Wolf's Castle is really two settlements stacked on the same hillside. The upper village, Wolfscastle proper, sits at the top of a steep slope. The lower village, called Ford, lies down in the river valley where the Western Cleddau and the Anghof meet. The A40 trunk road from London to Fishguard runs straight through, and the Swansea-to-Fishguard railway line passes through Ford. There was once a halt station at the bridge where the road and railway cross, used for both passengers and farmers loading milk churns from the local dairies. It closed in 1964 when British Rail withdrew the local Fishguard service. Limited services were restored in 2012 after a forty-eight-year gap, but Wolf's Castle Halt was not reopened, and the platform foundations have mostly disappeared under brambles.

Behind the village rises the motte of the castle that gave the place its name. It is an earthwork, not a stone keep, the kind of mound-and-bailey fortification the Normans threw up by the thousand to control conquered ground. This one sat at the strategic northern end of Treffgarne Gorge, where the only easy route through the Preseli foothills could be controlled by a small garrison from a high mound. It was built after 1093 as part of the Landsker Line, the rough boundary of Norman castles that separated the anglicised lowland south of Pembrokeshire, which became known as "Little England beyond Wales," from the Welsh-speaking uplands to the north. Two languages, two cultures, two legal systems faced each other across this line for centuries. The names on the modern road signs still mark it. South of the village, English place names dominate. North, Welsh ones take over.

In the early 1800s, a Welsh antiquarian called Richard Fenton, born and raised in nearby St Davids, began digging in the fields around Wolf's Castle and found something nobody expected. A Romano-British villa lay buried under one of the meadows. The Romans had never been thought to have settled this far west into Wales; the conventional view was that the legions stopped at Carmarthen and held the line. Fenton's villa showed Roman influence reaching to within twenty miles of the Irish Sea. The exact site of his excavation has been re-investigated in recent years, archaeologists trying to pin down whether the villa was a working farm, an outpost, or something else entirely. The answers are still emerging from soil that has held them for sixteen hundred years.

Musland Farm, half a mile outside the village, was the home of Captain William Davies Evans (1790-1872) of the Royal Mail packet service. He commanded ships between Milford Haven and Waterford for forty years, becoming famous in his own time as much for his innovations in lighthouse signaling and steam navigation as for chess. But it is the chess that survives. His gambit, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.b4, sacrifices a pawn to gain tempo and open lines, and it shaped nineteenth-century chess as profoundly as any opening ever invented. Capablanca played it. Bobby Fischer revived it. Kasparov used it to beat Anand. A small Pembrokeshire farm gave its name to an idea that millions of chess players have spent their lives studying. None of them know they should be looking up at the green Wolf's Castle hill on a map.

Wolf's Castle in the present day is mostly farms. Dairy, sheep and beef, with the Wolfscastle Country Hotel and the Wolfe Inn making up the visitor economy. The slate quarry near Sealyham and the roadstone quarry in Treffgarne Gorge both fell silent decades ago. A small primary school built in 1834 still operates, two classrooms in a Victorian schoolhouse. The community council sponsors the village's entry in the Wales in Bloom competition every summer; Wolf's Castle won the Small Village Trophy in 2005 and was runner-up in 2006. Three churches serve the parish, including the Grade II* listed St Dogfael's at St Dogwells, named for the Welsh saint who gave his name to St Dogmaels at the northern end of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path forty miles away. The Norman castle is grass and earth now. The chess move is immortal. The trains still go past.