawn. Villagers hire it for £10 an hour, everyone else for £14. It runs a summer barbecue, carols at Christmas, and a pop-up pub, which is the closest the village comes to keeping one. For a proper pint, or a shop, you drive the five miles south to Haverfordwest.

Country Paths and St Mary's

The walking makes up for the shortage of indoor options. A Ramblers circuit loops from Wiston to Clarbeston Road and back through Longlands Woods — farmland, woodland and quiet lanes, the kind of country that surrounds the whole scattered parish.

The Church of St Mary sits below the castle and is Grade II* listed. Its two round-arched nave doorways look twelfth or thirteenth century, the tower fourteenth or early fifteenth, and the porch has an unusual ogee-headed doorway. In 1864–5 the architect David Brandon restored it for Lord Cawdor, replacing the windows and the roofs. There has been a church on the site since around 1147.

Wizo's Castle and a Moving Seat

The village itself was founded around 1108 by a Flemish settler named Wizo, granted the lordship by Henry I after the king took the land from a rebel. The name means Wizo's town; in Welsh it is Cas-wis, Wizo's castle. The Welsh spent much of the next century trying to take it back. It fell to Hywel ab Owain in 1147, was retaken, fell again in 1193 when Wizo's son Philip was captured, and was sacked by Llywelyn the Great in 1220, after which William Marshal the Younger ordered it rebuilt. By about 1300 the lords had given up and moved the seat to Picton Castle, three miles off, which still stands and has fifty acres of gardens you can spend a day in.

A Borough in Decay

Wiston sits on the Landsker Line, the old boundary of "Little England beyond Wales." It was once a self-governing borough with its own parliamentary vote. In 1603 George Owen of Henllys listed it as one of nine Pembrokeshire "boroughs in decay," and it has gone on decaying quietly into a farming parish ever since.

Rail Links and Roman Ground

Clarbeston Road station is two miles north, which is handy, though the buses are the limited rural sort. In 2013 archaeologists confirmed the first Roman fort ever found in Pembrokeshire, 500 metres north-east of the village, under a field at Churchill Farm. It had been there the whole time, waiting under the grass, while everyone climbed the wrong hill.