In October 2022, workers preparing the old Ocky White department store for redevelopment lifted a flagstone and found a skull. Then another. By the time the archaeologists were finished, the remains of 307 people had been recovered from beneath the Haverfordwest department store, including the bones of children. The site turned out to be the graveyard of a medieval Augustinian priory, in use until perhaps the early 18th century, that everyone in town had forgotten was there. The town has been forgetting itself like this for a very long time. Haverfordwest is the county town of Pembrokeshire, the largest urban area in the county, and a place where every generation has, in some sense, lived directly on top of the last.
The name is brutally practical. Haverfordwest comes from Old English haefer ford, the ford used by goats; in local dialect people still call it Harford. The 'West' was tacked on in the 15th century to keep mail from confusing it with Hereford up in England. The town's location is the point. Haverfordwest sits at the tidal limit of the Western Cleddau, the last place where the river could be forded before tides made it unworkable, and a pair of east-west sandstone ridges meets the river right at that crossing, raising two natural defensive spurs. On the northern spur, the Normans built a castle around 1100, attributed to Gilbert de Clare. On the southern spur, traders set up the High Street and what would become St Mary's parish. The castle's gentry and the merchants' market came together at the river: that, in a sentence, is the town.
Pembrokeshire has, since the 12th century, been split by an invisible line that locals call the Landsker. North of it the language and culture is Welsh. South of it the place is, in a famous local phrase, 'Little England beyond Wales' - English-speaking for the better part of nine hundred years. The line was drawn by Henry I, who imported Flemish settlers into the Pembrokeshire south to dilute Welsh resistance. They arrived in waves, traditionally given as 1107, 1111, and 1151, settling in the Hundred of Roose. Wizo the Fleming raised a motte at Wiston, near Haverfordwest, by 1130. Geraldus Cambrensis, writing later in the same century, recorded them in Pembrokeshire as a distinct group. By 1327 the chronicler Ranulf Higden declared them extinct, absorbed into the wider population. But the Landsker remains: today you can still drive north out of Haverfordwest and within ten miles cross from English-speaking villages into ones where the bilingual road signs reverse priority and Welsh comes first.
The English Civil War (1642-1651) was hard on Haverfordwest. The town's burgesses sided with Parliament. The local gentry were Royalist. Between them they fought back and forth across the bridges so often that the town changed hands five times. The Royalist garrison in the castle, holding for King Charles I in 1644, famously abandoned the place after mistaking cattle in the dark for the enemy. The Parliamentarian victory at the Battle of Colby Moor in 1645 settled south Pembrokeshire for Cromwell, and in 1648 Cromwell sent letters ordering Haverfordwest Castle to be partially demolished. The town earlier in its history had been burned by French troops landing in 1405 to support Owain Glyndwr; later it would survive a single Luftwaffe raid on 24 September 1940 in which the City Road and New Road areas were hit but no one was killed. Haverfordwest's habit of getting knocked down and rebuilt is older than England's own.
In 1545, Henry VIII declared Haverfordwest a county corporate. The designation was issued partly to support a campaign against piracy in Pembrokeshire waters, and it made Haverfordwest one of only two such counties in Wales - the other was Carmarthen. The town had its own sheriff, its own Lord Lieutenant until 1931, and its own Quarter Sessions court until 1951. The status was finally abolished in 1974, although Haverfordwest still has the legal right to appoint its own sheriff, a curious medieval inheritance. Today the town's economic life has shifted to the retail park at Withybush on its outskirts - the Welsh historian John Davies once described Haverfordwest as becoming 'a medieval town surrounded by tin sheds.' The medieval town is still there: St Mary's Church, the ruined castle on its ridge, the steep High Street, the old quayside. The Old Wool Market on Quay Street, once an 18th-century wool warehouse, is now Haverfordwest Town Council's headquarters.
Haverfordwest has produced an unusually heterogeneous cast of famous people. The artist Gwen John was born here in 1876, her younger brother the painter Augustus John lived here, and both passed through Pembrokeshire's small art world before their reputations took them to Paris and London. Sir Thomas Picton, the British general killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, was a Haverfordwest man. Captain Francis Cromie was born in 1882 and died defending the British Embassy in St Petersburg from revolutionaries in 1918. In the modern era, actors Christian Bale (born 1974, Empire of the Sun, Batman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy) and Rhys Ifans (Twin Town, Notting Hill) were both born in Haverfordwest. So was the AIDS activist Terry Higgins (1945-1982), one of the first people known to die of an AIDS-related illness in the UK; the Terrence Higgins Trust carries his name. So was Chelsea Manning, who lived in the town as a child. The list reads like an essay on how varied a single small Welsh county town's contribution to public life can be.
Haverfordwest sits at 51.80 N, 4.97 W on the Western Cleddau river in central Pembrokeshire. From the air the town reads as a dense historic core on two sandstone ridges flanking the river, with the castle ruins on the northern spur and St Mary's Church on the southern spur, modern suburbs spreading north toward Withybush. Recommended viewing altitude: 1,500-3,000 feet. The town's own airport - Haverfordwest (EGFE) - lies about 2 nm north-northeast at Withybush, on the same road that leads to the retail parks and Withybush General Hospital. Fishguard is about 18 nm to the north on the A40; Milford Haven 8 nm to the south on the A4076; St Davids 14 nm northwest on the A487.