186 miles of Coast Path, cliff to cliff
Opened in 1970. Lengthened by diversions ever since. Still the longest honest day’s work this coastline does for people who do not own a boat, a tank farm, or a hotel. The path is the county’s most famous line, and the one that keeps disappearing into gorse, a firing range, or the tide.
The Pembrokeshire Coast Path runs 186 miles, 299 kilometres, from the slipway north of St Dogmaels and the plaque at Poppit Sands to the bridge east of Amroth Castle. Almost all of it sits inside the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. Official notes put the total rise and fall at about 35,000 feet. That is Everest, if Everest were a series of headlands, steps, and a sandwich in a bus shelter at Newport.
The highest point is Pen yr Afr on Cemaes Head, 175 metres. The lowest is the Sandy Haven crossing near Milford Haven, a couple of metres above low water, which is another way of saying: miss the tide and you will learn a new route the hard way. When Wynford Vaughan-Thomas opened the trail it was sold as 180 miles. Footpath orders have been adding corners ever since. Cliffs fall. Farmers fence. The path goes round, and the milepost moves.
What the numbers actually are
Ten to fifteen days for the whole trail if you are fit and the weather holds. Over fifty beaches. Hundreds of gates. Flights of steps in the thousands, the Park has counted 273 flights and nearly 3,800 individual steps. Stiles have been cut back hard: more than 500 in the early nineties, down to a couple of dozen. That is one of the quiet good stories on this coast. The path is still a cliff-top job in a storm.
About ten percent runs on road. A little more sits on MOD tarmac or a high-tide alternative. A sliver is a boat. The rest is footpath, which means mud, stone, and the particular Pembrokeshire habit of dropping you fifty metres to a beach and asking you to climb out the other side as if that were a punchline.
The coast in pieces
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Poppit to Newport, then Fishguard. The hard welcome. Steep, thin services, Cemaes Head, Ceibwr, the kind of first day that sorts people out. No café between Poppit and Newport Sands that you should bet a day’s water on.
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Strumble to St Davids to the Dale roads. Volcanic headlands, Ramsey Sound, Whitesands, the city in the hollow. Walkers treat St Davids as a rest. The path treats it as a corner.
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Dale to Milford to Pembroke. The stretch through-walkers try to skip because it looks like industry on a map. It is still the path. Sandy Haven is the tide gate. The towns are the beds and the buses.
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Angle to St Govan’s to Amroth. Barafundle, the Stacks, Bosherston lilies, the Castlemartin ranges, then the holiday coast into Tenby and the last miles to Amroth. This is the postcard. The ranges are the small print.
Who the path is for
Through-walkers with a book of stamps and a blister system. Day walkers who leave a car at one National Park car park and hope the bus exists at the other end. Dog walkers on the easy miles. People who have lived here forty years and still use it as a way to the shop in Newport. The trail does not choose between them. Erosion does.
Every winter a piece of cliff takes a step west. Diversions appear. A farmer’s field becomes the path for a season. The Park and the trail officers do the unglamorous work of moving a national line a few metres inland so that nobody has to learn about gravity the fast way. That work is the path as much as the view from Pen yr Afr.
It is also an employer. Cafés in Newport, bunkhouses on the peninsula, ice cream in Tenby, a bus driver who knows the look of someone who has just come off Cemaes. Take the path away and you do not only lose a waymark. You lose a reason a wet Tuesday in March still has a till drawer worth opening.
How not to get it wrong
Carry water on the north. Carry a tide table on the Haven crossings. Carry the humility to turn round when the wind is using you as a sail. The limestone south is beautiful and can be closed because someone is firing live rounds through it. That is not a rumour. Check the range times.
Do not treat a beach as a shortcut because the map draws a yellow line across sand. Do not walk a crumbling edge for a photograph. Do not assume Amroth to Poppit is “the same path” in both directions. South to north puts the big climbs in a different order and the weather in your face on different days.