Qualla: Manorbier

Manorbier: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manfred Heyde, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1146, a boy was born in a castle perched above a Pembrokeshire bay, and seventy years later he was still writing about it. Gerald de Barri, who would sign his books Giraldus Cambrensis and is now remembered as Gerald of Wales, called Manorbier 'the pleasantest spot in Wales' - a verdict he reached after a lifetime of travel through Ireland, England, France, and his own country. He had compared it to a lot of places. He still picked home.

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Image: Manfred Heyde | CC BY-SA 3.0

Manorbier: The Manor of Pyr

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 th...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Manorbier: Odo's Castle

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 desc...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Manorbier: The First Travel Writer

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Duckfield, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 Ba...

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Image: John Duckfield | CC BY-SA 2.0

Manorbier: Drones Over the Sea

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 bipla...

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Manorbier: What He Would Recognise

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DS Pugh, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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...

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Image: DS Pugh | CC BY-SA 2.0