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More About Cottages and Self-Catering near Fishguard

Head inland and the country changes within a couple of miles. The Gwaun Valley cuts back from the coast towards the Preseli Hills, wooded and steep-sided, with a scatter of farms and one very old pub along it. The skies over that side are among the darkest in Wales.

The beaches take dogs the whole year round, which the big southern resorts do not. Goodwick, the harbour at Fishguard and the cove at Pwllgwaelod are all open to them, out of season as much as in.

In September 1752 Britain went to bed on the second and woke up on the fourteenth. Eleven days were removed overnight to bring the country into line with the Gregorian calendar most of Europe had used for generations. The Gwaun valley, a few miles inland from Fishguard, declined to go along with it, and has never caught up.

So New Year here falls on 13 January, and it is called Hen Galan, the old New Year. Roughly three hundred people live in the valley. The children go from house to house in the morning, singing and wishing everyone a happy new year. They are given calennig for it, a new year gift of sweets or money. Then the day ends where these things end, in the pub.

That pub is the Dyffryn Arms at Pontfaen, and it is worth the detour on any day of the year. It was built in 1845 and has stayed in the same family ever since.

There is no bar counter: you are served through a sliding hatch from the ground-floor cellar, and the beer arrives poured from a glass jug. Everyone calls it Bessie’s, after Bessie Davis, who worked behind that hatch for seventy-two years and died in 2023 aged ninety-three.

None of this is written up in the past tense. Hen Galan is still kept. ITV covered it in the valley in January 2025, and the children still get an unofficial day off school for it. Seeing it means booking a cottage in January, which is not a sentence most of this county could honestly write.

The pub holds something rarer than most visitors realise. The Campaign for Real Ale lists its interior on its National Inventory at the top grade, as of outstanding national historic importance, and there are very few of those in Wales. Its hours move about, so ring before you set off.

The other argument for being inland here is overhead. Pembrokeshire has eight Dark Sky Discovery Sites, and the darkest skies are in the north around the Preselis. The National Park blames its light pollution on the coastal towns like Haverfordwest and Tenby, and the Gwaun valley is on none of those lists.

It is not a Dark Sky Reserve, and calling it one would be wrong. But on a clear night inland you will see far more than from any seafront.

One more thing suits self-catering with a dog. Goodwick Sands, Fishguard and Pwllgwaelod are not on the county’s list of beaches with summer dog restrictions, unlike Tenby and Saundersfoot, which close parts of theirs from May to September. Read the boards when you arrive, because these things change, but as it stands you can walk a dog on the sand here in August.