The village sits at the mouth of the River Arth, between Aberystwyth and Cardigan, on the southern end of Cardigan Bay. It was founded around the time of the Norman invasion, and the Normans soon built Dinerth Castle a little way up the river valley to keep an eye on the local lords. In the 12th century, Cistercian monks established themselves in the area. They needed building stone for their great new abbey at Strata Florida, in the hills inland - and the limestone they wanted, the warm honey-coloured Bath Stone, came from quarries near Bristol. The economical way to move it was by sea. The monks used Aberarth as their port, landing the stone here and hauling it overland up the Arth valley to the abbey site. The Lord Rhys, the powerful prince of Deheubarth, had granted them the abbey lands. Their stone went past this village mouth, block by careful block, for a building that is now itself a roofless ruin in the Cambrian Mountains.

Llanddewi Aberarth Church stands on what tradition holds to be a ninth-century site. The present church has a Norman tower; the rest was rebuilt in 1860, during the great Victorian wave of Welsh church restoration. Inside the front door, the Viking hogsback waits. Outside, the churchyard runs down the hillside with its old graves facing seaward. From the church wall, on a clear day, you can see most of the southern arc of Cardigan Bay, the cliffs running off toward Cardigan in one direction and Aberystwyth in the other. Below, in the river valley, the village settles into its small terraces of grey-stone houses, the cycle path running quietly out to Aberaeron a mile and a half away.

Aberarth was a working ship-building village before 1850. Like dozens of small Cardiganshire harbours and creek-mouths, it produced wooden trading vessels in numbers that, summed across the whole bay, made Cardigan Bay the most productive Welsh region for shipbuilding outside the great industrial yards of South Wales. When iron and then steel replaced timber, the trade collapsed almost everywhere up the coast at once. Aberarth's harbour silted, its yards closed, its population drained. The village faded back to a quiet shadow of what it had been. The beach today is large pebbles, popular with surfers when the swell lines up, but no boats are built here now. The shipwrights houses are holiday lets. The harbour mouth is a wide pebble bank where the River Arth crosses the shingle to reach the sea.

What Aberarth has now is birds and quiet. Red kites, which were reduced to a handful of breeding pairs in mid-Wales in the 1930s, drift over the village in numbers now; the long Welsh conservation effort has been remarkably successful, and the fork-tailed silhouette is a common sight. Peregrines hunt the cliffs. Choughs - those red-billed crows that are increasingly rare in Britain - work the headlands. Stonechats perch on gorse. Hywel Teifi Edwards, the historian and academic who was father of the BBC newsreader Huw Edwards, was born and raised here, his Welsh-language scholarship rooted in a community that still speaks the language as a matter of course. Cynan Jones, one of the most-translated Welsh writers of his generation, lives in the village. Michael Geraint Robinson, an engineer and inventor who has contributed substantially to the optics of 3D cinema, grew up here. A village of barely a few hundred people keeps producing more than its share of the wider Welsh story.