Pembrokeshire, Haverfordwest, and St Davids

Arrival Date: 2025-09-07
Departure Date: 2025-09-13
Accommodation: AirBnB

After not having a big holiday for a year because of our house move, we finally got back on the road again and made our way down to Pembrokeshire in the South of Wales.

Traveling Down

Our drive down was tainted by all manner of diversions, adding up to nearly ninety minutes of detours! Setting off at about 10:30, we didn’t get to our AirBnB until nearly 6pm (including a stop for lunch in Aberystwyth). The apartment is spacious, but pretty tired/dated; I get the feeling someone bought it a decade ago with the express purpose of being an AirBnB, did it up then, and then left it to run itself. Several corners have been cut, least of all the bedding which is more bobbled than a generational school jersey! I couldn’t sleep in the creaky bed for all the itching, so I slept on the futon.

St Davids

Monday morning, we visited St Davids, the UK’s smallest city. The countryside around was beautiful, and the occasional glimpses of the sea between hills and woods brought a lot of variety to the drive. Although the constant changes in speed limit mean you have to keep a keen eye on the signs at all times. I kept missing the national speed signs on the way out of villages, so drove at 20mph for far too long on the open roads.

We arrived in St Davids just after 10:30 and stopped in at the Oriel y Parc (park gallery) on the way into town for a little look around. It was nice, but nothing spectacular. So we drove the rest of the way into St Davids, down to the bottom of the hill, and parked up to visit the cathedral first of all.

While I’m partial to a cathedral, I much prefer a ruin, and luckily for me both of these are right next to each other!

St Davids Bishop’s Palace

Helen decided to go straight to the cathedral and left me here on my own, citing the extremely dark clouds above. I said “pah! A little water never hurt anyone!” And just as I bought my ticket and walked out into the grounds of the ruin, the heaven’s opened torrentially, and I got drenched.

This ruined palace, a glorified parsonage, was more elaborate than a lot of castles I’ve visited. The bishops who lived here in the past and operated St Davids Cathedral must have been very wealthy, it was expansive! I think the great hall here was larger than those in most castles I’ve visited.

The palace was built in the late 13th century, after the adjacent cathedral, but started its decline less than 250 years later, as the reigning Bishop at the time stripped all the lead from the roofs to sell for his own gains.

St Davids Cathedral

Walking the short distance between the Bishop’s Palace ruin and the cathedral, I soaked up a little more rain, then entered the cathedral like Aragorn arriving at Helm’s Deep!

The cathedral began construction back in the 12th century, shortly after the Pope decreed that “Two pilgrimages to St Davids is equal to one to Rome, and three pilgrimages to one to Jerusalem.”

Edmund Tudor (father of Henry VII) is entombed in the main hall, he died from the bubonic plague before his son was born, so I didn’t want to get too close.

Lunch

It finally stopped raining when we walked up to the top of the hill into the city centre, so suitably soggy, we went in search of somewhere for lunch. There’s a pizza place we wanted to try out, but it was closed unfortunately, so we ended up at the Cross Hotel after visiting a few little shops (I also bought a couple of records from a local record shop). We weren’t too hungry, so just had a couple of lite bites, and went back out to do some more exploring.

By this time, the clouds had pretty much dissipated entirely as we were walking back to the car. We got some fancy chocolate from a chocolatier, and I got an ice cream to keep me quiet for 15 minutes. This would be Helen’s favourite part of the day so far!

Now that there were some blue skies, I could take some much nice pictures of the cathedral.

And the palace.

Whitesands Bay Beach

Earlier in the morning when the rain was torrential, we thought about just going back to the AirBnB to do some reading, but since the sun had come out and dried everything off in record time, we decided to head up to the beach.

It was stunning!

I decided to prove to Helen I was still young, so I climbed up the rocks onto a small hill. It reminded me of being on holiday in France at Les Iles in Penestin, I searched several rock pools for little crabs but couldn’t find any. Besides, I didn’t have my bucket and net with me, and I don’t think Helen would’ve let me take any back to the AirBnB anyway.

Haverfordwest

We got back to Haverfordwest at about 3:30pm and had a walk around the town. We’d already been into town last night, but everything was closed, so we were able to visit a few shops this time. There was a lovely independent bookshop where Helen naturally bought several books, and a really nice arts and crafts shop as well.

Dinner

For dinner, we went back out towards St Davids to a small village called Solva, and to a restaurant called the Harbour Inn. The food here was delicious, with a menu right up my alley. Helen had a lasagne and I had a hunter’s chicken.

The circular structures on the left are old lime kilns, that were in use for a century from roughly 1800-1900 during the industrial revolution, as limestone was one of the main industries in the village back then.

Eventually we got back to the AirBnB at about 8pm after a quick trip to Tesco Extra for some supplies. So apart from getting caught in the torrential rain, it was a great day!