Qualla: Pembrokeshire Coast Path

Pembrokeshire Coast Path: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hogyn Lleol, CC BY 4.0. Thirty-five thousand feet. That is the cumulative climb of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, which equals the height of Everest from sea level, accomplished one Welsh stile at a time. The trail runs 186 miles along the western edge of Wales, from Amroth in the south to St Dogmaels in the north, mostly hugging the cliff edge a few yards from a long drop into the Irish Sea. It opened in 1970, the result of a survey by the naturalist Ronald Lockley, who walked the coast in the early 1950s and reported back to the Countryside Commission that a continuous footpath was feasible if landowners would cooperate. Most did. Some refused, which is why the path occasionally swerves inland through hedgerows and field gates before remembering itself and returning to the sea.

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Image: Hogyn Lleol | CC BY 4.0

Pembrokeshire Coast Path: A Naturalist's Line

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Owengwynne, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ronald Lockley was not a hiker by trade. He was a naturalist who had lived on the Pembrokeshire island of Skokholm and written acclaimed books about puffins and shearwaters before being asked to survey a possible route around the county's coast. The 1952 establishment of the Pemb...

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Image: Owengwynne | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pembrokeshire Coast Path: Five Hundred Million Years of Stone

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alvear24, CC BY-SA 3.0. Every step on the path crosses a geological time machine. Precambrian granites, more than 300 million years old, surface on Ramsey Island and at the peninsula's southern tip. Cambrian sandstones built St David's Cathedral. Ordovician muds form the dark cliffs of the north coast, ...

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Image: Alvear24 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pembrokeshire Coast Path: What Lives at the Edge

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cliffs are alive in spring. Thrift and sea campion bloom pink and white along the path, kittiwakes scream from ledges, and guillemots crowd onto stacks so densely they look like grey shingle. Offshore, Skomer, Skokholm and Ramsey hold internationally significant seabird colon...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pembrokeshire Coast Path: The Pilgrim Coast

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manfred Heyde, CC BY-SA 3.0. The path threads a landscape soaked in story. Neolithic burial chambers stand a few yards off the trail at St David's Head. Iron Age promontory forts, probably built by settlers from Gaul, ring almost every defensible headland. The medieval pilgrim route to St Davids Cathedral cr...

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Image: Manfred Heyde | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pembrokeshire Coast Path: How People Walk It

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rollercow, CC BY-SA 3.0. Almost no one walks the whole thing in one go. Most visitors take a few miles at a time, parking at a village and catching the Puffin Shuttle or the Strumble Shuttle back to the car. Pembrokeshire's coast buses, with names like the Coastal Cruiser and the Poppit Rocket, exist spe...

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Image: Rollercow | CC BY-SA 3.0