Mathry's name means martyr. It sits on a high hill six miles southwest of Fishguard, its parish church squarely in the middle of the village, dedicated to seven holy men whose deaths are remembered nowhere else. In 2006, a Pembrokeshire genealogist worked through the parish baptism records and found a Jemima Nicholas christened in Mathry on 2 March 1755. Haverfordwest Records Office thought it likely this was the Jemima Nicholas, the cobbler who, forty-two years later according to folklore, captured twelve French soldiers single-handed with a pitchfork during the Battle of Fishguard. Her birthplace, if it was here, would mean the woman who became Wales's most famous citizen-soldier was born in this small hilltop village.
The village's older spellings include Mathrey and Merthyr, both rendering the Welsh word for martyr into English. The parish church in the centre of the village is dedicated to the Holy Martyrs of Mathry, a group of seven sainted men whose names and stories are now lost. The current church was built in 1869 on older foundations and restored in 1902; the antiquarian Richard Fenton recorded earlier that the church of his day originally had a steeple, blown down in a storm. The village lay in the historic hundred of Dewisland, the territory immediately surrounding St Davids, and a weekly market and annual fair were granted to Mathry by letters patent in the reign of Edward III, who ruled from 1327 to 1377. The market faded out by 1833. The fair, held on 10 October, was still running into the nineteenth century.
In the early 1800s the parish held about 860 people, scattered across small settlements and farmsteads rather than concentrated in the village itself. Slate quarrying gave work to many of them. Sir John Owen of Orielton, the first baronet of his line, subsidised a school for the poor children of Mathry to the tune of ten pounds a year, a sum that paid for the schoolmaster and some books at a time when most rural Welsh children received no formal education at all. The parish sat on the turnpike between Fishguard and St Davids, with traffic passing through it daily; the modern A487 has since slipped just to the north, leaving the village a little quieter than it once was. Mathry Community Council now meets monthly in the community hall and oversees a community that includes the smaller villages of Abercastle on the coast and Castlemorris inland.
What the parish register may quietly hold is the beginning of a folk story. Jemima Nicholas, baptised here on 2 March 1755, would have been forty-two on 22 February 1797 when 1,400 French troops landed at Carreg Gwastad Point eight miles to the northeast. The legend says she walked out with a pitchfork and rounded up a dozen of them, locked them inside St Mary's Church in Fishguard, and then helped marshal the women of the town in their red flannel shawls to fool the French commander into thinking he was outnumbered. No contemporary written source mentions her by name. But she did exist, she did live in Fishguard, she did die at the age of ninety-two, and she is buried in St Mary's churchyard. The 2006 records search added one more link in the chain: she may have been born in Mathry, where the church is dedicated to martyrs and where the parish register, opened that day in 1755, became the first written record of the life of a Welsh folk heroine.
Mathry sits at 51.95 degrees north, 5.08 degrees west on a high inland point in the Pembrokeshire peninsula, about six miles southwest of Fishguard and nine miles northeast of St Davids. From altitude the village shows as a cluster of buildings on a clear hilltop with the modern A487 road skirting it to the north. Haverfordwest (EGFE) lies twelve miles south; Swansea (EGFH) fifty miles east. The village stands on high ground above the coastal cliffs of Abermawr and Abereiddi, with the open Atlantic visible to the west on a clear day.