Qualla: Fishguard and Goodwick

Fishguard and Goodwick: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor came here in 1971 to film Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, and they found the location already half built for them. Lower Town Fishguard is one of those harbours that looks like it was sketched into existence by someone who needed a backdrop for ships and quayside cottages and a tide that comes right up to the front door. Above the quay, the cliffs flare with 460-million-year-old pillow lava from the Ordovician. Beneath the ground, in a neat line on the hill above the ferry terminal, four Neolithic burial chambers wait where they have waited for the last five thousand years.

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Image: Colin Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fishguard and Goodwick: Two Towns, One Bay

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit nat morris from Haverfordwest, Wales, CC BY 2.0. Fishguard and Goodwick spent the first eight hundred years of their adjacent existence not really speaking. Fishguard sat up on its medieval bluff above the old harbour, prosperous from fishing and coastal trade by the seventeenth century, with the Norman castle long gone but the...

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Image: nat morris from Haverfordwest, Wales | CC BY 2.0

Fishguard and Goodwick: The Geology Below

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuart Logan, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cliffs that frame Fishguard Lower Town's harbour are protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of what they preserve. From Saddle Point on the western side around to Castle Point on the east, the rocks here demonstrate the Llanvirn series of the Ordovician pe...

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Image: Stuart Logan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fishguard and Goodwick: Ancient Marks on the Land

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RobinLeicester, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before the Vikings or the Normans, Neolithic farmers built four chambered tombs along a single line on the hillside above what is now the ferry terminal. The Garn Wen burial chambers cluster a footpath away from a modern housing estate, and Pen-Rhiw Cromlech sits with its ma...

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Image: RobinLeicester | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fishguard and Goodwick: Under Milk Wood Quayside

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Talsarnau Times, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Andrew Sinclair filmed Dylan Thomas's verse drama in 1971, he needed a Welsh harbour that could double as the fictional Llareggub. He used Lower Town Fishguard, and the wedge of houses and cottages curling around the old quay barely needed dressing. Burton played the Voice o...

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Image: Talsarnau Times | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fishguard and Goodwick: Edwardian Goodwick

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Goodwick's heyday came later, with the 1906 arrival of the Great Western Railway and the dream of trans-Atlantic liners docking at Fishguard Harbour. The dream collapsed when silting prevented the larger ships, but for a brief Edwardian moment Goodwick was fashionable, and you ca...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0