The name itself records a deep memory. 'Manor of Pyr' refers to the early Welsh saint after whom Caldey Island, just down the coast, is also named. Long before the Normans arrived to build their walls of stone, this stretch of headland was already a named, known place, part of the network of saints and chapels that wove medieval Wales together. The village today still sits inside that older geography. St James's parish church dates from the 12th century and is Grade I listed; the cromlech called the King's Quoit, a Neolithic burial chamber raised perhaps five thousand years ago, leans into the slope south of the bay. The bay itself opens cleanly to the south, with cliffs that reveal vertical beds of folded rock where the Carboniferous limestone met something stronger and was forced to stand on edge.

The Norman knight Odo de Barri was granted Manorbier, Penally, and Begelly after 1103, his reward for helping to conquer Pembrokeshire. His first castle here was motte and bailey - a wooden palisade on an earth mound - and the stone walls that survive today were added by his descendants over the next century. One of those descendants was the man who would put Manorbier into European literature. Gerald, son of William de Barri and grandson of the Welsh princess Nest, grew up in this castle hearing both Welsh and Norman French, watching the fish ponds beneath the walls and the orchard and vineyard his family kept. He left it for Paris, for Lincoln, for the courts of Henry II and his sons. He kept coming back.

Gerald wrote some of the earliest travel books in the British literary tradition. The Topography of Ireland and the Conquest of Ireland followed his time on Henry II's military expedition; the Journey through Wales and Description of Wales came from a 1188 tour with Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, recruiting for the Third Crusade. The books are gossipy, opinionated, and observant. He noted miracles and mockingly debunked others. He described kingfishers and the way the sea broke against Manorbier's cliffs. He listed the food and the customs and the failings of his neighbors. He even sketched his own family. For modern medievalists, his pages are gold; for medieval readers, they were closer to a long, witty letter from a man who could not stop noticing things.

The twentieth century gave Manorbier a stranger kind of fame. From 1933 to 1946 a mixed civilian and military airfield operated just east of the village, and during the Second World War the RAF used it to fly pilotless de Havilland Queen Bee target drones - radio-controlled biplane Tiger Moths sent up so that gunners on the cliffs could practice shooting them down. Winston Churchill once stood here to watch one launch. The field passed to the army in 1946 and is still a live firing range today, the sole UK site for testing the Starstreak high-velocity missile. The danger area extends 13 miles out to sea and 50,000 feet up. On a quiet day, walkers on the coast path hear the distant crack of training rounds; on a windy one, only the gulls.

Manorbier still has about 2,000 residents across its three villages of Jameston, Lydstep, and Manorbier Newton. Trains stop on request at the small railway station, where a Mesolithic flint scatter once turned up in the embankment. Walkers crossing the headland on the Wales Coast Path pass the castle, the church, and the sandy beach in less than an hour. The orchard and the vineyard Gerald described are long gone. The view down the bay is not. If a 12th-century cleric were dropped onto the cliff above Manorbier today, he would recognise the rocks, the sea, the church tower, and the shape of his old home - and probably start writing about all of it before sundown.