Qualla: Pembroke, Pembrokeshire

Pembroke, Pembrokeshire: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Monkeyrustler at English Wikipedia, Public domain. On 28 January 1457, in a chamber inside the outer ward of Pembroke Castle, a thirteen-year-old widow named Margaret Beaufort gave birth to a son. Her husband Edmund Tudor had died of plague three months earlier in a Yorkist prison. The infant was named Harri - Henry, in English - and twenty-eight years later, after marching out of exile in Brittany and winning a battle in a field in Leicestershire, he would crown himself Henry VII of England. The Tudor dynasty began here, in a Welsh town few people in London had ever seen.

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Image: Monkeyrustler at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Pembroke, Pembrokeshire: The Land's End

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JKMMX, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pembroke means 'Land's End' - or possibly 'headland' - depending on which medieval scribe you trust. Both readings work. The town sits at the western tip of a long limestone peninsula, surrounded by tidal water on three sides, with the River Cleddau finger-painting estuaries thro...

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Image: JKMMX | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pembroke, Pembrokeshire: The Castle That Never Fell

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pembroke Castle was never taken by storm. Not by Welsh princes, not by Owain Glyndwr - whose long rebellion stopped at its walls - and not by King Charles I's Cavaliers during the English Civil War. The castle's final extension around 1254 was followed by perimeter walls around t...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pembroke, Pembrokeshire: Margaret's Son

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Edmund Tudor was twenty-five when he died. Margaret was twelve when he married her and thirteen when their child was born. She would later say the labour was difficult and that she nearly died of it; she had no other children, ever. The baby was raised by his uncle Jasper Tudor a...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pembroke, Pembrokeshire: Dock and Powder

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0. Three miles to the northwest, the Royal Navy founded Pembroke Dock in 1814, and the old town suddenly had a much louder neighbour. The dockyard turned out 263 warships before it closed in 1926. Now the conurbation has a combined population near sixteen thousand, with the towns sh...

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Image: Jaggery | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pembroke, Pembrokeshire: Walking the Walls

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0. Visitors arrive expecting a ruin and find a town. Pembroke Castle is the most complete of any in Wales, restored carefully in the 20th century and still possessing the immense round Great Keep that William Marshal built around 1200. From the battlements you look down on the millp...

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Image: Jaggery | CC BY-SA 2.0