Push aside the gorse on a hillside above Angle Bay and you will sometimes find concrete. A square pad, an empty rectangular pit, a low brick hut on a rocky shelf. None of it is signposted. Some of it was a 40mm Rolls-Royce cannon emplacement. Some of it was a searchlight battery. Some of it was a tiny one-man hut where a watcher with binoculars sat through wartime nights looking for German aircraft trying to mine Milford Haven. The Angle Peninsula Coast is officially a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its wildlife, but the more you walk it, the more it reads as a wartime ruin field that the wildflowers have politely overgrown.
Milford Haven was one of the most strategically important anchorages in Britain. The Royal Navy used it, the merchant fleet used it, and during the Second World War the Luftwaffe attacked Pembroke Dock at the haven's head repeatedly. RAF Angle opened on 1 December 1941 in direct response, a fighter station for No. 10 Group, Fighter Command, sited on the high ground of the peninsula so its aircraft could intercept raiders coming in from the southwest. Supermarine Spitfires, Westland Whirlwinds, and Hawker Hurricanes flew from grass strips that had been farmland a year before. Among the squadrons that rotated through were No. 312 (Czechoslovak) Squadron RAF, exiled Czech pilots flying for Britain, and the Canadian 412 Squadron. The hollows in the surrounding earth banks once housed machine guns. Inland from East Picket Bay, the earthen E-pens used to disperse and protect fighter aircraft are still visible as low semicircular ridges in the turf.
In 1943 operational control of Angle passed from RAF Fighter Command to the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, and the airfield's character shifted. A Sunderland flying boat, hull damaged during a rescue, came in to land at Angle, which was no small feat for an aircraft designed to settle on water. Coastal Command moved a unit in to test weapons designed to attack German U-boats in the Atlantic. The Atlantic was the war that won the war: keeping the convoys running between America and Britain was the slowest, most expensive battle of the conflict, and Angle was one of a hundred small stations along the British coast trying to push the U-boats further out. After 1945 the airfield was abandoned, and most of the buildings were demolished in the 1980s. The runway shapes can still be traced in the field boundaries from the air.
At the western end of the peninsula, where the coastal path drops down to West Angle Bay, the rock pools shelter Asterina phylactica, a tiny green cushion starfish that was formally identified as a species only in 1979. It is small enough that you can hold a dozen on one palm, and it lives in only a handful of places. The bay itself is gentle and sandy, the kind of beach that families visit when the weather turns, and the SSSI designation is partly about that starfish, partly about the maritime grassland behind the dunes. Walk back inland and you trip again over concrete: anti-aircraft posts near the World War I memorial, more emplacements past the lifeboat house, the brick mine-watcher's hut at West Pill. The same coastline holds the rarest small starfish in Wales and the densest cluster of wartime ruins in Pembrokeshire.
On 15 February 1996, the oil tanker Sea Empress lost control entering Milford Haven and grounded on rocks just outside the haven mouth. Over the next week she leaked 72,000 tonnes of crude oil into the same water the U-boat hunters had once watched. The Angle Peninsula coast caught the worst of it. Beaches went black. Seabirds died. The starfish in their rock pools were assumed lost. Restoration eventually cost around £60 million, and the effects on local ecology lasted years. By 2003, when the area was formally cited as an SSSI by the Countryside Council for Wales, the recovery was sufficient to justify protection. The cushion starfish is still there. So are the dunlin on the mudflats. The concrete ruins above them now look out over a clean sea, which is, given the past century, more than anyone in 1996 dared expect.
The Angle Peninsula Coast lies at approximately 51.68 N, 5.10 W, on the south side of the Milford Haven Waterway entrance. From the air the peninsula reads as a long flat-topped finger of land pointing west, with West Angle Bay visible as a small crescent of sand at its western end. The runway shapes of the disused RAF Angle airfield can be picked out as field-boundary patterns on the higher central ground. Recommended viewing altitude: 1,500-3,000 feet. Nearest active airport is Haverfordwest (EGFE) about 8 nm to the north-northeast; the old RAF station is no longer operational. The coast is part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and the Wales Coast Path.