David was born around 500 AD to Saint Non, at the wind-battered headland where the Chapel of St Non still stands above the cliffs west of the modern town. He was baptised at Porthclais harbour by Saint Elvis, raised by his mother at Llanon, and educated, according to tradition, at the "Ty Gwyn" or white house at Whitesands. As an adult he founded his own monastic community at a place called Glyn Rhosyn, the Vale of Roses, in the dip where the cathedral now stands. He died, by traditional reckoning, at his monastery on March 1, 589. He was a famous ascetic, drinking only water, eating only bread and herbs, and the cult that grew around him spread quickly through the Celtic Christian world. Geoffrey of Monmouth later called him "the pious archbishop of Legions, at the city of Menevia," Menevia being the Latin name still used for the Catholic diocese.

Pilgrims came. So did Vikings, repeatedly, through the ninth and tenth centuries, raiding the wealth that pilgrimage had accumulated. The cathedral records bishops killed in Viking attacks. The scholastic community at St Davids was nonetheless famous enough that when Alfred the Great wanted to build a centre of learning at his court in the 880s, he sent for a monk called Asser, who had been born, tonsured, trained and ordained at St Davids. Asser eventually went to Wessex but kept one foot at St Davids; he later wrote the biography of King Alfred that is one of our main sources for Anglo-Saxon history. Kings came in person too. William the Conqueror in 1081. Henry II in 1171. Edward I with Queen Eleanor in 1284. Each visit added prestige and gold, and the Normans rebuilt the cathedral on a grander scale that you can still trace in the twelfth-century arches.

Then in 1536 Bishop William Barlow, an aggressive Protestant reformer appointed under Henry VIII, sold the lead from the roof of the Bishop's Palace and used the proceeds to dower his daughters. He moved the bishop's main residence to Abergwili in Carmarthenshire in 1542 and effectively abandoned St Davids to the elements. The palace, once one of the finest medieval episcopal residences in Britain, gradually fell into the ruin you can still walk through today. The Reformation had emptied the pilgrim road. By the seventeenth century two more bishops had applied for licences to demolish the ancient buildings, and by the nineteenth only the cathedral retained any of its former glory. The city lost its remaining legal privileges in 1886, and for a hundred years it was a village called a city only out of stubborn local memory.

In 1991 the St Davids town council proposed reclaiming the title. The Home Office took the request to Buckingham Palace, and in 1994 Queen Elizabeth II granted city status "in recognition of their important Christian heritage and their status as cities in the last century," to St Davids in Wales and Armagh in Northern Ireland. The Queen herself came to present the letters patent at the cathedral on June 1, 1995. Technically the entire community of St Davids and the Cathedral Close is now the city, which makes its area 17.93 square miles, including the offshore islands. But the urban area itself, the actual built-up town, is just 0.23 square miles, the smallest of any UK city. The City of London is smaller in administrative area but has a vastly larger working population.

The city sits on a peninsula at the southern end of the Irish Sea, between Cardigan Bay to the north, St George's Channel to the west, and St Brides Bay to the south. Pen Dal-aderyn, just west of St Justinian, is the most westerly point of mainland Wales. Ramsey Island lies offshore across the tide-ripped Ramsey Sound. The coastline is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and the highest point is Carn Llidi at 181 metres. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path threads past the cathedral and out to St Davids Head, where Iron Age field walls run down toward the sea. Whitesands Bay, two miles west, has been called the best surfing beach in Pembrokeshire. The city is small. The landscape it inhabits is vast.