Walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Path

The Pembrokeshire Coast Path National Trail is a long distance walking route. Its 186 miles (300 km) twist and turn through some of the most breathtaking coastal scenery in Britain. Lying almost entirely within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park (Britain’s only coastal national park), the trail displays an array of coastal flowers and bird life, as well as evidence of human activity from Neolithic times to the present.

When walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, you will start in St Dogmaels in the north and end at Amroth in the south, taking in almost every kind of maritime landscape from rugged cliff tops and sheltered coves to wide-open beaches and winding estuaries. Both the Wales Coast Path and the International Appalachian Trail follow the route of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.

As well as offering walkers spectacular coastal scenery and wildlife, the Trail passes through a landscape rich in the history of human occupation and maritime history. Walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Path reveals Neolithic cromlechs, Iron Age promontory forts, churches and chapels of the seafaring early Celtic saints and their followers, links with the Vikings through place names such as Goodwick and the islands of Skomer and Skokholm, massive Norman castles such as those at Pembroke, Tenby and Manorbier and later Napoleonic forts along the south coast and the Milford Haven waterway.

Throughout the length of the Trail small quays, lime kilns and warehouses, and sites like the brickworks at Porthgain, are reminders of an industrial tradition. The Milford Haven waterway, whose natural harbour once so impressed Nelson, is still an industrial hub. But it is in the quieter, remote and wild places, populated largely by birds and visited occasionally by grey seals, that the spell of old Pembrokeshire - the ancient ‘Land of Mystery and Enchantment’ (Gwlad Hud a Lledrith) remains.