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More About Hotels and Inns in Fishguard

The sea is the whole point on this side. Boats come and go for Ireland, walkers pick up the Coast Path over the headland, and the beach at Goodwick runs the length of the bay below the town.

August is the month to plan around. Aberjazz, the jazz and blues festival, fills the town across the late August bank holiday. Outside those weeks Fishguard is quieter than the resorts further down the coast.

The Great Western Railway meant this to be the port where America met Britain. It took over the line in 1898 and set out to take transatlantic traffic off Plymouth and Southampton.

To make room it blasted a million and a half tonnes of rock out of the hillside at Goodwick, and the quarried-out ground became the quay. The north breakwater runs a thousand yards. The harbour opened on 30 August 1906.

Three years to the day later came the moment it had all been for. On 30 August 1909 the Cunard liner Mauretania called at Fishguard, the first to do so. She had crossed from New York in four days, fourteen hours and twenty-seven minutes, nearly three hours faster than anyone before.

She was in at twenty past one, and the first of three special trains left for Paddington at twelve minutes past two. The Spectator put it best: passengers who left New York after breakfast on Wednesday dined in London the following Monday night.

It lasted five summers. The harbour was too shallow, so passengers had to be ferried ashore by tender rather than walking off onto the platform.

Worse, a smaller inner breakwater built for the Mauretania caused silting that dredging could not keep up with, and the idea of bigger liners was quietly dropped. A planned two-mile railway of cuttings and tunnels was abandoned within two years, and the war finished the idea off in 1914.

The Fishguard Bay Hotel, above the harbour at Goodwick, was built for those passengers. It started as an eighteenth-century house called Windcliff, put up for two brothers named Rogers who ran an oil-mill at Goodwick and were reputed smugglers.

The Fishguard and Rosslare Railways and Harbour Company bought it in 1896 and reopened it, the name respelt, as the Hotel Wyncliffe.

The Great Western Railway took it on, renamed it, and extended it to forty bedrooms by 1910. By the 1930s it offered golf, tennis, boating and billiards to go with them. Cadw, the Welsh Government’s heritage body, lists it as the only major railway hotel in the region, built for the transatlantic trade.

It has been shut since 2020 and the companies behind it are in liquidation. It is a listed building to look up at from the harbour road rather than anywhere to stay. Its gardens carry a separate listing of their own, a terraced Edwardian design with a rill, a cascade and a pool. They are not open, and the woodland has been let go.

What that leaves is a town whose places to stay are smaller than its history suggests, and there is no shame in it. The ferry still sails twice a day from the harbour the Great Western built, to Rosslare, on a ship called the Stena Nordica.

And the festivals still fill what rooms there are. Aberjazz, the jazz and blues weekend, reaches its twenty-third year from 27 to 31 August 2026, and the folk festival returns over the late May bank holiday in 2027.

What all that leaves a visitor today is a working harbour rather than a resort. You can watch the Rosslare boat come and go, walk the breakwater the Great Western built, and pick up the Coast Path over the headland. The town keeps its prices steadier than the resorts down south.