You don’t have to stay in a converted jet or a UFO to explore Pembrokshire Wales .
These overnight options are parked up in a field at Norchard Farm, Redberth near Tenby and, according to the owner and former trainee fitter at Simpsons Piccadilly, Toby Rhys-Davies, a night there will help you feel more grounded. As well as giving you a taste of the high life. Albeit in an old cow field.
“Apple Camping” offers sleepovers in a converted 1970s nine-seater “Jet Star”, complete with an authentic cockpit and swept wings.
It was one of the first VIP jets and the first jet you could stand up in. There are no flight attendants. But there is a bar area. Rhys-Davies designed his bijou UFO B&B for those whose holidays involve fantasies of alien abduction.
“Cool Camping” offers more down-to-earth accommodation at Wales’s most westerly and scenic pitch at Rhosslon Ganol, overlooking Ramsey Sound.
the pembrokeshire
Infinity Edge Vitality Pool
You can also stay in Roald Dahl’s holiday cottage in Tenby. The famous Welsh storyteller spent every Easter there from 1920-36. “The Cabin” was part of the Welsh walled seaside town’s old assembly rooms and spa. It is now owned by Dahl’s niece and available through Coastal Cottages.
Sadly, the quayside first-floor Atlantic-front, self-catering holiday apartment has no lick-able wallpaper or edible marshmallow pillows.
But copies of his classic “Revolting Recipes” are complimentary if you want to try your hand at “noodles made out of poodles” and “smelly jelly made from armadillo toes”.
The most luxurious place to stay in Pembrokeshire is undoubtedly the St Bride’s Spa Hotel in Saundersfoot. There are some hotels that make you wish the weather turns awful and for it to pour down so you can stay there all day. It is one.
Its infinity pool and Cliff Restaurant overlook the harbor and three beaches with Pendin Sands in Carmarthenshire on a good day visible in the distance. Tenby and Caldey Island are around the headland the other way.
St Brides Lounge
You go to Pembrokeshire to walk, stare and eat. At St Brides. chef Josh Hughes offers fine but not too dressy dining with treats like lobster risotto, bream, whole Dover sole, and slow-cooked ox cheek. His full west Wales breakfast comes with optional laver bread or local seaweed.
Saundersfoot is a foodie haven with restaurants such as The Stone Crab, Periwinkle, The Coast, and Harold O’Vinegar’s seafood deli on Ocean Square all helping you fuel up prior to your walk or replenish after.
You do sometimes wish that hiking maps show you pit stops that provide much-needed dressed crab and Welsh lamb cawl soup breaks, directions to the nearest puff pastry outpost, and legends revealing the whereabouts of and routes to Pembrokeshire Pasty and Pie shops with their menus of carb-loading Hog the Duvet sausages rolls,
Popeye pies with wilted spinach and white truffle oil, lamb, redcurrant, and rosemary, where is pembrokeshire currants, beef steak, and Stilton Tenby Treats.
Barafundle Bay
Instead, it’s the usual beauty spots, picnic sites, cromlechs, and castles like the Norman Manobier and not its Potting Shed garden center café’s sublime and Alice’s much-needed Brie, bacon, and cranberry sandwich on white or bread. Walking holidays work up appetites.
If you base yourself at the St Bride’s Bay Spa, a good hour-or-so long introductory walk is along the seafront -through the cliff tunnels of the old railway line which used to carry anthracite coal- to Wiseman’s Bridge and Amroth, the official start or finish of the 186-mile long Pembrokeshire Coastal Path which take you all round clifftop west Wales to St Dogmaels. It is part of the 870-mile Chepstow-Queensferry Wales Coast path.
It takes in 479 stiles, fourteen harbors ( like Little Haven and Portgain ), Britain’s smallest city ( St David’s), one MOD property, one low-tide crossing ( Dale), Whitesands Bay from where St Patrick embarked to Christianize Ireland and other beaches like Barafundle, Broad Haven North, Marloe Sands with its Three Chimneys, The Gann, Angle, and Freshwater East and West.
A day’s walk in the UK’s only coastal national park, tests your threshold for Blue Flag beaches, coves, volcanic headlands, Anglo-Saxon lynchets (earth terraces), Iron Age promontory forts, puffin breeding grounds, screeching gulls, seals, hermitage chapels, mudflats, rock-pooling families, Dry Robed surfers, dog-walkers and fellow walkers endangering your toe caps with their extra-sharp trekking poles and potentially lethal Nordic walkers.
Blue Lagoon
At the end of the day’s walking, you want to get back to your spa hotel, and gingerly ease yourself into the hydro pool and thermal suite before readying yourself for a well-earned 30-day aged steak.
www.celtictrailswalkingholidays.co.uk offers 2-7 day guided and non-guided walking holidays starting at £245
